THE MAKING (AND MEANING) OF OLAN, TX

I thought I was making films so I could tell stories, but I was wrong. I discovered that I’m really in it to hear them. They say life imitates art, but that’s a bunch of horseshit. A not-so-clever inversion of what everyone already knows: movies are make-believe. Right? As usual, the truth is a little more complicated. You see, I used to be just like the hero of this short film. Broke and out of work, with the ink still drying on my divorce, I washed out of New York City at the age of thirty-seven and moved in with my mother at the dead-end of a country road. It was these events that spurred Christian Durso to write the first draft of Olan, TX. I found solace in long solitary road trips through west Texas. Along the way I met the people who are at the core of this film and I fell in love with the landscape that has become this fictional town.

In the opening shot, director of photography Angela Herr captures a potent image, a rusty oil well sputtering against a backdrop of churning wind turbines. It’s easy to see which way the wind blows. Fossil fuels are running out and their extraction has damaged the land. Renewable energy like the vast wind farms featured in Olan, TX must be our future. Once again though, the truth isn’t so simple. Many locals oppose the turbines. The industry is not well regulated and some folks who live among them were unable to share in the profits, not in the way their grandparents did when oil was struck on the farm. These stories get told in whispers. Up close, the turbines make funny noises—enough that our sound techs earned their money—and they do occasionally spew industrial lubricant. I saw a cow walking around with a huge splotch of axle grease running down its side. Furthermore, some people call them an eyesore—though I suppose there is no accounting for taste, because I find them beautiful. So beautiful, in fact, that I knew we had to shoot this film here. I’m just saying, its complicated.

In the story, Olan’s father was a decorated Vietnam veteran. In real life, so is Vic, who runs the Elks’ Lodge where we filmed. I sat with him and explained the movie while he chain-smoked cigarettes, and I could see that the story meant something to him. He told me about when he was drafted, and said that even forty years on, he still didn’t like to talk about the war. He sure said a lot with the things he didn’t say.

Later, at the antique shop, I was trying to give the actors something juicy. I asked the lady who ran the store if she ever gets a customer like our man Olan. Somebody so desperate for cash they might sell the shirt off their back. She just laughed and said, “Honey, I see him in here every damned day.” I think a lot of folks are going through hard times, everywhere.

Meanwhile, in the props department, you’d be surprised how much a coffin costs. Even a cheap one. Nobody rent’s them and it turns out to be nearly impossible to find one second hand. Pretty much everybody who ever bought a coffin is still using it. Except me. I was able to locate a manufacturer in Dallas and get a price on a unit that had been scratched in the warehouse. Same deal as when I when I bought my first TV set. Before we hung up, the foreman said, “You know, it’s bad luck to buy one before you need it.” Geez, I’m just trying to make a short film, I thought.

I stashed the casket in my ex-girlfriend’s garden shed. She wasn’t super happy about it, and the guy who mows her lawn almost had a heart attack. I promised to get rid of it by Halloween. I figured some rich guy would give me five hundred bucks to have a real coffin in his front yard for trick-or-treat. Wrong again. I was contacted a family who needed to bury their father and couldn’t afford a casket. They wanted to know if it was real. Their old man been a veteran too, and he’d gotten swindled in his final days. The family was left with a stack of bills. It was just like in the movie, you can’t make this stuff up. In the end, they talked me down to four hundred, and I felt okay about it.

Back in 2017, I only lived with my mother for about six months, but that time in my life is at the root of this story. After I moved out and made my home in Austin, it was mom who encouraged me to make this film. She also stepped in with the gap funding when the budget ran amok. Mom was my biggest supporter. Last fall, not long after I sold the coffin, a scan revealed a baseball sized tumor in my mother’s lung. Suddenly I was measuring my postproduction schedule against trips to the chemo ward. Ars longa, vita brevis, they say: art is long, life is short. Now there’s a cliché with some truth to it. Editing, music, sound, and color all take time. Small-cell lung cancer, on the other hand, doubles every month. Mom lived to see the first few rough cuts, but that’s all. Olan, TX is dedicated to her memory.

I started making a film about grief before I knew the first damned thing about it. Grief or filmmaking. But I found out along the way. If life does imitate art, then I would sternly caution you against making a film about losing a parent. But like I said, I don’t think works that way. It’s a chain, you see. Art imitates life, and then life imitates art, and then art imitates life again. It’s the same with any kind of storytelling. It must always be matched by storylistening. I came here to tell you a story, but it’s yours that I really want to know. That’s why we’re here isn’t it? Welcome to Olan, TX.