Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1470106
1 8 8 3 | P E R S P E C T I V E 7 3 designing it. I started my career with the 1988 Lonesome Dove miniseries, about an epic journey from Texas to Montana, and now, approaching the end of my career, am doing the 1883 series about another epic journey from Texas to Montana. Not a bad pair of bookends. The starting point of Lonesome Dove was "a dried up little fart of a town on the banks of the Rio Grande," a wonderful set to design but much simpler than what Taylor envisioned. He wanted to start his epic journey "where the West begins," which, as declared by its city motto, is Fort Worth, Texas. He also had in mind a specifi c area of Fort Worth called Hell's Half Acre. Historically, around the show's 1883 time period, a million and a half Texas cattle were driven through Fort Worth and Hell's Half Acre was where cowboys went for saloons, dancehalls, gambling houses and prostitutes. Taylor is a purist when it comes to authenticity and I knew a big part of my mission was to accurately recreate the wild and wooly character of the place. The real Hell's Half Acre hasn't existed for a very long time (the Fort Worth Convention Center in downtown now sits on the site), but Taylor initially thought we could just adapt Fort Worth's historic Stockyards District to serve as our Hell's Half Acre. Location manager Mark Jarrett and I scouted the Stockyards and I quickly concluded that shooting there would be impractical—no, insane. The Stockyards is one of the biggest tourist attractions in Texas, second only to The Alamo in San Antonio. Twice each day, once in the morning and again in the afternoon, a herd of longhorn cattle is A. JAMES DUTTON ARRIVES IN HELL'S HALF ACRE. ILLUSTRATION BY KATHRYN YINGLING, IN PEN/INK AND WATERCOLOR.. B. THE STREET CLEARS AFTER A SHOOTING IN HELL'S HALF ACRE. PRODUCTION STILL. C. JAMES DUTTON ARRIVES AT THE LIVERY STABLE IN HELL'S HALF ACRE. PRODUCTION STILL. B C