Part 02: Why Oklahoma?
Remember how I said my son is about as old as the movie? This next story happened on Christmas Eve, when he was nine months old and we had flown to Oklahoma to visit family.
Now, before I continue, I want you to imagine a scenario in which you need to ship a vase. You get to the post office, but the vase won’t fit in the box you brought. Your solution? Smash the vase into little pieces. It shouldn’t be that hard to put the vase back together once it arrives at its destination, you incorrectly and naively assume. By the time you realize the error of your ways, though, it’s too late. This is what flying across multiple time zones with a baby is like.
That one-year-old vase will scream and cry and poop in the middle of the night, angering all the postal workers seated around you who can’t sleep because of your vase. Yes, I know, my metaphors are mixed there, but that’s only because I am still, all these years later, suffering from the sleep deprivation brought on by those endless nights.
Anyway, back to story time: it’s 4 AM and my son is not sleeping. I angrily grab the car seat and throw it in the rental car that I booked, thinking that a nice drive will help him fall asleep. After a quick stop at a 24-hour coffee drive-thru, I’m off on an early morning tour of Oklahoma City. And as I’m driving, I’m thinking about the film I wrote, about these characters named Cate and Henry. I’m thinking about where this kind of story would exist.
In early drafts of the script, we spent more time on the backstory of Cate and Henry’s relationship—how they came from a neighborhood where poverty lived close to prosperity, how kids could have a love for each other that hasn’t yet been tarnished by the economics of status and race and achievement. I imagined an uncut Steadicam shot where we follow Henry as he leaves his posh family home, gets on his bike, and rides right across the street to Cate’s derelict neighborhood.
• • •
I found myself driving through midtown OKC when the sun started to rise on that frigid December morning (my son had, of course, fallen asleep instantly in the car… ugh). The air was more than just cold; it was sharp, and the light of sunrise refracted in bright angles. I drove across 13th Street toward Classen Boulevard. To my right, I saw the neighborhood of Heritage Hills: all beautiful brick homes built by old money. The scene on my left was strikingly different: cracked concrete and peeling paint, a poverty-stricken area with rows of decaying home bound in by more than just the name of the neighborhood, Classen-Ten-Penn. Named after the streets that mark its borders—Classen Boulevard, Tenth Street, and Pennsylvania Avenue—it’s almost as if the city planners felt that giving this part of town a name that clearly delineated its borders might just keep the urban decay from spilling out across the boulevards into nicer neighborhoods.
I started to feel a chill in my spine, like I’d stumbled across a spot where my script’s story had already happened and, rather than writing it, I was uncovering it, brushing back the frost and frozen clay to find someone else’s very real reality. I’d find out later—from a police offer friend in town who works undercover to arrest men who try to solicit sex from sex workers—that anyone who wanted to find a sex worker in OKC knew where to look: on a road called Blackwelder Boulevard, a street that runs right down the center of Classen-Ten-Penn. Yep.
So you have Heritage Hills on the one side, Classen-Ten-Penn on the other, and here’s the kicker: the neighborhoods had a vacant church between them, sitting like a closed bridge between the two worlds. Could the symbolism be any more on the nose? But that church was perhaps a sign, too: we needed to shoot several scenes inside a vacant church! If we wanted to depict a church-turned-restaurant, then we needed a space that would allow our production team to move in and take over for a few weeks, which isn’t something that most functioning churches have time or space for. But, like magic, here was an empty church, facing Henry’s neighborhood on one side and Cate’s on the other. I had the distinct sense of being handed something.
• • •
In the years that passed from my discovery to the final cut of the film, plenty changed. What you see in the film looks quite different from what I saw on that December morning. However, I still look back on this memory as some kind of commission.
I ended up making many stops that morning, opening my car door as silently as possible each time so as not to wake the sleeping baby vase in the back seat. At each stop, I took pictures of buildings I saw, buildings that ultimately inspired the film’s setting, story and characters.
And over the following years, whenever I visited Oklahoma, I took time to catalogue even more locations, always looking for beautiful, intriguing and striking spaces.
The movie had to take place in Oklahoma. Shooting a film in Oklahoma absolutely presented challenges, but all filmmakers must choose between idealism and practicality at some point in the process. Sure, you might want to make a movie in Oklahoma, but what if there’s more money available to shoot in a different location? For a short time, we had a production company try to convince us to shoot Hosea in Serbia! So if you shoot elsewhere, you’ll get your movie made, but if you stick to your ideal location (in my case, Oklahoma), then your movie may never see the light of day. It’s a dilemma.
But in my mind, it was always Oklahoma. It was set in stone. I found so much symbolism in the location. To our early investors, I wrote:
Oklahoma is the center of the Bible Belt, and with a culturally integrated religiosity, it stands in perfectly for the religious power structures present in ancient Israel during the time of Hosea. Hosea must take place in an environment where the ambient society looks down on a prostitute as morally unclean. It is her perception of this hostile context that gives the the biblical woman Gomer—and our character Cate—a permanent cause of marginalization.
With Oklahoma in my mind, themes in the script started to emerge, like the idea of being marked or scarred by earlier events in our lives. Oklahoma is a place that marks you, literally. I wrote about that phenomenon to early investors, as well:
Oklahoma doesn’t have dirt. It has red clay. It is an iron-rich, brick red that stains the horizon and the knees of your jeans. It is the color of blood; the substance most often associated with religious sacrifice and atonement. In a story like Hosea, which is used by people of faith around the world to discuss those themes, the red of the landscape becomes the pulse of the narrative.
Just ask anyone who grew up in OKC if they remember the knees of their jeans stained red from dirt the color of bright red bricks, or if they recall the edges of their home dirty from splashes of red clay after a rain. I wanted the story and these characters to feel like they had been marked. So we shot in Oklahoma.
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