So…I took out across the desert, intending to do some writing, figure out what was missing from the script, and take it easy for a few days.
From the airport, I drove through town and was amazed (as always) at the spectacle that is LAS VEGAS. It’s such a ridiculous place, excess in the worst possible way, but still with a silly charm that is hard to shake. Las Vegas is a different planet, a world unlike our own, and suddenly it WANTED to be in the script. I took some notes and drove out into the desert, ready to be away from people and red-lights and stuff.
The roads in the desert are an amazing thing. They are desolate and empty and long and straight and flat and in the distance they disappear into a hazy cloud of uncertainty. I like that about desert roads. I stopped multiple times, turned the car off and took pictures in the silence, and jotted down some notes.
The silence is impressive in the desert. It is similar to the silence of being underwater and I can imagine that it must be alot like what it is like to be n astronaut in space.
In Holbrook, Arizona I spent some time in the Petrified Forrest and Painted Desert, did some back country hiking, and tried to get a little lost. But venturing back into town brought me the first gem of the trip - a little place called “The Wigwam Motel”. If you have never seen or heard of this place, it is impossible to explain in any rational terms. It is literally a roadside hotel that has, instead of normal hotel rooms, has large concrete TEEPEES. And they are TEEPEES, not Wigwams. Wigwams are rounded. These are TEEPEES. And not just teepees, but also old vintage cars from the fifties parked outside each of the teepees. So, needless to say, I stayed there.
Inside, the walls of the room were sloped (obviously) to a point and there was a bed, a small table, and a chair. That’s it. The bathroom was a small shower stall, a toilet, and sink off the rear of the TEEPEE which also had a sloped wall causing the mirror to look directly at ones feet. This place was begging to go into the script. More pictures. More notes.
Leaving Holbrook it was cold, really cold - like 15 degrees, and there was frost on all the windows of all the old cars. I remember writing “RAVE ON” with my finger on the back of an old Ford. For all I know, it’s still there.
Driving across the desert through Flagstaff and into New Mexico, it started to warm up. So much so that by midday it was in the seventies. There had been a sixty degree temperature change in less than five hours. WOW.
After hours and hours of nothing but desert, the landscape started to look like something out of a sci fi movie - the surface of a foreign planet or a moon of Jupiter. More pictures, more notes.
For some reason, that night, I kept driving after the sun set. The stars came out in an amazing canopy of light in the desert sky. I stopped the car, bundled up, and laid on the hood of the car just staring up into nothingness. It was one of those moments where I felt like Oliver Vale - the main character of the script. I was on the run across the desert and I was looking up into the same stars that every other desert pioneer had peered up into at some point. The same stars Oliver would have seen.
I think we all have to stop every once in a while, climb out onto the hood of our car, or lean back on our motorcycle, and drift off into the abyss. It makes you feel really small and incredible alone. It’s fantastic.
I jumped back into the car, turned on the heater and opened my note pad. On one side of the page, I wrote DESERT and on the other side I wrote SPACE. And then I started to write words like “beautiful”, “desolate”, “cold”, “dangerous”, “deadly”, “vast”, “empty”, “makes you feel small”. A list of all the similarities between the desert and the void of space. After who knows how long, I had a list a couple of pages long. I knew I was in the right place to write this new draft of the script. The imagery and the tone and the vibe of the story were all starting to gel.
Now…where the hell am i going to sleep tonight?
To be continued…
