The Door
Feature Film | Action, Crime, Drama
Based On
The podcast “Witnessed: Borderlands” from Campside Media
Quick Hitter
When people today in West Texas are asked to criticize Sheriff Rick Thompson – a convicted and sentenced criminal who served 26 years in prison – they are almost all, down to the last hard-bitten DEA agent and betrayed Presidio County administrator, loathe to do so. Why is that? Is it just blind adherence to the “sheriff” figure of lore? A hesitancy to criticize a “law man,” as if to do so would shatter the image of Wyatt Earp himself? Or is there something more to the story? Is Rick Thompson ultimately someone who did what he felt was the right thing – who tried to control an uncontrollable region – and stayed stoically silent as he took the fall so his town could survive?
Or, maybe, he was just a memorable bad guy along with his counterpart – drug running, partying, mountain lion-taming rancher Robert Chambers. Two men playing by their own rules in the West Texas of the 1980s.
The mystery – and ambiguity – of that question is at the heart of The Door, a neo-Western that dives headlong into the story of how the sleepy town of Marfa became known as “La Puerta” – the Door – allowing a tidal wave of cocaine to crash into West Texas. Brazen cartels on one side of the border, always a step ahead, DEA agents on the other, backed by billions of dollars in Regan’s war on drugs. And in between, two men: Rick Thompson, the duly-elected, previously incorruptible sheriff, and Robert Chambers, the notorious drug smuggler.
In the tradition of films like No Country for Old Men and novels like Charles Portis's Gringos, The Door mashes up the shockingly real and the deeply surreal, chronicling not just the events of a crime, but digging deep into the mystery and aura of one of America's most myth-soaked regions.
WITH
Status
In Development
