TERLINGUA — This weekend, the community is warmly invited to attend the regional premiere of The Big Bend, a film shot and set in Terlingua. The feature follows the story of two young families on vacation who quickly learn that off-grid trekking is not the quiet and tranquil experience they expected.
The idea for the film sprung from a real-life trip undertaken by producer Aaron Brown and director Brett Wagner, old friends and film industry pros. Brown, a native Texan, grew up visiting the Big Bend as a kid. “It was this Wild West place in my mind,” he said. “Years later, I visited the area again, and it was even more magical than I remembered.”
After starting up his own Austin-based company, Onion Creek Productions, Brown eventually scraped together the money to buy a place on Terlingua Ranch, and called up his old friend and fellow film industry pro Wagner to plan a trip for themselves, their wives and their kids. “It was a really fun trip, but you know Terlingua — weird things happen,” Brown said. “It’s not Disneyland. It’s not a completely sterile place to visit.”
The wheels started turning for Wagner almost immediately. “Being out there with young children for the first time, we had experiences and saw things that felt very cinematic to me,” he said. “I had a desire to make a movie in that place with [Brown], and I had little images in my head but no clear story yet. I just wanted to connect the dots.”
A few months later, Brown opened up a package in the mail, and found that Wagner had connected those dots into a feature-length screenplay. Wagner’s project — comical, surreal, suspenseful, thoughtful — couldn’t be wrangled into a single category, but the plot was adequately summed up by the film’s tagline: “Things go south.”
The two initially set out to make an homespun production, but grander ambitions sprang from a story that had grown so organically from their own lives and experiences. They hustled to raise money, recruited some well-respected actors and were finally ready to film in 2019.
The team quickly found out that the desert pays no mind to the constraints of show business. One of the first lessons they learned the hard way — there was no cell service in many of their filming locations, and walkie-talkies can only transmit so far. “We had to let the Big Bend area tell us how this movie was going to be made,” Brown said.
Scheduling was a headache. The adult actors were booked solid, and their kid colleagues were in school full time. Their only overlap was during the summer, a notoriously brutal time to be outside in South Brewster County. A parched summer quickly rolled over into a violent monsoon season, replete with hail storms and flash floods. The script had to be modified and cut on-the-fly as roads to film locations were washed out and knocked-out power limited interior shots. (Paradoxically, a scene set on the river while it was raging had to be altered when they showed up to find it ankle-deep.)
Brown and Wagner did try to keep their people as safe as possible and hired Donny Dust — a Marine Corps veteran turned caveman survivalist turned reality TV legend — to help the city-slicking crew adapt to the environment. His star power eventually rivaled his prowess as set medic and earned him a spot in the film. “He did an amazing job taking care of everyone,” Brown said.
Several Big Bend locals also pitched in to help. Brown’s neighbor on the Ranch, White Bear, lent his time and his animals to the film. Scott Teppe of Fort Davis’s Rattlers and Reptiles served as the dedicated snake wrangler. Will Drawe, formerly of the Brewster County Sheriff’s Office, brought his day job to the big screen, donning the official uniform alongside location manager Buckner Cooke, who also served double duty as a deputy.
The locals also had plenty to teach about the realities of life on the border. On a pre-filming scouting trip, Brown and Wagner took a rafting trip down the Rio Grande where they docked briefly in Mexico.
Wagner hadn’t previously understood just how fluid — pun intended — the border was. After accidentally sacrificing a pair of flip flops to the mud, he reflected on how both sides of the canyon were mirror images. “It’s the same land over here that it is on the other side,” he said. “It made the whole idea of a hard border — or God forbid, a wall — seem comical.”
The crew called it a wrap in 2020, and the film headed into post-production. Its premiere was delayed by two wildly infectious factors: the COVID-19 pandemic and the global craze over Taylor Swift.
Debuting their baby in pandemic-era virtual screenings didn’t feel right, so they waited out festival and awards cycles until flesh-and-blood audiences returned to theatres. They set a date for 2023, only to have the surprise drop of Swift’s Eras Tour film set them — and many other smaller productions looking to generate buzz — back even further. “It wrought havoc with everyone’s release schedule,” Wagner explained.
Last summer, the film finally started trickling down a circuit of big screens from New York and Los Angeles. This weekend’s screening marks the last official premiere of the movie before it hits online streaming services.
The duo hope that their “love letter to Terlingua” is well received by the desert rats who welcomed them as one of their own. “It’s a place that makes you feel a part of something bigger,” Brown said.
Free screenings of the film will be hosted on Friday, January 24, at 7 p.m. and Saturday, January 25, at 4 p.m., both in the Cinnabar Theatre on Fire Station Road in Study Butte (turnoff just north of Big Bend Boating & Hiking.) Brown will attend the screenings for a Q&A. After Friday’s showing, all are invited to a celebration at the Boathouse in the Ghost Town beginning at 9:30 p.m.
