Rolling Roadshow

Texas is made for road trips, so last summer I took advantage of the state's abundance of weird small towns. I have been encouraged by the Alamo Drafthouse, a cinema in Austin that shows cool stuff and serves drinks, and their "Rolling Roadshow" - a scheme where they put on open-air screenings of Texas movies, in the towns where they were filmed.

One of their features was the Paul Newman 1963 movie Hud in Claude, which is just a few miles from Amarillo. I packed up my lawn chair and headed north. Now, when it comes to landscape in West Texas, I hear a lot of complaints about its flatness. Yes, it is flat, but I choose to perceive it as living in a Mark Rothko painting. For example:

Except, of course, when you come across a canyon. The transition is so rapid it is actually startling, to go from flatness to deep, red and rocky. I pulled over in the bottom of a canyon just to contemplate things for a moment.

Of course, the Grand Canyon gets more press, but the mini-versions thereof in West Texas are pretty impressive. I drove through the canyons, enjoying the novelty of their verticality, and I was pleased to notice a sign for a lookout up ahead. I pulled in, and noticed a big rig stopped there, with the driver leaning against it. I have seen enough movies to know that this is not a great place for a single woman to stop, so I pulled a U-turn and continued on to Claude. I didn't want to miss the big show, of course.

Claude is an archetypal dying town. It's close enough to Amarillo to get a bit of traffic, but the downtown was quite depressed. I stopped at the Dairy Queen, as that is a staple of the West Texas diet, and explored the main street before the movie. Attractions included the Gem Theatre, which plays itself in the film.

The old schoolhouse:

And an assortment of abandoned shop windows full of mysterious objects, such as this old car:

Or this, a bathtub with sides covered in carpet. This strikes me as a bad idea, or at least something you can only get away with in a desert climate. I'm not sure if the yoke and lantern were included in the original package.:

Finally, no small western town is complete without a cigar store Indian. This one is adorned with a sacred white buffalo. I'll tell that story another time.:

As the sun started to set, the Alamo Drafthouse crew got their projection booth truck into position and inflated their portable screen in front of the town hall. You can see the projector lenses peeking out.:

One of the delightful things about the process is we got to see things that are normally hidden at a movie theatre, like the process of calibrating the projector for the screen.

The local Legion was selling hot dogs, and some kids had been recruited to distribute free popcorn. We all staked out our spots in the parking lot with our lawn chairs, and the show began with some vintage movie trailers that might have shown before Hud back in the day. An unexpected thrill in watching the movie in the middle of town is that since it was shot there, one could perform shot-by-shot comparisons with the surrounding space. There'd be a shot of the courthouse, and then you would look to your right, and there's the courthouse. Not much has changed, except none of Claude's residents resemble Paul Newman in the slightest. 

As the sky grew darker, the light of the screen started to attract moths, which in turn attracted the local bat population. I've written before about the ways nature often competes with outdoor screenings (lightning at the drive-in, etc.), but this was quite spectacular to watch the cloud of bats swirling above us, and occasionally cruising in front of the screen. 

When the show wrapped, I drove home, but took the big highway through Amarillo, since the canyon is not such a good option in the dark.