Before Breaking Bad: New Mexico on Film

How New Mexico went from a legendary movie location to a major production center, and the tiny independent film made during that transition.

Today, New Mexico is inseparable from images of Albuquerque, Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul, and a thriving film and television industry. But New Mexico's relationship with filmmaking began more than a century before Walter White ever stepped into an Albuquerque car wash.

I came to New Mexico as an independent filmmaker during a very different moment. I made Lost in New Mexico on a tiny budget, at a time when the state was beginning to transform itself from a place where Hollywood came to shoot into a place that actively competed for film production. Looking back now, I can see I was working right at the hinge point of that transition, though I did not know it at the time.

New Mexico Was a Movie Location Long Before Breaking Bad

New Mexico's relationship with the movies is almost as old as the movies themselves. In 1898, Thomas Edison and a film crew traveled by train to Isleta Pueblo, just south of Albuquerque, and shot a fifty-second actuality called Indian Day School. It shows a line of Native American children filing in and out of a one-room schoolhouse, and it is generally regarded as the first film shot on location in New Mexico Territory, more than a decade before statehood.

The territory did not stay a novelty for long. By the early and mid-1910s, the Selig Polyscope Company had set up something close to a working studio in Las Vegas, New Mexico, and its biggest star, Tom Mix, made dozens of short Westerns there, contemporary reports put the count at twenty to thirty films in a single year. Mix did his own stunts, cultivated a six-shooter-and-a-grin persona that would define the American cowboy on screen for decades, and helped set a template other filmmakers kept returning to: New Mexico as the visual language of the frontier.

That association held for most of the twentieth century. Billy the Kid became something like a house genre unto himself. A 1911 silent version was the first of more than seventy films eventually made about the outlaw, and a 1930 version directed by King Vidor was shot around Gallup. Through the 1940s and 1950s, films like The Grapes of Wrath (1940) and Ace in the Hole (1951), both filmed around Gallup, kept the state's mesas and small towns in front of national audiences.

For decades, the image of New Mexico onscreen was largely the image of the American frontier: horses, dusty roads, ranches, deserts, mountains, and small towns. The state had become part of Hollywood's visual language long before it became part of Hollywood's production infrastructure.

Why Did Filmmakers Come to New Mexico?

Ask anyone who has scouted locations in New Mexico and the first answer is geography. Within a relatively short drive, a filmmaker can find desert, mountains, plains, forest, ranch country, pueblo architecture, and Spanish colonial towns. That range gave New Mexico an unusual ability to stand in for other places entirely, without a production ever leaving the state.

The second answer is light. The Southwest offers the kind of intense sun, dry air, and open sky that photographs distinctively, the look that makes a Western feel like a Western before a horse ever enters the frame. Cinematographers have chased that light in New Mexico since Tom Mix's era.

But scenery alone does not build a film industry. A state can be a spectacular place to shoot while capturing very little of the money a production actually spends: crew payroll, equipment rentals, hotel rooms, catering, lumber and hardware for sets. For most of the twentieth century, New Mexico was mainly living on the first model, productions arrived, shot the landscape, and left. The important change came when the state started trying to keep more of that spending at home.

From Film Location to Film Industry

There is a real difference between being a place where a movie is filmed and being a place where movies are made. In the first model, a production flies in, shoots its exteriors, and flies back out, taking most of its budget with it. In the second, productions hire local crews, rent local equipment, use local facilities, and put money into an ecosystem that survives after that particular production wraps.

New Mexico spent the final decades of the twentieth century inching toward the second model. Silverado (1985), Young Guns (1988), and The Milagro Beanfield War (1988), the last shot largely in the village of Truchas, kept the state working steadily through the 1980s, and Terminator 2: Judgment Day used Santa Fe locations in 1991. Governors Bruce King, Gary Johnson, and Bill Richardson are all credited with helping build the political groundwork that eventually turned that steady work into a deliberate industrial strategy, one built around tax incentives.

The Early Incentive Years

New Mexico's film incentive is written directly into state law as the Film Production Tax Credit Act, and its legislative history is public record. The Legislature created the original credit in 2002, through Laws 2002, Chapter 36, Section 1, codified as NMSA 1978 Section 7-2F-1, at an initial rate of fifteen percent of qualified direct production expenditures made in the state. The following year, Laws 2003, Chapter 127 added the Act's definitions section and rounded the law into the form that would govern the program for its first several years. That made New Mexico one of the first states in the country to compete for Hollywood productions with a tax incentive rather than scenery alone, years ahead of the wave of state incentive programs that followed over the next decade.

For an independent filmmaker, an incentive is not an abstract line in an economic development report. It can be the difference between a production happening and a production staying on paper. A rebate on production spending turns part of the budget back into usable resources, whether that means an extra shooting day, a better camera package, or simply enough cash flow to get through post-production.

The state's ambitions went beyond luring any single movie. Every production that came through, however small, added to a pool of experienced crew, equipment vendors, and local production companies, the kind of infrastructure that makes the next production easier to bring in. That compounding effect is the whole logic behind an incentive program, and it is also, as it turned out, the environment my own film landed in.

Lost in New Mexico: The Pivot Year

My own experience of that transition came through Lost in New Mexico, released under its original title Susan Hero, a project I wrote, produced, and directed through Camerado between 2003 and 2004, in the earliest years of the state's new incentive program. It is a multicultural, science-fiction road movie: a woman named Susan, desperate to clone her deceased daughter, sets out across the Southwest with her undocumented companion, Javier Apollinaire, in search of a maverick animal-cloning expert who claims he can bring the child back. The film premiered on the festival circuit in 2007 and reached wider release in 2009.

It was not a major Hollywood production. The budget was tiny by industry standards, *, and I received a rebate under the state's incentive program during its infancy. Looking back, that is one of the more interesting things about it. I was participating in a state strategy that was helping change New Mexico's relationship with film production, even though at the time I was simply trying to get my own movie made.

I chose New Mexico partly because it was familiar ground. I had lived in the state before, and returning to shoot there put me back in a place I already understood. * The production moved through Albuquerque, Laguna Pueblo, and Mountainair, a spread that let a very small crew access desert, pueblo, and small-town settings without traveling far between them, and the incentive environment made the economics workable for a production of our scale.

This was filmmaking at a very different scale from the productions that would later make New Mexico internationally famous. We were working with *, moving between those three locations and solving the kind of problems that come with making a feature on a very limited budget.