Crystal Wise
If you were to imagine a writer from West Texas, you might conjure up someone like Christian Wallace.
While his beard-mustache combo is reminiscent of D.H. Lawrence, he routinely sports dirt-laced boots and once penned a 6,000-word ode to his truck. It’s a dichotomous combination of gruffness and sensitivity.
A longtime writer for Texas Monthly — whose mug has even graced the cover (check out April 2022 issue) — Wallace grew up in the West Texas town of Andrews and did some time as a roughneck in the oil fields. Providing such context makes his narration of “Boomtown,” a 12-part podcast he wrote for Texas Monthly’s multimedia arm in 2019, all the more fitting.
The podcast, glitzily produced with a musical score, sound effects, and insightful interviews, features Wallace’s Texas twang guiding listeners through the dynamics of the energy industry’s roughnecks and wildcat billionaires battling over land rights in the Permian Basin.
The serialized show found listeners who kept the downloads pumping like an oil rig. One listener, one critical listener, was particularly intrigued.
Taylor Sheridan, that famous Fort Worth native with the golden touch in television dramas, tuned into Wallace’s podcasts and was intrigued. He might have been drawn in by plotlines that involved economics, geopolitics, and boundaries — the ingredients of something like “Yellowstone.”
Hollywood interest is nothing new for Texas Monthly, who have sold rights to articles that would become films — like 2011’s “Bernie” — or TV shows — like “Love & Death,” released earlier this year on Max. Now, Sheridan wanted “Boomtown.” And in late 2020 or early 2021, by Wallace’s estimation, the mastermind of the Dutton family and his producing partner, David Glasser, acquired the rights.
Crystal Wise
Two months later, Wallace says he was asked to meet with Sheridan on the set of “1883” in Fort Worth, where he was exposed to how all-in Sheridan can be with his productions. Wallace recounted about 300 extras with dozens of horses and a few blocks of the Fort Worth Stockyards retrofitted to look like it did in the late 19th century.
“It was an incredible entry into that world,” Wallace says. “Taylor and I spent the next couple of years talking, off and on, about West Texas — oil and gas, the people, the culture, stories from the patch I’d heard growing up.
“He eventually asked me to write a spec script based on the ideas we’d been talking about. I’d never written a script before, but I took a crack at it, and a few weeks later, Taylor called and said, ‘Well, buddy, I think this is gonna work.’”
Sheridan brought on Wallace as a co-creator and executive producer.
That was the birth of “Landman.” The series, which will premiere on Nov. 17 on Paramount+, features Billy Bob Thornton, Jon Hamm, Demi Moore, and Michelle Randolph in the cast.
Produced by MTV Entertainment Studios, the show began filming in Fort Worth in early February and ended in late June. Wallace says Cowtown, as a locale, made sense from a story perspective. Sheridan has an affinity for the city, which has its own Western heritage.
“‘Landman’ explores both the bigwigs who own oil companies and the roughnecks who get their hands dirty on the rigs,” Wallace says. “Fort Worth was built on cattle and oil. A good chunk of the city’s buildings and museums were paid for by oil. That wealth is still present in the city today, so it makes sense that part of ‘Landman’ would be set there.”
Wallace says the terrain west of Fort Worth visually resembles the Permian Basin.
“I’ll admit to being skeptical at first about how well this region would translate to West Texas, but it turns out that a lot of the country west of Fort Worth looks pretty dang similar to parts of the Permian,” Wallace says.
The background isn’t all that fits the vibe.
Wallace says the show has drilled down for even more authenticity with the cast and props.
“Everyone was trying their best to hew to an authentic representation of the region and industry,” Wallace says.
Crystal Wise
“Landman” actors and crews participated in a three-day roughneck camp similar to the cowboy camp that Taylor requires of his “Yellowstone” casts.
This included putting actors on a real workover rig. The crew helped the actors perform jobs by a floor hand, a derrickman, and an operator on a rig.
“Those are skillsets that are not easy to pick up, but I was impressed by how well all the guys did,” he says. “I mean, the derrickman is working about 80 feet in the air. There’s steel pipe coming at him. Just to get up there, takes some guts, and our actors took it all in stride.”
The authenticity extended to the costumes. Wallace said costume designer Emma Potter had some of Wallace’s buddies from the oil patches send her their work clothes, or “greasers,” which became the prototype for accurately aging the costumes. This meant an entire color palette of varying hues of dirt and oil.
“When the actors or extras put on their greasers, I swear you wouldn’t be able to tell them apart from the real deal,” he says.
Of course, realism has its limits in a drama series. Actual landmen or landwomen spend hours scouring courthouse records, inputting data into spreadsheets, and filing lease extensions, the tedium that “would probably put most viewers to sleep,” Wallace says.
In Sheridan fashion, drama is provided by dynamic actors, like the way Kevin Costner carried “Yellowstone” or Harrison Ford fueled “1923.”
“Landman” focuses more on the oil field at large rather than on any one specific job, Wallace says.
“That said, Tommy Norris [Billy Bob Thornton’s character] is a landman, and there are elements of that job you’ll see throughout the series, but Tommy is also a Swiss Army knife of skills that he uses to keep M-Tex Oil running as smoothly as possible,” Wallace says.
Hamm seemed a natural for “Landman” after his performance as the villainous Sherrif Roy Tillman in the fifth season of “Fargo.”
The first trailer for “Landman” dropped in early September. In the trailer, Thornton’s character says in a voiceover: “The oil and gas industry makes $3 billion a day in pure profit. But before any of that money is made, you got to secure the land and manage the people. That’s my job. The first part is pretty simple; it’s the second part that can get you killed.”
Wallace says he’s grateful that Sheridan saw fit to add his narratives to Sheridan’s network of dramas.
“Several other of my Texas Monthly articles had been optioned by Hollywood before this, and I had always wanted to help translate my own work for the screen,” Wallace says.
“But Taylor was the first to give me an opportunity to do that.”
