Among the many large, beautiful, well run ranches we scouted for the US section of the film, the Four Sixes stood out - and they were actually enthusiastic about us shooting there. We assured them that we would disrupt their work completely, ask them to do things over and over again for no apparent reason, and generally be a huge nuisance. But they persisted. Perhaps they didn't know what they were getting themselves into.
The ranch headquarters is at the edge of the town of Guthrie, population 200. There are no hotels there, so we imported a camp of 25 or so trailers. These were not movie-star double-wides, but moderately serviceable units with mostly working showers and occasionally working air conditioning to fend off the 100-degree Texas summer. Of course, when you put a group of trailers together, you pool their tornado magnetism. More on that later.
In the trailer camp, dubbed Greywater Gulch, we also set up our mess tent. Because we'd be working "split days," shooting early morning and late afternoon for the best light, we had a strange meal schedule: breakfast at 4:30 AM, lunch at 10:30 AM, a second lunch at 3:30 PM, and dinner at 9:30 PM; a few hours sleep and do it all over again. Most of the crew and some of the cowboys also slept during the mid-day break. But for Scotty and his crew of three caterers, there was no rest for the weary.
In addition to the trailers, we had a few more crew staying in outbuildings around ranch headquarters. Add to that the cowboys, who soon found out that Scotty had a seemingly endless supply of good food, cold beer and ice cream (who knew that cowboys love ice cream?), and the headcount for meals was usually 50 plus. Everyone gained weight.
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