By MICHAEL GRACZYK, Associated Press Writer
MARFA, Texas - A thousand feet above a wind-swept, drought-browned valley, a man steps out of a late-70s Ford Granada on a deserted two-lane. He is confronted by a second man, who raises a pneumatic bolt gun to his forehead and deals a fatal blow.
Chip Love — or "Man in Ford," as Oscar-nominated "No Country For Old Men" would come to credit him — collapses to his knees on the blacktop, where Texas Ranch Road 2810 cuts through the crest of a hill covered in volcanic rock and tall, thick-trunked yuccas.
He gets up. He's shot again. And again. And again. Eight times altogether he rises and falls.
Getting it right pretty much takes all day.
"It's not as easy as it looks," Love, 50, a local rancher and bank manager, laughs about his role as an early victim of psychopathic killer Anton Chigurh, played by Javier Bardem.
On another day, just a few miles to the west of Love's "death," a crew of oilfield workers bounds down the stairs of a dusty depot, emptying a train pulled by an early 20th century steam locomotive. But this is a scene that will play out in "There Will Be Blood," another film up for multiple Academy Awards.
This is no mere coincidence.
When Hollywood needs Western desolation, it comes to Marfa.
More than 50 years ago, famed filmmaker George Stevens also settled on this area for his epic Texas oil tale "Giant," which starred Rock Hudson, Elizabeth Taylor and James Dean. (Stevens won a best director Oscar for "Giant" in 1957, the only win of that film's 10 nominations).
The stark, gorgeous landscape outside the town shows up in all three films, and it isn't just the wide open desert horizon that directors take advantage of. They also employ the locals.
In the depot scene from "Blood," filmed at the 59,000-acre MacGuire Ranch, it was lifelong rancher David Williams who led the group off the train. Not that he was scene-stealing.
"I wasn't trying to get in the movie or be a movie star," said Williams, 38.
When Williams first escorted location scouts here four years ago, the only structures were the long, unused railroad tracks that lead to Mexico and an old water tank that supplied steam engines of a past era. Houses, a block-long town, an oil well site and a church atop a hill were built later to represent Bakersfield, Calif., in 1910.
For his work making arrangements and shepherding the six months of filming, Williams also earned on-screen credit as an executive producer — heady stuff for a guy who got his first real look at the ocean when he attended the film's Hollywood premiere last year.
"They wanted the openness, they wanted clear view for miles, they wanted nothing obstructing the view," Williams recalled, describing his birthplace and where he's raising his family. "And that's what they found out here."
Marfa, population 2,100, was founded as a railroad stop in 1883 and is believed to have been named by a rail executive's wife after a character in Dostoyevsky's "The Brothers Karamazov," which she was reading at the time.
Now, the town with no movie theater is a big part of 16 nominations at this year's Academy Awards on Sunday — eight each for "No Country" and "Blood," including best picture, best director and, somewhat to Marfa's credit, cinematography.
"This is a really little hidden secret," says Ree Willaford, who together with her artist-husband, Jason, bought an old Marfa building three years ago and renovated it to become their home, studio and gallery they call Galleri Urbane.Their friendship with "No Country" producers and directors Joel and Ethan Coen brought the brothers to Marfa for a look at the area.
"It is kind of the last frontier," Jason Willaford said.
Maybe not for long. Marfa is becoming a micro version of the art mecca that Santa Fe, N.M. has become. Blocks of the tiny downtown, where a blinking stop light easily handles the sparse traffic, have been taken over by the foundations established by renowned artist Donald Judd, who moved to Marfa in 1972 and died 22 years later.
The presence of the Judd and Chinati foundations has spurred other artists, like the Willafords, to work and establish galleries, taking advantage of the pure azure sky that glows pink and purple and golden at dawn and sunset and where the horizon is interrupted with the jagged Chinati Mountains.
"I can wake up one day and feel like I live in the coolest place in the world," David Lanman, a carpenter who was mayor when the two movies were being filmed two years ago, said.
"Look out his window," he said, nodding to a mountain view. "It's art. It's as beautiful as it can get."
In recent years, the well-heeled have been lured to renovate run-down vacant businesses and adobe structures; other new places erected around town are worthy of Architectural Digest. The changes present a dilemma, pumping welcome money into the fickle, cattle-dependent economy, but sending property values and tax rates soaring.
Mateo Quintana Jr., 70, born and raised in Marfa, looks through the window of his tiny barber shop and sees a city block taken over by one of the Judd foundations.
"It's been good," he said. "They fixed up all the buildings."
He remembered Judd coming to town and paying him $75 every two weeks to rent a pony. He also picked up some extra cash to help out with haircuts for "Blood" folks, and his brother was hired to work security.
"I think the town didn't mind us," said Daniel Lupi, one of the movie's producers. "We certainly spent a lot of money."
The only three hotels in town were booked solid for the six months during work on "Blood." Almost three dozen local families rented out their casitas, a kind of backyard apartment, to those involved with the film.
Adela Dominguez, 55, who works behind the counter at the El Cheapo Liquor Store, said she's never seen any movie people come in, but the booze that flowed regularly at the Paisano Hotel, which back in 1955 served as headquarters for the "Giant" cast and crew and remains a shrine to the film, came from El Cheapo.
"It worked out good for everybody," Williams said.
Another benefit: There's no such thing as Marfa paparazzi.
"We see celebrities all the time in Marfa," said Robert Halpern, editor and publisher of The Big Bend Sentinel, the town's weekly newspaper. "We leave them alone."
While "Blood" was in Marfa for months, filming of "No Country" took just less than two weeks because the bulk of the movie was shot in New Mexico. Still, Love, who runs the Marfa National Bank — the only one in town — said merchants benefited from both films, and "people like me got to do something different."
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