It speaks to the rich tradition of Penn State athletics that one of the most extraordinary sportsmen of his day – and to this day, the only NFL veteran ever to fight and defeat a world heavyweight boxing champion – today is all but unknown except to a few diehard fans. It took a chance remark overheard at a family wedding for me to learn that Steven Vincent Hamas, my great-uncle, had once been “a boxer.” What I learned after researching his story is that he was so much more than that.

A boomtown of factories and textile mills in the decades surrounding the first World War, Passaic, New Jersey had been a city of immigrants ever since its formation by Dutch settlers in the seventeenth century. Its polyglot culture and blue-collar ethos made Passaic an ideal location for Austro-Hungarian immigrant Andrew Hamas (HAY-mus) to pursue his American dream. Two of the virtues Andrew instilled in his seven children were Eastern Rite Catholicism and a passion for all things athletic. The vacant lot next to the Hamas Tavern on Third Street boasted Passaic’s first outdoor basketball hoop, and it was there that the Hamas boys – Michael, Steven, Andrew, George, and John – honed their games while challenging all comers.

Both Steve (born January 9, 1907) and his older brother Michael played on Passaic High’s storied “Wonder Teams” of 1919-1925 that won 159 straight games – a boys’ varsity record that stands to this day – with Mike averaging 31.1 points per game in a low-scoring era in which teams still jumped center-tap after every bucket. Mike went on to captain the Penn State basketball squad, but it was kid brother Steve who would well and truly put the Hamas clan on the national sporting map.

Steve followed Mike to Happy Valley, matriculating in the fall of 1925. A mathematical savant, Steve was a pre-med major with dreams of becoming a surgeon. But it was in sports that the 6-1, 190-pounder truly shined, earning 12 varsity letters – still a school record – in football, basketball, boxing, track, and lacrosse while winning Penn State’s inaugural Outstanding Athlete Award.

Steve later recounted his introduction to boxing to sportswriter Mike Gelos of the Passaic Herald News. After the 1926-27 basketball season had ended, boxing coach Leo Hauck pulled the strapping sophomore forward aside. The Penn State fighters were prepping for the Intercollegiate Boxing Association tournament in Syracuse and were in desperate need of a heavyweight. Might Steve be willing to go a few rounds with his Varsity Hall roommate Marty McAndrew, the intercollegiate light-heavyweight champ? “Figuring his roommate wouldn’t hit him too hard or too often, Hamas agreed,” Gelos recalled, “and managed to survive the sparring session. He thanked McAndrew for allowing him to stay vertical, to which his buddy replied, ‘Steve, I really tried to knock your block off.’”

Steve “Hurricane” Hamas won the collegiate heavyweight crown that year, pacing the Nittany Lions to Houck’s second national team title. Both would repeat as national champions in 1929, Steve’s senior season. Penn State would win two more national titles under Houck, in 1930 and 1932, but Steve Hamas by then had brought his unique blend of talents to an entirely different arena.

Hamas was back in Passaic after graduation, teaching and putting money aside for medical school when an intriguing opportunity presented itself. Edwin (Piggy) Simandl, a wholesale meat salesman from nearby Orange, had acquired franchise rights to the Duluth Eskimos of the fledgling National Football League and was assembling a squad for the 1929 season. Might the versatile Hamas, who’d just set a Penn State record by earning five varsity letters in his senior season, like to try the professional game?

The Orange (N.J.) Tornadoes made their NFL debut on September 29, 1929 before 9,000 mostly curious onlookers at Orange’s Knights of Columbus Stadium. With the hard-hitting Hamas at fullback, the Tornadoes battled Tim Mara’s New York Football Giants to a scoreless draw, the result sealed by Hamas’ game-saving tackle on a 55-yard Ray Flaherty interception return.

A shaggy forebear of today’s NFL, the league in 1929 was a roving carnival of cash-strapped owners and itinerant gridders bent on reliving their collegiate glories. Attendance was sparse, and stability elusive. The Giants of 1929, for example, had just merged with the Detroit Wolverines of 1928, one of three teams that had folded that offseason. Giants quarterback Benny Friedman, the former Michigan All-American, was the league’s highest-paid player not named Red Grange. He earned $750 per game.

With a respectable record of 3-5-4, the Tornadoes tied for sixth in the 12-team league even as Curly Lambeau’s 12-0-1 Green Bay Packers claimed their first NFL title. And while this would be Hamas’ only season of professional football, he got to stand toe-to-toe with such future NFL Hall of Famers as Friedman, Ernie Nevers of the Chicago Cardinals, and Jimmy Conzelman of the Providence Steam Roller. As for the Tornadoes, they would be sold after the 1930 season and, after passing through Cleveland (as the Indians) and Boston (as the Braves), would eventually become the Washington Redskins, now the Commanders.

With money still tight and the world economy in ruins, Steve Hamas, newly married to the former Katheryn Work, took stock of his prospects. Heavyweight champ Gene Tunney had retired from boxing in 1928, and Jack Sharkey had just lost the vacant title to German bruiser Max Schmeling. As a two-time national collegiate champion, Steve reasoned he at least could earn more in the ring than on the gridiron. He called Houck, his old college coach, who put him in touch with veteran fight manager Charley Harvey.

Fighting mostly in Newark, Hamas won his first seven professional bouts, five by knockout. He won his next nine on a West Coast swing before returning east to make his Madison Square Garden debut on May 15, 1931 in an undercard bout against Al Moro, scoring a second-round knockout. Nine more victories followed, giving him nineteen straight by knockout before finally going the distance against veteran Hans Birke at the Garden for his 27^th professional win.

Steve’s unblemished record, and the crushing left hook behind it, did not go unnoticed. His next fight, scheduled for January 15, 1932 at Madison Square Garden, would determine whether the newly-anointed “Passaic Pounder” was worthy of the nickname. Tommy Loughran, considered one of the greatest pure boxers of that or any era, had been world light-heavyweight champion with over a hundred professional victories to his credit, including unanimous decisions over James J. Braddock and Max Baer. A win over Loughran, twice named The Ring magazine’s Fighter of the Year, would catapult Steve Hamas from fistic obscurity into the ranks of the heavyweight elite.

Hamas’ second-round upset of Loughran, followed by a career-ending knockout of Armand Emanuel, put his record at 29-0. He then suffered his first professional loss, on points, to the slick-boxing Lee Ramage for the California State heavyweight title. Serial rematches against Loughran (a win and two losses) and Ramage (two wins and a draw), plus a draw with Charley Masseria and a fourth-round KO of Benny Miller, set the stage for what would prove to be the high point of Steve’s boxing career.

Atop the heavyweight division, anarchy reigned. Schmeling had defended his title but once before losing it to Sharkey in June of 1932. Sharkey had, in turn, lost to Italian giant Primo Carnera the following year. Schmeling’s first attempt at a comeback had been thwarted by Baer. Sharkey, meanwhile, had fallen to Loughran. For Hamas, earning a title shot meant again besting one of these top-tier contenders. So when Charley Harvey reached an agreement with Schmeling’s manager Joe Jacobs for a February, 1934 bout in Philadelphia, Hamas prepared as never before.

Working with Newark trainer Al Thoma, Hamas spent hours sparring and studying film, dissecting the big German’s style. An effective counterpuncher, Schmeling relied on a straight right hand that he always held at the ready, high and tight to his chest. This short, powerful punch was the perfect counter to Hamas’ best weapon, the left hook. Always a cerebral fighter, Hamas settled on a strategy of fighting from a crouch to frustrate Schmeling and elude that powerful right.

Before a capacity crowd of 15,000 at Philadelphia’s Convention Hall on February 13, 1934, Hamas deployed that strategy to perfection, crouching and weaving and tattooing the former champion with stiff jabs to the face. By the ninth round he’d opened a gash over Schmeling’s left eye. Blind and bleeding and never able to unload, Max Schmeling, the 12-to-5 favorite, barely stayed upright through 12 punishing rounds to lose by unanimous decision.

Hamas had begun the 1934 campaign ranked ninth in the world. His win in Philadelphia landed him on the April cover of The Ring alongside the tagline “Schmeling’s Conqueror Now Heavyweight Contender.” Two months later, Baer beat Carnera for the title. In October, Hamas took a split decision off the dangerous Art Lasky at Madison Square Garden and entered 1935 right where he wanted to be: as the top-ranked contender for Baer’s world heavyweight crown.

Contracts with Madison Square Garden for the Hamas-Lasky fight guaranteed the winner a title shot against Baer. The fight, however, had proved controversial when a backhand blow by Lasky was penalized by referee Billy Cavanaugh. Although Lasky’s post-fight appeal was denied, the Garden’s all-powerful matchmaker, Jimmy Johnston, decreed a Hamas-Lasky rematch. That edict outraged Charley Harvey, who instead accepted a guaranteed $25,000 purse – roughly $500,000 in today’s dollars – offered by German promoter Walter Rothenburg if Hamas would travel to Hamburg for a rematch with Schmeling. In response, Johnston threatened suit to enjoin Hamas from ever again fighting stateside.

In retrospect, Harvey’s decision was, as The Ring’s Ted Carroll would later call it, “one of the most ruinous moves ever made by a fight manager.” Worse yet, Hamas had suffered an injury to his left elbow during training but, rather than risk the Schmeling purse and reprisal from Johnston, Harvey refused to postpone. Unable to spar, Hamas was limited to roadwork and limbering exercises – preparations that appeared lackadaisical to the sporting press and were mistaken for overconfidence. Meanwhile, with the Third Reich’s pride on the line, Rothenburg had constructed Hanseatic Hall, a 25,000-seat indoor arena – Europe’s largest – just for the fight.

On March 10, 1935, Hamas and Schmeling again met under the lights before a sellout crowd with both of their futures at stake. This time, however, after feeling a pop in his injured elbow during the third round, Hamas was all but defenseless against the German champion’s powerful right hand. He suffered six knockdowns in total, three in the sixth round alone, and would have no memory of the fight’s dramatic finale when, battling on instinct, he refused to go down under a terrible onslaught of punches.

The next day’s banner headline in the Philadelphia Record, SCHMELING STOPS HAMAS IN 9^TH ROUND, didn’t begin to capture the carnage. So savage was the beating he’d endured that Hamas would spend 10 days in a Berlin hospital, partially paralyzed and seeing double. Katheryn, who generally shunned her husband’s fights but who’d traveled to Hamburg for this one, had seen enough – an assessment with which Hamas reluctantly agreed. And while Hamas-Schmeling II was to be the Passaic Pounder’s last bout, its fallout would continue to reverberate for years to come, on both sides of the Atlantic.

As fate would have it, neither Schmeling nor Lasky got the coveted title shot against Baer. Instead that honor fell to Braddock, a 10-to-1 underdog whom history would immortalize as the “Cinderella Man” for his hardscrabble past and his stunning upset victory.

In Germany, meanwhile, trouble was brewing for Schmeling. At the conclusion of the Hamas fight, as 25,000 delirious fans sang the Deutschlandied, Joe Jacobs, Schmeling’s Jewish manager, could clearly be seen with his arm outstretched, giving the Nazi salute. Schmeling was promptly summoned to the office of Nazi Reichssportführer Hans von Tschammer, who ordered the fighter to sever all ties with Jacobs, which Schmeling refused. While a principled stance, it was one for which Schmeling nearly paid with his life when, unlike other prominent German artists, actors, and athletes, he was later drafted and sent to the front lines during World War II.

Schmeling’s 1935 win over Hamas had revived the 30-year-old German’s hope of recapturing the heavyweight crown now held by Braddock. To get there, however, he would first have to face boxing’s newest sensation, an unbeaten 21-year-old Detroit heavyweight named Joe Louis. “Steve Hamas had driven me crazy in Philadelphia by using an outstanding eye to pull away from my right,” Schmeling would write in his 1977 autobiography. “Even though I hit him countless times, the effect of the punches was diminished. So I had to use a similar move to try to neutralize some of the deadly impact of the Brown Bomber’s powerful rights.” Ripping that page from the Hamas playbook, Schmeling crouched and jabbed and generally frustrated Louis for eleven tactical rounds before scoring a stunning 12th-round knockout at Yankee Stadium on June 19, 1936, ending Louis’ unbeaten streak at 24. In their 1938 rematch, Louis turned the tables on Schmeling with a first-round knockout in what remains the most famous bout in all boxing history.

Steve Hamas never made it to medical school. He did, however, serve his country with honor as a major in the Army Air Corps during the Second World War before becoming the mayor of Wallington, N.J. and being inducted into the New Jersey Boxing Hall of Fame. He also became an outspoken critic of boxing. “The referee can’t always tell how bad a man is hurt,” he told the Philadelphia Inquirer in 1957. “A man can take a brutal beating in the ring and perhaps be injured for life.”

In his later years, Hamas would author an unpublished novel, Glorious Dissipation, and would return to the Penn State campus with his collie dog Laddie to perform mathematical demonstrations. Steven Hamas III recalls that his grandfather would “play games with the audience that his dog could multiply faster than they could. Someone would choose any number times any number and before the students could use the hand crank on their comptometers, he would have Laddie whisper the answer, leaving them dumbfounded.”

With a career record of 35-4-2, including 27 by knockout, Hamas could boast of having beaten the only three fighters – Loughran, Ramage, and Schmeling – who’d ever beaten him. But even the Passaic Pounder was overmatched against Guillain-Barré Syndrome, which claimed Penn State’s all-time letterman on October 10, 1974. He was survived by Katheryn, and by their children, Steven, Jr. and Katheryn Ann.

So yes, my great-uncle was a boxer. He was also a pioneer, a polymath, and a patriot who carried the hopes of a nation across the Atlantic to battle Nazi Germany by proxy more than a year ahead of the 1936 Berlin Olympiad. For all these reasons, Steve Hamas should be remembered, and perhaps even revered, as one of the greatest Nittany Lions.

This article by Chuck Greaves first appeared in the March/April 2019 issue of Penn Stater, the official alumni magazine of Penn State University.

My father, like nearly all of Levittown’s original homeowners, was a veteran. An Army sergeant, he returned stateside from the European theater with a flat-top crewcut that he wore, graying but somehow never thinning, until his death in 1997. Mom too was a vet; a telephone operator who’d joined the Women’s Army Corps less out of patriotic fervor than a longing to see the world beyond her native Scarsdale. They met in Italy and married there before returning together to New York at war’s end. Then, with $90 down and a G.I. Bill mortgage, they purchased my childhood home on Tallow Lane in 1947 for the princely sum of $7,000.

Dad found work at Burroughs Corporation, now known as Unisys, redeploying skills he’d learned at war to the repair of civilian business machines – analog precursors to today’s mainframe computers. His job entailed leaving home every morning at 9:00 with a black leather satchel of specialized tools that he carried to various client locations throughout Long Island. More a mechanic than a programmer, he would eventually fall victim to a technological revolution that left him surplus to the company’s needs by his middle fifties, when he accepted early retirement.

Burroughs wasn’t Dad’s only job. With a wife and six eventual children to support, he augmented his modest salary by officiating local sporting events. This meant high school football on fall weekends, basketball in winter, and fast-pitch softball in the spring and summer months. His winter routine, as I came to witness it, involved working until 5:00, presiding over the family dinner table until 6:00, grabbing a quick nap, then heading off in his referee’s uniform. Other seasons meant different routines, different outfits – striped shirt, blue shirt, mask and chest protector. The Levittown of my childhood was overwhelmingly white and working-class, and its Little League was the world’s largest. Ours was a sports-centric family living in a labyrinth of suburban streets teeming with the like-minded progeny of other veterans, all of us striving and scrapping at ground zero of what would come to be known as the American Baby Boom.

I graduated high school in 1974, just as a different war was winding to a different conclusion and a countercultural ethos was penetrating even Levittown’s fiercely Republican conservatism. This, combined with his early retirement and an emptying nest, seemed to disorient my father in a way that left him diminished. He spent more time at the American Legion post or in front of the television. He developed a paunch, drank more beer, became quicker to anger. Behind our open hands, his children whispered snide comparisons to television’s Archie Bunker.

Like my brothers before me, I played basketball in high school, and in that bygone era, the drinking age in New York State was only eighteen. This meant rowdy post-game parties at the homes of friends or teammates whose parents were either extraordinarily tolerant or, more likely, gone for the weekend. Courtship was in the air, and fistfights were not uncommon. Then on summer evenings, with school in recess, our same restive crowd would congregate in the high school bleachers, or at the village green, sipping beer or, in a nod to the zeitgeist, smoking a little weed. There were, suffice it to say, many an evening when I’d return home to Tallow Lane in the wee hours, decidedly worse for drink.

And there my old man would be waiting. Not just sometimes, but always, no matter the season and no matter the hour; a slipper-shod Cerberus parked in his leather recliner with a cigarette in one hand and a Schaefer beer in the other, the scene invariably suffused in the bluish glow of the television. There was no escaping him, or the nightly ritual of feigned sobriety required to gain passage through the living room to the staircase leading to my upstairs bedroom. It was a test I dreaded but, with frequent repetition, had come to master.

Or so I’d thought. It was decades later, after both our parents had passed, that I shared this memory with my siblings at a family gathering. Something to the effect that Dad must’ve been a real insomniac because no matter the hour, I’d always come home to find him watching television. To which my sister replied, “Did it ever occur to you that he was waiting up for you, to be sure you made it home safely?”

I’m older now than my father was then, and my admiration for the man grows with each passing year. His own education preempted by war, Dad nonetheless lived to see all six of his children graduate college. While the eight of us shared a three-bedroom shoebox with a single bathroom, we never wanted for food or clothing, sundries or schoolbooks. Because Mom never did learn to drive, Dad’s additional responsibilities included transportation, shopping, and running the manifold errands our bursting household required, all in a used Chrysler he nurtured into antiquity with determination and elbow grease.

And of course, watching over us.

Dad was taciturn by nature. Like many of his cohort, he never spoke of his wartime service. He rarely complained or lectured. He parented instead by example, and from my father’s example I learned, even decades after his death, that the true measure of a man lies not in words but in deeds, and that the tougher the going, the more profound even the smallest of deeds can be.

We may not have been wealthy, but I couldn’t have wished for a richer inheritance.

The science of fingerprinting was pioneered by Sir Francis Galton, a British anthropologist who, beginning in 1888, published a series of monographs establishing that each individual’s prints are unique and that they remain so, unchanged, over a lifetime. Recognizing the significance of Galton’s research, Scotland Yard began collecting and compiling the fingerprints of arrestees for use in criminal investigations and prosecutions, and by the dawn of the twentieth century fingerprinting had become commonplace, both in policing and in the public’s understanding of police procedure.

Roughly a century after Galton’s pioneering research, DNA evidence was first employed in a rape and double-murder investigation in Leicester, England in 1986, both to exonerate the 17-year-old suspect already in custody, and later to identify and convict the actual killer. Subsequent advances in the extraordinary, revolutionary field of forensic genetics have allowed crime-scene investigators to extract and analyze genetic material from even the slightest biological trace evidence, and thereby to identify or exclude suspects using what amounts to their individual “genetic bar-codes.”

Today, perpetrators know better than to leave their fingerprints or their DNA at the scene of a crime, and crime writers know to use or manipulate such evidence in our stories. Thus our fictional burglars wear gloves, and our fictional killers wipe prints from their murder weapons, and our fictional CSI investigators probe and comb for minute bits of hair and blood evidence.

To simply ignore fingerprint or DNA evidence in our fiction would be to commit authorial malpractice. Yet that is precisely what many crime writers are doing when it comes to one of the latest and potentially most consequential items in the modern law enforcement tool box.

In October of 2021, I spoke at a crime convention in Crested Butte, Colorado and asked a roomful of veteran and aspiring mystery writers if they’d ever heard of Sensorvault. Not a single hand went up. Which didn’t surprise me, given the number of novels I’d been reading in which, had Sensorvault been employed, the story would have ended at around page 10.

Sensorvault was born in 2009, when Google began using GPS and related technologies to track the geo-location of every Android-based mobile device on earth (and every non-Android device, such as iPhones, that use the Google search engine, or a Google app like Maps) and store that information in a searchable database. The Sensorvault database thus contains precise historical location data for literally hundreds of millions of mobile devices worldwide, making it a treasure-trove for criminal investigators seeking to learn, for example, who may have been at or near a particular crime scene on or around a particular date or time. Moreover, the information stored in Sensorvault is readily available to law enforcement agencies via court-issued “geofence warrants” that are rapidly becoming routine tools in criminal investigation. According to Google, it received fewer than a thousand geofence warrants in 2018; by 2020, that number had ballooned to over 11,500.

Geofence warrants specify a defined geographic area – a particular house, for example, or even a city block – and a limited time period. Searching Sensorvault, Google then identifies any and all mobile devices present at the relevant time and place and codes them with anonymous ID numbers. If the requesting agency can show probable cause, the court will then order Google to reveal the users’ identities. Thus geofence warrants are sometimes called “reverse-location warrants” in that, unlike a typical search warrant, the process begins not with a particular suspect but rather works backward from a place and time to identify possible suspects. Moreover, once a particular mobile device has been identified, Sensorvault can continue tracking its movements outside the original geo-fence coordinates.

Geofence warrants are potential game-changers in criminal investigation, not unlike fingerprint and DNA evidence before them. And like those earlier innovations, the availability of geofence warrants and the Sensorvault database must be considered when plotting a credible crime story. For want of a less self-serving example, I’ll refer readers to my just-released legal thriller The Chimera Club, in which a geofence warrant and forensic genetics both are employed, and manipulated, along the serpentine path to catching a killer.

The upshot here is that we as crime writers must take a hard look at our works in progress. Is there a scene in which resort to a geofence warrant might help identify the killer? If so, are the police or FBI accessing Sensorvault? If not, then why not? We’re quickly reaching the point at which readers will be asking these very questions, and we as savvy storytellers had better have the answers baked into our novels or else risk the distinctive clunking sound of a tossed book hitting a reader’s wall.

Mancos, Colorado is about as far from Hollywood as you can get without a passport, and screenwriting gigs for 65-year-old novices are about as common as sled dogs on Sunset Boulevard.  Yet October of 2020 somehow found me on a Mancos film set watching acclaimed television director Felix Alcalá (ER, Breaking Bad, The Good Wife, Madam Secretary, etc.) guide an ensemble cast of talented actors through a script I’d written for the pilot episode of Badwater, a dramatic television series I’d created and set in the fictional Four Corners town of Goodwater, Colorado.

If you’ve ever aspired to write for the screen, then the Badwater origin story might be of some interest to you – not as a “how-to” tutorial so much as a “why-the-heck-not?” inspirational yarn in which naïve perseverance confronts the gravitational forces of convention, and somehow manages to fly.

This particular story began in September of 2019, when Felix and I were introduced by a mutual friend, the painter and sculptor (and Cowgirl Hall of Fame member) Veryl Goodnight, at her Mancos art studio.  Like me, Felix was a relative newcomer to the Four Corners region, prompting Veryl to exclaim, in that way she does, “Chuck’s a writer!  And Felix is a director!  You two should know each other!”

Over dinner the following week, Felix and I did get to know each other, sharing tales of triumph and tribulation in our respective creative spheres.  He at the time had a project in development with a Hollywood production company, and the attendant bureaucracies were driving him to distraction.  “I’ll end up owning ten percent of a show I no longer recognize,” he lamented, or words to that effect.  We decided, by the time our check had arrived, both to work on something together and to do so in such a way as to retain creative control and ownership of the resulting product.

Fortunately for us, we had complementary skill sets.  I was a versatile writer of both fiction (genre and literary) and nonfiction, and, as a retired lawyer, was undaunted by the complexities of the legal labyrinth we were about to enter, while Felix, a 40-year veteran of the entertainment industry, had the experience and connections needed to convert my ideas and words into celluloid.

We agreed on an overarching theme for whatever it was we were about to create; namely, that of moral ambiguity.  As in, if fate placed you in an untenable position, how far would you go to extricate yourself, and would the means you were forced to employ justify the ends?  So with that conceptual dilemma as my polestar, I set out to draft what’s called a “treatment,” or brief (in this case, 15-page) synopsis of the television series taking shape in my head, including its setting, its main characters, and its central conflicts.  The treatment I wrote for Badwater also included a fairly detailed outline of the pilot episode, plus a “series bible” mapping out each of the first season’s six proposed episodes.

By spring of 2020 the global COVID-19 pandemic had arrived, which Felix and I viewed both as an obstacle and an opportunity, the latter because worldwide television production had effectively shut down, clearing the field for our little venture.  Cast and crew that might not otherwise have been available to us suddenly were, and while New York and Los Angeles were blossoming into COVID-19 hot-spots, our rural Colorado county was boasting a less-than 1% positivity rate, making it one of the safest U.S. locations in which to film.

The Badwater Felix and I envisioned would be equal parts rural noir and contemporary Western.  I completed my initial draft of the pilot-episode script – a first for me – in early summer and held my breath while awaiting Felix’s verdict.  He, meanwhile, seeking a critical second opinion, shared it with a veteran film-and-television screenwriter who (in an email Felix would later show me) wrote:

“Just finished reading the Badwater script and I must say – it’s one of the best pilot scripts that I’ve read in a very long time.  I didn’t see the writer’s name on any of the pages, but whoever he is, he’s got an amazing sense of drama and cinematic timing.  I felt like I was watching it, not reading it.  To that end, the writing was spectacular: tight, conclusive, unpredictable – and sharp as hell.  I wish I could offer a note or two, but I tend to believe in this business you don’t try to fix what isn’t broken.”

Thus (mutually) reassured, we donned our co-producer hats, rolled up our sleeves, and focused on some of the more mundane aspects of our undertaking, which included creating a Colorado production company, schmoozing potential investors, complying with state and federal securities laws and regulations, securing copyrights and related IP, qualifying our company (which we’d named Luz de Luna Productions, LLP) as both a SAG-AFTRA and DGA signatory company, and pursuing a production incentive rebate from Colorado’s Office of Film, Television, and Media.  While I was handling those chores, Felix was spearheading the pre-production side of the ledger with the help of his daughter Kristin, who would soon become our line producer once her regular gig on Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm went on COVID-induced hiatus.

Our plan was always to hire professional actors for the dozen or so main roles in the ensemble cast while employing local actors – including many Indigenous tribal members – for the remaining roles to the extent possible.  We also calculated that the script would require approximately 100 background actors, all of whom, because ours was to be a union production, would command SAG-AFTRA minimum-scale wages.  We advertised an open casting call in Mancos in mid-August and were delighted when over 300 aspiring thespians, masked and socially-distanced, braved multi-hour lines in the broiling heat to audition.  Our L.A. casting director, meanwhile, was forwarding us audition tapes for the professional roles, and by late September we had our entire cast in place and under contract.

I’ll pause here for a moment to reflect on the tumultuous nature of what we’d undertaken.  By this point Felix and I were like a pair of those plate-spinners on the old Ed Sullivan show, balancing casting, location scouting, budgeting, crew, pre-production, union and guild negotiations, contracts, permitting, COVID-19 protocols, bookkeeping, banking, insurance, payroll, scheduling, transportation, catering, housing, and myriad other responsibilities, and trying to prevent any one of them from hitting the floor and shattering the dream we’d nurtured from concept to the threshold of reality.  There were days when I found myself sitting in my home office with ten open tabs on my computer and two telephone conversations going at once, bandying terminology I was only just learning to address issues I could never in my wildest dreams have anticipated – and all with an eye on the calendar, since we would need to film before winter snows arrived, ideally during the peak fall colors of Colorado autumn.

Okay, you say, but what about financing?  Doesn’t an episode of quality television generally cost on the order of $5 million to produce?  Suffice it to say that after a few early missteps and setbacks, we were able to raise roughly $600K in investment capital which, augmented by Colorado’s 20% incentive rebate for in-state production expenditures, yielded a budget that, if scrupulously husbanded, might just get us (crawling, gasping) over the finish line, thanks largely to the many good people who’d agreed to work on Badwater for minimum scale as personal favors to Felix.

That last statement is no small thing.  The talent and expertise we were able to assemble for our little indy venture in southwestern Colorado – the empty Mancos Opera House served as our production headquarters – were nothing short of astonishing.  Consider, for example, our prop master, whose truck arrived directly from the set of Top Gun: Maverick, or our editor, with over 70 feature film and television credits to his resume.  In the spirit of Mickey Rooney, this was very much a “Hey, kids!  Let’s put on a show!” fantasy that was, by an admixture of elbow grease and Tinseltown fairy dust, actually coming to fruition.

Principal photography began on October 16 and wrapped on October 26.  The actors acted, the crew crewed, and but for one Covid-19 false-positive test result (out of the 522 tests we administered to our troupe of 50+), it all came off without a hitch.  Our actors, who had assembled from both coasts, gelled into a tight unit of dedicated professionals who bared their souls on every take.  We filmed 78 scenes in nine days, in settings as varied as a courtroom, a jail cell, a honky-tonk bar (where a live local band performed a song I’d written for the scene), a schoolhouse, a newspaper office, a car dealership, and literally dozens of rugged outdoor locations, both daytime and night.  And as Badwater’s screenwriter and co-producer, I got to experience the entire production first-hand, from the bleary 5:00 a.m. crew calls (“Safety meeting in five minutes!”) to the exhausted late-night wraps, all with a script supervisor trailing in my wake.

The post-production process – primarily editing – lasted into early 2021, and in February I got my first look at the first-draft pilot episode of Badwater on DVD.  That experience was akin to that first time you held an advance reading copy of your debut novel combined with the first time you heard it performed on audiotape – exhilarating, humbling, and wondrous.  Felix and I had delivered a primetime-quality television episode on schedule and under budget, and we’d met or exceeded every goal we’d set for ourselves in terms of compelling and thoughtful storytelling.

All of which, of course, is but prelude to the even more challenging task ahead of us – finding a distribution home for Badwater’s first season.  The commercial market for television, still in flux, has splintered into three general categories – broadcast, cable, and digital/streaming.  Given Badwater’s adult themes and language, we know broadcast television is a nonstarter.  As for cable v. digital/streaming, we recognize that both will involve surrendering some degree of creative control over the baby we’ve birthed on our own, at home, but such is the world we aspire to enter.

I hope to share that next chapter of this story with you in a future post, around a different campfire.  Until then, watch this space.