This is an important post for me because I am from New Mexico, and grew up outside Albuquerque, NM. Now, people don't believe it these days, but previous to Breaking Bad it was very, very, VERY common to run across Americans who did not know that New Mexico was a state. This was regardless of where they were from. I had cousins, related to me, that did not know their kin lived in a state.
I tell people that today and they literally are like "I mean I always knew New Mexico was a state" but no they didn't. I grew up taking road trips to people asking me how I was white, how I spoke English so well, did I need a passport to enter the US? Even to this day, after I tell people where I'm from, most of the time their brain defaults to Arizona. They remember me saying I'm from a Southwestern state, I guess they figure "I would have remembered if it were Texas, sooo... Arizona?"
Anyway, this is all to say, New Mexico and Albuquerque specifically have sort of a history regarding representation on television. Namely that the reality show COPS caused Albuquerque to ban television production because they were tired of being featured on it so often. So when Gov. Gary Johnson (whom most people know more for being the perennial Libertarian candidate than for the state he governed) started and Gov. Richardson finished the process of developing film incentive tax credits in the state, they had to do so by basically convincing Albuquerque to let go of its "city of crime on tv" bias.
The tax incentive program did nothing to help New Mexico be recognized by the rest of the US until Breaking Bad came along. Productions beforehand were more like "Albuquerque kinda looks like LA so that's some discount location shooting." Breaking Bad was the real breakout of "No this is a specific place with a specific character." Everyone now either thinks they know Albuquerque because they saw it on Breaking Bad, or they are humble enough to ask "Is it anything like Breaking Bad?"
Which, to give Breaking Bad a lot of credit, its location scouting is ... whoof... outstanding. Anywhere in that show where anything happens is more or less where that sort of thing would happen. It doesn't necessarily ACTUALLY happen, but if it did... yeah, that's... that's where that would happen. I caught that vibe when there was a scene in the Triple-K near what we call "Ghetto Smith's" where Jesse and Walter are trying to pretend not to know each other while talking over the junk food displays: yeah. I've been to that Triple-K. That happens there.
But, as one person once pointed out when I was telling him basically this exact same thing: "So, are you saying you'd rather be known as meth dealers than Mexican?"
I used to joke that Breaking Bad terribly misrepresented Albuquerque because everyone there is on heroin, not meth, but I'm tiring of the jokes in general and really wanting some solid Burqueño filmmaking about all the cool stuff there. I for one want to make a feature based off of some of Lucia Berlin's short stories from A Manual for Cleaning Ladies, but unfortunately I can't secure the rights to them (I'm under the impression that Cate Blanchett owns them). But the point is there is a ton of good story potential, not just in Albuquerque but the region, that deserves more than just leaving it to the Breaking Bad universe and moving on.
We've discussed Albuquerque before, I think with regard to a weekly thread about statues of film characters. It's been very educational for me. I also find a lot familiar in your descriptions. Thanks for sharing.
Oddly enough, Mr. Haddon, your pics of Detroit remind me of many parts of my own hometown, though a much smaller, anachronistically old and new city, Norfolk, VA. Elements of the very new, very old, beautiful and downright trashy exist right around the corner from each other...! This article has made me think more about the settings of my scripts, varied to say the least. Guess that's the point, right?! Much enjoyed the read - perhaps even more so the pics. Sure bends my perceptions of your hometown!
This is interesting as I’ve just had two experiences with a few screenwriters about location. The first was from Scriptnotes. John August and Craig Mazin were discussing something of a modern phenomenon but the losing of regional accents.
And how one may not hear the actual accent of that region as it’s thought to be.
I’m from Brooklyn and it was used as an example. The guys said it’s not an automatic to stop a random person in Brooklyn and expect to hear a authentic New York accent and they have some experience here as they both live and work in LA but aren’t from California.
However, I had to push back that the native New York accent is nowhere to be found. I sent in a voicemail in response. So I’m the “listener” you’ll hear in episode 642 and I’m very much a native New Yorker.
I spoke on how gentrification has muddled the now new idea of what Brooklyn is. To me it will never be the domain of hipsters. They can’t tell me where Ebbets Field is at (an apartment complex) and what’s near it with our referring to your phone. They definitely can’t tell me what train is near my high school if I just gave them the neighborhood. They aren’t natives. And they would have to be here 25-30 years to get it.
Hipsters only really dominate two and half neighborhoods. All of Greenpoint and Williamsburg and a good chunk of Bushwhick. In the gentrified hoods they are around but haven’t changed the landscape. No bike lanes or vegan shops. Just regular New York blue collar life with the oddball renovated brownstone that sticks out like shit in snow.
Yet Brooklyn has more people than Philly. Natives like me are very much still around. But the pop culture (“Girls” for example) doesn’t focus on my side of Brooklyn, I went to Canarsie High, ran around East Flatbush over in Utica Ave going to Kings Plaza in Mill Basin on the B41 bus.
The hipsters aren’t going to this part of car centric Brooklyn where the trains don’t run. To them “that’s” Brooklyn. Everyone lives 2-5 blocks from a train. Cars are for the suburbanites. My mom’s owned three cars her whole life. Wouldn’t know how to use a metrocard for all the money in the world. People forget the amount of people who drive in New York is the same amount people the that live in all of LA.
I grew up on Cozine Ave, the Belt Parkway was five minutes from my door, by foot or bus it’s a ten-fifteen minute walk to the 3 train -a local at that.
That’s the real New York. To my east is Jamaica Bay out my bedroom window was JFK’s tower and John Gotti’s hood South Ozone Park, Queens.
The next conversation I had on this was with Hilliard Guess on his Screenwriters Rant Room, his guest on that episode spoke on New York has been “over shot” to that I stopped the show and wrote in to Twitter to explain how vast NYC is and for the budgets people get and fear of losing their jobs I guess they go with the same ol two step. And as George Clinton said -who wants to have sex in one position their whole life?”
I love John and Hilliard, so good company there. Thanks for such a thoughtful response. I think what's interesting here is that, from your explanation, John and Craig have demonstrated my point. They have an idea what an "authentic New Yorker" is, right? I'd suggest most Americans do. Then, there's the idea of it held by people in other countries (which is why, when they visit, they tend to focus on very specific areas only - not the "real" NY). Writers and other artists can either contradict these ideas, use them as a shortcut, subvert them, change them, and more. But they exist. The reader/viewer has those ideas whether we like it or not.
Know exactly what you mean lol but I don’t know whether to be a wee bit disappointed the gritty streets of Detroit weren’t as gritty as I imagined from the aforementioned movies.
I was born in Glasgow, Scotland, a beautiful city that has suffered badly from bad publicity :)
The reality is that most cities have beauty in them. Well...maybe not most. But a lot of them. People choose to overlook it because it doesn't comport to their biases, classism, whatever.
I think your take on this is quite accurate. You have to consider the audience's pre-suppositions and expectations, even if you are far away from any chance at producing your idea. One of the first features I wrote was in large part about overturning audience expectations of a certain location and its people. I have to say, regretfully, that I am one of those people whose image of Detroit was a poor one, though in my defense I believe this perception came more from knowing( as a history buff) of the city's decline since the 1950s, rather than due to salacious or misleading film, TV or media sources. It was quite a change to see your photos showing the "life" of the city, its people and its history!
Detroit still has a lot of areas that look like the apocalypse, but that's the result of a city of 2,000,000 people dropping under 1,000,000. But the renaissance has been real. If I were to ever return to the States to live (and I wouldn't, but if I did), I'd move to Detroit. I love everything about it today. I loved it as a kid, too, but you're ignorant as a kid. As an adult, I can enumerate its wonders and be grateful for how it's survived.
I love Detroit, but my experience with the city is very narrow.
I'm a big-time Red Wing fan. I even had season tickets for a season - even though I live in Toronto. (Hence why I only survived a season of the 7-8 hour drive per game).
There's a real sense of place I get when I visit that isn't replicated anywhere else.
Detroit *exists* in a way that feels defiantly alive despite the odds. There's a constant "fuck you, world" energy when you explore it. It's a city that feels like Rocky getting back up off the mat to me when everyone around him is shouting for him to stay down.
good advice and something i try to think about ... although probably not as clearly as you layout here
it reminds me of a time, years a go, when i submitted the exact same script to The Black List three times (i was trying to be scientific)
the story was set in a 'temperate rainforest' covering an isolated mountain range in SE Australia – these temperate rainforests (or what’s left of them) are known for their towering gumtrees (Mountain Ash) and enormous tree ferns ... so nothing like the usual picture which springs to mind when someone says the word, “Australia”
so you can imagine my disappointment when, under the heading LOCATIONS, two of the three evaluations simply jotted down the word, “Australia” – thankfully the third did a better job, writing, “rural Australia, forests, houses, roads, waterfall”
I enjoyed the photos, even if they seemed hypersaturated to my eye. But then agan I am colorblind. I always thought if I ever got into filmmaking I would need to give up control over the image to a cinematographer with more typical color vision lol
I like to add saturation to pics to reflect my emotional experience of what I'm photographing. But in this case, most of these photos aren't modified that much. Some, yes, but they're far from distortions of reality.
I don't know if you remember the great YouTube series "Every Frame A Painting" but one of my favorite videos is, "Vancouver Never Plays Itself" showing all of the different styles of film shot in Vancouver and lamenting how rare it was to see a version on screen that felt rooted in the experience of living in the city: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ojm74VGsZBU
Wonderful photos, Cole! Also, this essay has left my mind a bit of a blur. I don’t think I find location of particular importance when I engage with film or literature, in fact I think I would be hard pressed to tell you where a lot of stories I love are actually set. However, I’m now questioning whether I’m actually doing this subconsciously. Going to have to go away and have a bit of a think about it.
This is an important post for me because I am from New Mexico, and grew up outside Albuquerque, NM. Now, people don't believe it these days, but previous to Breaking Bad it was very, very, VERY common to run across Americans who did not know that New Mexico was a state. This was regardless of where they were from. I had cousins, related to me, that did not know their kin lived in a state.
I tell people that today and they literally are like "I mean I always knew New Mexico was a state" but no they didn't. I grew up taking road trips to people asking me how I was white, how I spoke English so well, did I need a passport to enter the US? Even to this day, after I tell people where I'm from, most of the time their brain defaults to Arizona. They remember me saying I'm from a Southwestern state, I guess they figure "I would have remembered if it were Texas, sooo... Arizona?"
Anyway, this is all to say, New Mexico and Albuquerque specifically have sort of a history regarding representation on television. Namely that the reality show COPS caused Albuquerque to ban television production because they were tired of being featured on it so often. So when Gov. Gary Johnson (whom most people know more for being the perennial Libertarian candidate than for the state he governed) started and Gov. Richardson finished the process of developing film incentive tax credits in the state, they had to do so by basically convincing Albuquerque to let go of its "city of crime on tv" bias.
The tax incentive program did nothing to help New Mexico be recognized by the rest of the US until Breaking Bad came along. Productions beforehand were more like "Albuquerque kinda looks like LA so that's some discount location shooting." Breaking Bad was the real breakout of "No this is a specific place with a specific character." Everyone now either thinks they know Albuquerque because they saw it on Breaking Bad, or they are humble enough to ask "Is it anything like Breaking Bad?"
Which, to give Breaking Bad a lot of credit, its location scouting is ... whoof... outstanding. Anywhere in that show where anything happens is more or less where that sort of thing would happen. It doesn't necessarily ACTUALLY happen, but if it did... yeah, that's... that's where that would happen. I caught that vibe when there was a scene in the Triple-K near what we call "Ghetto Smith's" where Jesse and Walter are trying to pretend not to know each other while talking over the junk food displays: yeah. I've been to that Triple-K. That happens there.
But, as one person once pointed out when I was telling him basically this exact same thing: "So, are you saying you'd rather be known as meth dealers than Mexican?"
I used to joke that Breaking Bad terribly misrepresented Albuquerque because everyone there is on heroin, not meth, but I'm tiring of the jokes in general and really wanting some solid Burqueño filmmaking about all the cool stuff there. I for one want to make a feature based off of some of Lucia Berlin's short stories from A Manual for Cleaning Ladies, but unfortunately I can't secure the rights to them (I'm under the impression that Cate Blanchett owns them). But the point is there is a ton of good story potential, not just in Albuquerque but the region, that deserves more than just leaving it to the Breaking Bad universe and moving on.
We've discussed Albuquerque before, I think with regard to a weekly thread about statues of film characters. It's been very educational for me. I also find a lot familiar in your descriptions. Thanks for sharing.
Oddly enough, Mr. Haddon, your pics of Detroit remind me of many parts of my own hometown, though a much smaller, anachronistically old and new city, Norfolk, VA. Elements of the very new, very old, beautiful and downright trashy exist right around the corner from each other...! This article has made me think more about the settings of my scripts, varied to say the least. Guess that's the point, right?! Much enjoyed the read - perhaps even more so the pics. Sure bends my perceptions of your hometown!
Detroit is a magical place. I wish more people knew that. I'm glad anything about the read resonated with you, Sharon!
This is interesting as I’ve just had two experiences with a few screenwriters about location. The first was from Scriptnotes. John August and Craig Mazin were discussing something of a modern phenomenon but the losing of regional accents.
And how one may not hear the actual accent of that region as it’s thought to be.
I’m from Brooklyn and it was used as an example. The guys said it’s not an automatic to stop a random person in Brooklyn and expect to hear a authentic New York accent and they have some experience here as they both live and work in LA but aren’t from California.
However, I had to push back that the native New York accent is nowhere to be found. I sent in a voicemail in response. So I’m the “listener” you’ll hear in episode 642 and I’m very much a native New Yorker.
I spoke on how gentrification has muddled the now new idea of what Brooklyn is. To me it will never be the domain of hipsters. They can’t tell me where Ebbets Field is at (an apartment complex) and what’s near it with our referring to your phone. They definitely can’t tell me what train is near my high school if I just gave them the neighborhood. They aren’t natives. And they would have to be here 25-30 years to get it.
Hipsters only really dominate two and half neighborhoods. All of Greenpoint and Williamsburg and a good chunk of Bushwhick. In the gentrified hoods they are around but haven’t changed the landscape. No bike lanes or vegan shops. Just regular New York blue collar life with the oddball renovated brownstone that sticks out like shit in snow.
Yet Brooklyn has more people than Philly. Natives like me are very much still around. But the pop culture (“Girls” for example) doesn’t focus on my side of Brooklyn, I went to Canarsie High, ran around East Flatbush over in Utica Ave going to Kings Plaza in Mill Basin on the B41 bus.
The hipsters aren’t going to this part of car centric Brooklyn where the trains don’t run. To them “that’s” Brooklyn. Everyone lives 2-5 blocks from a train. Cars are for the suburbanites. My mom’s owned three cars her whole life. Wouldn’t know how to use a metrocard for all the money in the world. People forget the amount of people who drive in New York is the same amount people the that live in all of LA.
I grew up on Cozine Ave, the Belt Parkway was five minutes from my door, by foot or bus it’s a ten-fifteen minute walk to the 3 train -a local at that.
That’s the real New York. To my east is Jamaica Bay out my bedroom window was JFK’s tower and John Gotti’s hood South Ozone Park, Queens.
The next conversation I had on this was with Hilliard Guess on his Screenwriters Rant Room, his guest on that episode spoke on New York has been “over shot” to that I stopped the show and wrote in to Twitter to explain how vast NYC is and for the budgets people get and fear of losing their jobs I guess they go with the same ol two step. And as George Clinton said -who wants to have sex in one position their whole life?”
I love John and Hilliard, so good company there. Thanks for such a thoughtful response. I think what's interesting here is that, from your explanation, John and Craig have demonstrated my point. They have an idea what an "authentic New Yorker" is, right? I'd suggest most Americans do. Then, there's the idea of it held by people in other countries (which is why, when they visit, they tend to focus on very specific areas only - not the "real" NY). Writers and other artists can either contradict these ideas, use them as a shortcut, subvert them, change them, and more. But they exist. The reader/viewer has those ideas whether we like it or not.
Know exactly what you mean lol but I don’t know whether to be a wee bit disappointed the gritty streets of Detroit weren’t as gritty as I imagined from the aforementioned movies.
I was born in Glasgow, Scotland, a beautiful city that has suffered badly from bad publicity :)
The reality is that most cities have beauty in them. Well...maybe not most. But a lot of them. People choose to overlook it because it doesn't comport to their biases, classism, whatever.
There’s beauty in the grittiness too
I think your take on this is quite accurate. You have to consider the audience's pre-suppositions and expectations, even if you are far away from any chance at producing your idea. One of the first features I wrote was in large part about overturning audience expectations of a certain location and its people. I have to say, regretfully, that I am one of those people whose image of Detroit was a poor one, though in my defense I believe this perception came more from knowing( as a history buff) of the city's decline since the 1950s, rather than due to salacious or misleading film, TV or media sources. It was quite a change to see your photos showing the "life" of the city, its people and its history!
Detroit still has a lot of areas that look like the apocalypse, but that's the result of a city of 2,000,000 people dropping under 1,000,000. But the renaissance has been real. If I were to ever return to the States to live (and I wouldn't, but if I did), I'd move to Detroit. I love everything about it today. I loved it as a kid, too, but you're ignorant as a kid. As an adult, I can enumerate its wonders and be grateful for how it's survived.
I love Detroit, but my experience with the city is very narrow.
I'm a big-time Red Wing fan. I even had season tickets for a season - even though I live in Toronto. (Hence why I only survived a season of the 7-8 hour drive per game).
There's a real sense of place I get when I visit that isn't replicated anywhere else.
Detroit *exists* in a way that feels defiantly alive despite the odds. There's a constant "fuck you, world" energy when you explore it. It's a city that feels like Rocky getting back up off the mat to me when everyone around him is shouting for him to stay down.
good advice and something i try to think about ... although probably not as clearly as you layout here
it reminds me of a time, years a go, when i submitted the exact same script to The Black List three times (i was trying to be scientific)
the story was set in a 'temperate rainforest' covering an isolated mountain range in SE Australia – these temperate rainforests (or what’s left of them) are known for their towering gumtrees (Mountain Ash) and enormous tree ferns ... so nothing like the usual picture which springs to mind when someone says the word, “Australia”
so you can imagine my disappointment when, under the heading LOCATIONS, two of the three evaluations simply jotted down the word, “Australia” – thankfully the third did a better job, writing, “rural Australia, forests, houses, roads, waterfall”
This made me chuckle. Ah, Americans and their ideas about Australia.
I enjoyed the photos, even if they seemed hypersaturated to my eye. But then agan I am colorblind. I always thought if I ever got into filmmaking I would need to give up control over the image to a cinematographer with more typical color vision lol
I like to add saturation to pics to reflect my emotional experience of what I'm photographing. But in this case, most of these photos aren't modified that much. Some, yes, but they're far from distortions of reality.
I can see that sort of emotional heightening in the saturation, kind of like a mushroom filter on reality
I don't know if you remember the great YouTube series "Every Frame A Painting" but one of my favorite videos is, "Vancouver Never Plays Itself" showing all of the different styles of film shot in Vancouver and lamenting how rare it was to see a version on screen that felt rooted in the experience of living in the city: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ojm74VGsZBU
I haven't seen this yet. Thanks.
Wonderful photos, Cole! Also, this essay has left my mind a bit of a blur. I don’t think I find location of particular importance when I engage with film or literature, in fact I think I would be hard pressed to tell you where a lot of stories I love are actually set. However, I’m now questioning whether I’m actually doing this subconsciously. Going to have to go away and have a bit of a think about it.
Great read, as always.
It's fascinating, right? How we insert ourselves into stories. It's part of why art is such a subjective experience, I'm sure.
Super insightful essay. And love the pics!
Thanks, Barbara. I'm glad you enjoyed them. I love Detroit!
So you love shoes…or know how to walk in other peoples shoes^^