Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes on Contributors
- Dedication
- Introduction
- Part 1 The Non-Westerns
- Part 2 The Westerns
- Part 2 Introduction
- 7 The Ranown Cycle: Budd Boetticher's “New Look” Western Programmers in 1950s Hollywood
- 8 Framings, Motifs, and Floating Poker Games in Seven Men from Now (1956)
- 9 The Ranown Style: Mapping Textual Echoes
- 10 You Were Married, But You Never Had a Wife: The Use of Space in the Westerns of Budd Boetticher
- 11 Ideology and Boetticher's Westerns from the Late 1950s
- 12 Outlaws Without a Cause: Generational Conflict in Budd Boetticher's Ranown Cycle
- 13 The Box in the Desert: Budd Boetticher, Breaking Bad, and the Twenty-first-century Western
- Index
13 - The Box in the Desert: Budd Boetticher, Breaking Bad, and the Twenty-first-century Western
from Part 2 - The Westerns
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 December 2017
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes on Contributors
- Dedication
- Introduction
- Part 1 The Non-Westerns
- Part 2 The Westerns
- Part 2 Introduction
- 7 The Ranown Cycle: Budd Boetticher's “New Look” Western Programmers in 1950s Hollywood
- 8 Framings, Motifs, and Floating Poker Games in Seven Men from Now (1956)
- 9 The Ranown Style: Mapping Textual Echoes
- 10 You Were Married, But You Never Had a Wife: The Use of Space in the Westerns of Budd Boetticher
- 11 Ideology and Boetticher's Westerns from the Late 1950s
- 12 Outlaws Without a Cause: Generational Conflict in Budd Boetticher's Ranown Cycle
- 13 The Box in the Desert: Budd Boetticher, Breaking Bad, and the Twenty-first-century Western
- Index
Summary
I once had a girlfriend whose stepfather lived in Riverside, California. My girlfriend had lived there until her early twenties when she moved to the coastal city of Redondo Beach, California. Once she had experienced the laidback atmosphere of Southern California, she never wanted to return to that forsaken desert city known as Riverside.
The first time I visited Riverside was in my girlfriend's company. As we passed the city limits, I saw scrawled on the side of the freeway the following piece of graffiti:
HOMICIDE
SUICIDE
MATRICIDE
PATRICIDE
INFANTICIDE
RIVERCIDE
When I met my girlfriend, she was twenty-five. The high school friends she had left behind in Riverside were roughly the same age. It seemed as if every single one of them desperately wished to escape the confines of their native city and move to fabled Los Angeles which was only about an hour away but, for some reason, very few of them could figure out how to accomplish this simple task. They seemed to be trapped there as if by some siren's spell outsiders could not hear. My girlfriend was one of the few who had (somehow … through sheer force of will?) made it out alive. Perhaps owing to Riverside's freefalling economy, everyone from the age of sixteen to twenty-nine had little to do except smoke methamphetamine; it seemed as if almost every one of them was either addicted to meth or recovering from it.
Given my personal experiences with this city, it did not surprise me when, in the latter months of 2013, I happened to stumble across an interview with television writer/director/producer Vince Gilligan in which he offhandedly mentioned that his hit television series, Breaking Bad (2008–13), a five-season crime drama about a chemistry teacher named Walter White (Bryan Cranston) who resorts to cooking meth in order to pay for his cancer treatments, had been set in Riverside, California in the first draft of the pilot episode. Upon selling the series to AMC, Gilligan intended to film all five seasons in Riverside. The only reason this did not occur was a financial one; these days, the cost of filming a television series in California is far too high.
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- Information
- ReFocus: The Films of Budd Boetticher , pp. 228 - 240Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2017