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LMGI COMPASS | Fall 2018 • 43 Gerry Jones knew something was happening that was absolutely not supposed to be happening, and the proof was in the blind- ing "Klieg lights," as he called them, that lit up the sky above a certain home in Carefree, Arizona. The home was owned by Ross and Phoebe Slingman, and while the Slingman family was back east, Jones had agreed to keep an eye on the place. "The Slingmans were quite proud of it," said Jones, and possibly thrilled that a famous director was to lease the house in their absence. "Ross wrote a strict lease that called for no filming or photography of any kind," and the would-be tenant agreed. The lessee, Orson Welles, was just there for a casual respite—a des- ert getaway to relax and contemplate his memoirs. That was the official story. But in fact, Welles was there to film pivotal scenes from his last opus, The Other Side of the Wind. And little did Jones know that this was Welles's modus operandi. Rent a home. Shoot a movie in it. Rent another home. Ditto. Bev- erly Hills, Strasbourg, Malaga, and now, inexplicably, Carefree. In Wind, the Slingman home would double as the ranch of director Jake Hannaford, played by a Hemingway-esque John Huston. Jones knew the home well. He had designed and built it, care- fully bridging the house over an arroyo between the granite out- croppings of Black Mountain. Memorialized as the desert home Michelangelo Antonioni famously blew up (several times) at the end of Zabriskie Point, it was also used as a location in Bob Hope's Cancel My Reservation. Jones fought in World War II, survived the battle at Okinawa, and entered post-war China as part of the 1st Marine Division. While there, he marveled at the monasteries of the Mahayana Buddhist monks, retreats that hewed to the mountainsides like 1,000-year- old stepping-stones. Twenty-five years later, Jones authored a paper entitled "Must We Destroy in Order to Build?" He an- swered the question by creating simple, innovative designs that seemed to have been lodged by time into the cracks and crev- ices of the mountain slopes ringing both Carefree and nearby Phoenix. He constructed his first two homes in Carefree, a town so starkly paradisiacal, that Gordon Lightfoot commemorated its main road with the song "Carefree Highway." With the Slingman house, Jones moved exactly one boulder. The rest he used as house-sized foundation stones. It was low-slung, modern; sited on 3½ acres and, at 2,400 square feet, modest by today's standards. Crew member Michael Ferris said, "It might not have been big, but it seemed huge due to the people in it." In the back was a pool, into which the Slingman kids would launch themselves from adjacent boulders. And it was next to this pool where my high school friend and future storyboard art- ist, animator and director, Larry Leker, was "shot" and took a dive into the deep end. Not once, but twice. It was the spring of 1974 and Larry and I had no intention of playing out an alternate opening to Sunset Boulevard. We wanted to be in an Orson Welles movie, and Larry's mother had heard that the director was shooting in Carefree at the Southwestern Studios (it was on this studio backlot where Antonioni's FX team recreated the Zabriskie house—known locally as "Boulder Reign"—and blew it apart while 17 cameras rolled). The New Dick Van Dyke Show had filmed there and that very wet spring, so had Orson Welles. The rain came down in buckets as Larry's brother negotiated the narrow, rise-and-fall roads that sluiced through the running washes of Carefree, but we found the studio in the dark and were neither gate checked or even noticed as we strolled in and joined half of the out-of-work actors of the Phoenix metro area. Orson was there, sitting in a chair, orchestrating a big scene centered on Huston, Peter Bogdanovich and Susan Strasberg. We had no idea what was going on. We were three of dozens of party-goers and cineaste-types flowing and circling about Stage 1 as cinema- tographer Gary Graver and his crew threw light onto celluloid that would not see the film gate of a commercial theater for more than 40 years. Wind would prove to be Welles's final feature film, soon to be cast adrift in a sea of legal contention and familial obstacles like an exiled Charles Foster Kane. We were extras, in the classic sense. Welles neither knew we were there, nor cared. People came and went, as we did, night after night. We were encouraged to bring cameras—look like real fans, journalists, film fanciers—in today's parlance, movie bitches. We hauled out a creaky Super 8 camera that J.J. Abrams ORSON WELLES and the other side of Carefree, Arizona Opposite page: Row one and two, photos courtesy of Michael Stringer; row three, photos one, two and four by Mike Ferris; row three, photo three by Jim Collette/LMGI; row four, photos one and two by Mike Ferris; row four, photos three and four by Jim Collette/LMGI.