Crystal Wise
When civil engineers, or whoever, mapped out our interstate highway system circa 1956, they typically chose big cities in which to intersect highways — our beloved Fort Worth being one of them. Yet, the major thoroughfares of Interstate 10 and Interstate 20 ignored this preference and elected to cross paths in West Texas’ Scroggins Draw.
Scoggins Draw, you should know, is not the name of a town. It’s the name of a valley. And there is no town in the valley of Scroggins Draw. There is no … anything in Scroggins Draw. But despite its seclusion, I hesitate to call this the middle of nowhere. After all, if you’re in Texas, you’re somewhere.
Forty miles west of this “somewhere,” Texas, is Van Horn, a town of 2,000 people that’s also home to Jeff Bezos’ rocket playground — nearby Corn Ranch is where Blue Origin launches celebrities and thrill-seeking millionaires into the final frontier at $300,000 a pop. This place, which boasts sweeping desert mountain views, an absence of hustle and bustle, and a quirky combination of cattle ranchers and space tourists is (currently) where home resides for Christina Voros and her husband, Jason Owen, a film-set wrangler.
Crystal Wise
Voros living in Van Horn won’t come as a shock to anyone who’s seen her name on film or television credits. After all, it’s a name that’s become commonplace on many a Taylor Sheridan-produced or -created project — “Yellowstone;” “1883;” and now as director of the upcoming “Lawmen: Bass Reeves.”
The miniseries, which was filmed in Fort Worth this past spring and stars David Oyelowo, Dennis Quaid, and Donald Sutherland, follows the life and exploits of the first Black deputy U.S. Marshal west of the Mississippi. Voros directed five of the series’ eight episodes and, fittingly, it will hold its premiere at the Lone Star Film Festival on Nov. 4 at the Isis Theater.
When the magazine’s photographer, Crystal Wise, and I first met Voros in the driveway of her and her husband’s Van Horn ranch, she sported a cowboy hat and turquoise jewelry and quickly introduced us to their hoard of excitable ranch mongrels and pet miniature donkey named Leon — who happens to have his own Instagram account. She then gave us a tour of the grounds, which includes horse stables, a metal shop, a rusted old truck whose make and model were indecipherable, and a vintage Argosy travel trailer from which she offices.
Yeah, it quickly became obvious why Voros has a knack for directing gritty Westerns and why the town of Van Horn fits her like a glove. Yet, her path to helming Sheridan projects and becoming enveloped in the Western world is anything but obvious.
Voros is a Hungarian dual citizen who grew up in the Boston area and attended Harvard, where she says she got accepted because she was active in fencing. But, after spending a semester before college to train in Hungary, she bowed out of the sport.
“I was accepted because I was a fencer, but I wasn’t obligated,” Voros says. “Luckily, [Harvard] doesn’t have athletic scholarships, so I didn’t fence. Then I proceeded to do theater and bartend for the rest of my education at Harvard — smoking, like, a pack of cigarettes a day until 4 a.m. bartending three nights a week. It’s a miracle I graduated.”
Though she studied theater at Harvard and had planned to pursue the craft in post-grad — at a program that would send her to the Moscow Art Theater School for year — Voros also applied for NYU film school despite thinking she had little chance of being accepted.
“I didn’t know anything about filmmaking, but it felt like a challenge to pull together my theater portfolio and pull together my artist portfolio. It felt like an exercise.”
A few weeks following a tense interview (“I was shocked I got an interview”) that left her crying on the $30 bus ride back to Boston, Voros was notified she’d been accepted into both NYU and her desired theater program. But, ultimately, this was a conundrum made easier after NYU offered Voros a fellowship that covered her tuition and a job. “I went to film school because it would cost less than theater school would have,” Voros says.
While it took her a minute to get her sea legs, having admittedly known nothing about film, one of her first film school projects — a “Gray Gardens”-inspired 12-minute documentary, “The Ladies,” about Voros’ two great aunts with whom she lived in New York — took the leap to the film festival circuit. Following this accomplishment, Voros started getting requests from people to film their projects.
NYU also opened the door for her work with James Franco, who started film school the year after Voros graduated. Upon the recommendation of her mentor, Voros served as a graduate assistant and director of photography on his student films, including his feature-length thesis project and a documentary on “Saturday Night Live.” Voros, who never realized the extent of Franco’s fame until he was recognized on the street one day, says Franco was her first real creative partner.
“He was the first person who put trust in me,” Voros says. Addressing accusations of his misconduct — multiple students at Franco’s acting school accused him in 2018 of sexual misconduct — Voros says of Franco, “I think he's done a tremendous amount of work on himself. I think he's in a really good place now. During that moment (when the accusations came out), I remember getting a lot of phone calls asking me to weigh in. But I have no frame of reference to talk about somebody else's experience. And my experience [with Franco] was so wildly different.”
Voros would partner with Franco on four feature-length films. The last of which, “As I Lay Dying,” is where Voros would meet her now-husband, Jason Owen.
With Owen, about as legit a cowboy as a legit cowboy could be, living in Van Horn, and Voros taking on an ambitious documentary about young cowgirls making commitments to the ranching life (a project that remains on hold), her visits to Texas became more frequent. And, more importantly, she started missing it when gone.
“When I would pull up to the driveway, I’d be like, “God, I have to write something for this place. I want to shoot a Western.’ I think I still see this place with an East Coaster’s fresh eyes, especially when I’ve been away from it for a long time. It doesn’t lose its splendor.”
It’s a common occurrence among those who work with Sheridan. He either hires cowboys and cowgirls or people who want to become cowboys and cowgirls. Having a disingenuous love of ranching, horses, and landscapes with no concrete obstructions just isn’t going to fly on the set of a Taylor Sheridan show. Whether one has to go through his famous cowboy camp or, like Voros, has already adopted the lifestyle, the cast and crew of Sheridan’s shows display an authenticity that has never been seen in Western filmmaking. The actors are really riding horses and really getting dirt on their faces, and visual effects aren’t generated
from a computer. Call it the de-Hollywooding of the Western genre, and Voros is playing a lead role in its reformation.
While Voros got her start in the Sheridan universe as a camera operator during the first season of “Yellowstone,” she quickly climbed the proverbial film crew ladder — jumping from camera operator to director of photography during Season Two — and eventually directed eight episodes of the popular TV series. This includes four episodes of Season Five, which averaged over 8.2 million viewers per episode. Following the Dutton clan back in time, Voros also directed four episodes of “Yellowstone” spinoff prequel “1883” — including the tornado episode, “Lightning Yellow Hair,” which Voros roundly admits entering having “no idea how to make a tornado.”
Clearly, she did one hell of a job. The episode received an Emmy nomination and is considered one of the highlights of the series.
Crystal Wise
“I feel so lucky to have been on that show,” Voros says. “When I was at the Four Sixes with Tim [McGraw], Faith [Hill], Sam [Elliott], Isabel [May], Lamonica [Garrett], and Gratiela [Brancusi], we would have dinner together every night, and someone would ask a question that everyone at the table had to answer. And I’m sitting at the table with these creative giants eating biscuits and chicken and having deep, thoughtful conversations about our own vulnerabilities as artists. I’m pinching myself; it was just such a beautiful moment.
“But I know for every moment like that, there was a lot of cursing about the drive, or the hours, or the lack of turnaround, or the lack of Fahrenheit.”
Following the show’s success, Voros would get tapped to helm the Sheridan-produced Paramount+ miniseries “Lawmen: Bass Reeves.” The show is the brainchild of Chad Feehan, who also serves as the showrunner, but don’t expect “Bass Reeves” to lack what one might deem a “Sheridan feel.”
“I think Taylor is very good at finding his people,” Voros says. “He’s good at being able to spot people who think like him. I think the reasons I got the [director of photography] job for Season Two is because he had been watching my camera work very carefully during Season One.”
Our trip to Van Horn happened soon after both the writers and actors went on strike, so potential projects in the industry had been at a standstill. But Voros made it clear what she wants her next project to be: directing a feature. And, of course, she wants that feature to be a Western.
“I feel like I’ve learned so much in the last couple of years, and I’ve become much more fluent in the animal side of things, the weaponry side of things, and production design side of things. I would like to find something that feels different enough and doesn’t retread the same boards, but would allow me to take everything I’ve learned in the last five years and elevate it.
“I like to tell myself that, someday, I’ll write my own [script]. But there’s also part of me that thinks the downside to working with Taylor [Sheridan] for five years is your own personal bar of what a good script is, getting so high that I don’t know if I could reach it.”
Voros is also planning a permanent move to Fort Worth. While we initially speculated her reasoning was due to the city becoming the epicenter of the Taylor Sheridan universe, it’s also because her mother is already a Cowtown resident.
“I love Fort Worth,” Voros says. “My mother was living in New York, and I made her move to Fort Worth.
“Our goal is to move to Fort Worth. I think Fort Worth is, as far as livable creative communities go, hard to beat.”
At least it also has proximity to an interstate intersection. Perhaps it’s not too different from Van Horn.
