Re: 1989's Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.

The next three days was second unit shooting outside of Antonito. Th scene we were filming was where Young Indy escapes from the bad guys with Coronado’s Cross and takes off cross country on horseback with the baddies in hot pursuit in automobiles. Indy comes across a handy circus train on the equally handy Pueblo & Chama Railroad and boards the moving train. Then the bad guys come along side and board the train also. The camera needed to be moving with the train. We spent 3 solid days on this……

My days were all long ones. The movie company wanted us ready to move at 630am. That meant for me I was on duty at 530am to drive to Antonito. We got moving about 645 each morning. Did whatever they had in mind until 930 or so, then hightailed back to town to clear up for train #1 to depart. Once they were by, we went back out and excepting for lunch, worked until 445pm or so when #4 came wandering in out of the hills and we beat it for town. After switching things around and tying up, I drove back to Chama, tying up at about 645 each day, 13-14 hrs on duty.

The first idea was to mount a camera truck with a camera boom on a flat car (in this case 6314) and shove it ahead while the camera shot the scene facing to the rear. Like so……



This wasn’t too successful. Even with the gyroscopic camera mount, the camera moved too much. The next idea was to mount it to the locomotive itself. They bracketed the camera mount to the handrails and cylinders. This was more solid and got what they were after.



This camera mounting had a humorous sidebar. After finishing up for the day, Train 4 was beating down our necks. I was pretty adamant about not laying out the passenger train – it was just bad form. When they were done I could see #4’s headlight coming up behind. They pulled their million dollar Panavision camera off the side of the engine and told me to highball for town, they’d take the rest of it off when we got in. So off I went. It occurred to me that all that aluminum piping hanging out there might not clear the switch stand in the yard. As I was pulling on the loop side, I was eyeballing the clearance real close……. Nope not going to fit, so I set the air and brought her to a stop. Our rear end was still fouling the switch to the depot and #4 was about ¼ mile back. I grabbed a wrench and started to take all that stuff off.

You’d of thought the world ended….”HEY! YOU can’t touch that stuff. You’re not in the union!!!.” I Told them this was MY engine and I could take whatever I want off of it. If you would prefer, I could let that steel switch stand remove it for you, but your high dollar camara mount won’t like it very much…. So reluctantly using MY tools, the mount came off and #4 came in only a few minutes off the advertised. That wasn’t the last time I used the “it’s MY train…” tactic to get something done.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/23/2017 08:34PM by Earl.