NM on Film

COOK RANCH AND THE SILVERADO SET

- Bonanza Creek Ranch
- Cook Ranch and the Silverado Set
- The Cumbres & Toltec Scenic Railroad
- Eaves Movie Ranch
- White Sands National Monument
- Zia Pueblo
Anyone entranced by a beautifully made Western movie is no stranger to that rush of exhilaration evoked by scenes of lumbering wagon trains heading west on precarious rutted trails, or those unforgettable wide-angle shots of horsemen galloping across an endless expanse of range land, their dust drifting into the backdrop of jagged mountains and piercing sky. These days another sensation can surface, too: a peculiar sense of dread that this gorgeous open territory may soon be swept up by the forces currently diminishing open space in the American West.

Bill and Marian Cook find this a cause for concern. "The West as we know it is rapidly changing," said Cook, a fourth-generation Westerner who has spent his life working with livestock. He is convinced that preservation of open range land is essential, and the way to do so is to explore other means of land use without resorting to subdividing property (when tax situations become unwieldy, or range agriculture is no longer cost-effective). The Cooks have discovered an ideal partnership between the film industry and cattle growing.

"It started to dawn on me, when I saw how eager these movie people were, that I could re-create range land for an alternate use that had some economic value," Cook said. He's quick to point out that he and Marian "stumbled into" their first film project. Coincidentally, in 1984, Larry and Mark Kasdan and crew were out scouting the area by helicopter, hoping to find the most suitable place to build the town of Silverado for the movie of the same name. Then one unexpected day, the location manager for the film appeared at the Cooks' door.

"As I remember, he knocked on the door and said, 'We'd like to do a little shooting here.' " At that time they wanted to build only two to three structures, offering Cook a "casual number" as a location fee. "There wasn't any great motivation for me one way or another, but I said okay. It just grew from that into a big budget movie and the Silverado set was built," Cook recalled.

According to Marian, it is now the largest set of its kind in the world. However, it almost didn't survive. "After the movie was over," Cook said, "the Film Commission came to me and really pleaded for me to keep the set. I was going to burn it down."

Instead he waited through a slow period until another large-scale project, Lonesome Dove, came along in l988. The Silverado set was resourcefully dressed and filmed for towns in four different states, depending on the view from the streets - mountains or prairie or the Galisteo River. Lonesome Dove also made use of locations farther within the ranch, a trend continuing to this day. Marian points out that a major reason for this is the unobtrusive network of roads enabling companies to get to remote areas, where you'll find anything from zigzagging arroyos to the foreboding Cerro Pelon to treacherous deep-cut slate and granite canyons, essential elements of true-to-life Westerns.

Then there are those endless airy vistas unique to the Galisteo Basin, an openness reminding one that this is a big ranch, 20,000 acres in all. The Cooks rely on ranch residents Don and Trixie Pope to work with the many film productions. The Popes raised cattle on the ranch for years before getting involved with the filming activity. According to Cook, Don Pope has metamorphosed from a cattleman-farmer, reluctant to deal with Hollywood, to a production-savvy ranch manager ready to grade roads, wrangle livestock and pull stuck generators out of the mud with a log chain on a Caterpillar. Pope has learned what it takes - "It's costing them roughly $200,000 a day to film, so they can't let anything get in their way," he said.

Pope admits he was nervous at first. Aggressively protective of the land, he worried about people driving too fast, leaving gates open and taking shortcuts instead of ranch roads. "As Trixie and I got longer in this thing, we learned to let it go. Some of it is absolutely going to happen; it's part of the territory of making movies." He still worries about people getting lost, though. "You can't have 250 people who aren't used to being out in open range and not have somebody get lost." It's easy to take the wrong ranch road and get turned around - which is what happened to an actress who showed up at the Popes' home miles from the movie set. "We had a little grandma at our door. A real grandma, cute as a bug's ear and real excited," Pope said. "They'd been looking all over for her for two hours and were waiting the scene for her."

Daily ranch life brings its share of challenges and so does location filming. There's a spirited team at the Cook Ranch who've learned how to make a success out of both.