| Tuesday, September 2, 2008 |
06:26 - There's a wild fandango loose in the theater
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Following an improbable series of linkages, starting from a story in last month's Road & Track about Carroll Shelby and his Terlingua Ranch in southwestern Texas and the Mustang he'd just built, and the circuitous road that the R&T editors took through the Texas mountains toward the border to find his legendary chili-cookoff ranch and drive the car, in the process passing through Marfa, Texas (where the James Dean movie Giant was filmed, and, later, the Kevin Costner movie Fandango was overlaid on top of it with references back to Giant and its filming locations for good measure), I found myself watching Fandango last night.
It's a fairly silly little 80s movie, with a shoestring budget (1985 Dallas stands in gamely for 1971 Dallas) and a 30-year-old Costner playing an 18-year-old newlygrad; but it's fun. People have apparently put in a decent amount of effort in tracking the filming locations, in particular the filming venue for the climactic scene where the group of "Groovers" dig up "Dom" (a well-disguised point of rocks just north of the Rio Grande 10 miles west of Lajitas, with Ranch Road 170 carefully cropped out of every shot).
But I'm here to tell you this: nobody is going to push an out-of-gas mid-century Cadillac from the location of the McLean Massacre (just outside of Elkhart, Texas) to Marfa in one night. Seriously.
Just thought that was important to point out.
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Brian Tiemann
