‘The Kid’ extends Santa Fe’s star turn
TV, movie productions spent record $145 million in area in last fiscal year
The Kid is back in Santa Fe. A Western movie starring Dane DeHaan as the infamous gunslinger is scheduled to begin production next week, the latest entry in another busy film-production high season for the Santa Fe area, which saw a record level of production spending during the past fiscal year.
The feature film gets underway not long after the Santa Fe Film Office provided a report to the City Council showing film production spending in the area has more than doubled, the latest blockbuster number to be trumpeted amid New Mexico’s yearslong upswing in movie business.
This Billy the Kid-centric feature setting up camp in the state capital would seem appropriate. It’s a flick about one of the West’s great figures shooting in a locale increasingly known as a hot spot for Western-genre filmmaking. Santa Fe is a city in which the real-life outlaw had a brief stint in jail, to boot.
According to Hollywood news site Deadline, the new film, titled simply The Kid, will follow a kid — though not specifically The Kid.
Jake Schur will star as a boy called Rio whose sister has been kidnapped.
Deadline reported The Kid will depict
the Billy the Kid saga and his showdown with Sheriff Pat Garrett through Rio’s eyes.
Film and television productions — including the firefighting epic Only the Brave, the Christian Bale-starring Western Hostiles, premier miniseries Waco and Godless as well as Netflix fan favorite Longmire — spent about $145 million in the area in the most recent fiscal year. That was up from $70 million the year before.
The production overview came as the joint city-county film office secured another year of funding — $150,000 each from city and county governments.
Eric Witt, the film office director, said the agency did not recruit all of the projects that shot scenes in the area during the past year.
But his two-person agency provided day-to-day logistical assistance that he said film productions had long sought in Santa Fe.
“Before, everything was confused,” Witt said. “Where productions get permits, how they find vendors, locations — there was conflicting information and in some cases wrong information.” A Santa Fe-centric film office was a signal to the industry that the area had its act together for attracting and accommodating film business, Witt said.
The New Mexico Film Office, based in Santa Fe, primarily handles producers’ questions about the state’s tax incentive programs, Witt said, and will hand off production management to a full-service local office where one is available — Albuquerque and Las Cruces being others in the state.
Though his report to the council did warn soundstage facilities would have to expand if Santa Fe is to attract even more film activity in the future, Witt said the past year’s level of production represented the maximum of what the area could sustain.
The Kid, currently in pre-production and expected to shoot in November, will be directed by actor Vincent D’Onofrio, perhaps best known for his roles in Full Metal Jacket and Men in Black. It will be D’Onofrio’s feature directorial debut.
Academy Award-nominee Ethan Hawke will star as well.
Hawke’s role has not yet been specified, though he might be cast as Garrett, the Lincoln County lawman who shot down Billy the Kid in a Fort Sumner home in 1881.
DeHaan, 31, recently starred in Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets.
Henry McCarty, the outlaw known best as Billy the Kid, remains a larger-than-life figure in the romantic annals of the Wild West. A favorite alias was William H. Bonney.
His travails in the New Mexico Territory in particular serve as inspiration to filmmakers, authors and history buffs.
An 1880 portrait of the Kid made in a Fort Sumner saloon sold at auction for $2.3 million in 2011. And Kid memorabilia hunters continue to search for a pair of suspenders believed to have been worn by the Kid when he posed for a photograph in New Mexico in 1878.
The Kid has been featured in pictures plenty, too, portrayed by Paul Newman (The Left Handed Gun), Val Kilmer (Billy the Kid) and Emilio Estevez (Young Guns), among many others.
The Kid represents the latest Western, modern or otherwise, to film in Santa Fe and surrounding areas, that have leveraged the state’s tax incentives for film productions.
Of recent note are the Coen brothers’ highly anticipated Western anthology The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, currently filming in the region; Hostiles, which shot in Santa Fe last summer; and Godless, a Netflix miniseries starring Jeff Daniels.