Back in college, one of my intrepid super-8 filmmaking friends, Kirk Mathison and I embarked on filming a western.... in Minnesota. We shot it at the sand and gravel pits on the southern side of Edina, the suburb where we lived. It was arid enough in mid-July, with lots of sand and scrub grass but without horses or an old western town the story was about a good guy and a bad guy hunting each other under the unforgiving sun, sans modes of transportation. The film turned out pretty well, considering, and that was that.
Jump ahead to 1995. I was working at Warner Bros. in Burbank, CA and one day, during my lunch break I fired up my super-8 camera and shot a bunch of footage (complete with horses!) in the studio's old western town located on their back lot. Little shots to add production value and scale to Kirk and my homespun western. One new shot featured the above WANTED poster of Kirk.
The end result is a shining example of irony -- what started as a genre film, shot almost entirely in a Minnepolis suburb, became a visual record of the WB western town... that was ultimately torn down to be replaced by, yes, a faux subruban neighborhood.
To view the film:
