Oil on Film and in Fiction Print Share
Oil on Film and in Fiction
(This article is excerpted from the original. The opinions expressed are those of the author and not of my office.)
The raucous early days of oil drilling in the American West, especially between 1910 and 1930, can be relived in two readily accessible creative works: director Jack Conway's 1940 film Boom Town and Upton Sinclair's 1927 novel Oil! (and after December 2007 its film adaptation in director Paul Thomas Anderson's movie There Will Be Blood).
Described on one website as a "four star cast but a two-star movie," Boom Town featured as male leads Clark Gable and Spencer Tracy and their love interests were Claudette Colbert and Hedy Lamar. For Gable, Boom Town appeared in August 1940, just eight months after the blockbuster Gone With the Wind (December 1939).
The movie received two Oscar™ nominations for best cinematography and best visual effects. Those technical qualities remain part of the film's appeal. The realism of oil boom towns, and especially early oil fields, is graphically captured in this black-and-white film. The arc of the story begins in Texas in 1918 and follows two down-on-their-luck wildcatters. They strike it rich, become oil barons, and then have a falling-out, which leads to loss of money and friendship. Afterwards, however, they rekindle respect for each amidst the hope of regaining their wealth from another oil pool discovery.
The oil field scenes in the first part of the movie are accurate re-creations of the drama and danger always present during drilling. Toward the end of the film, depictions of devious financial dealings by oil men and the federal government's use of anti-trust laws against oil companies taps into the public's anti-big-business biases common during the Depression Era (1929-1941).
The film has distinct links to New Mexico. It dramatizes the utter waste and despoliation occurring when wells are "brought in." Throughout the era from 1910 into the 1930s, conservationists called attention to the destruction of landscape because of "gushers" and the ever-present danger from fire posed by leaky storage tanks and pipelines. Pressure steadily mounted to impose regulations to correct these problems.
New Mexico in 1929 accepted improved oil field practices and applied them to the Hobbs discovery that same year. The state's oil field conservation law, written in cooperation with the petroleum industry, was adopted in 1935. It became the model for Louisiana's law, adopted in 1940. In Boom Town, Clark Gable's character favors conservation practices, and he is duly praised by Spencer Tracy for taking this stand.
© 2007 by David V. Holtby. Used with permission.
