Yes, bikini-clad baristas actually do exist. No, the cartel doesn’t maintain relationships with landmen like Billy Bob Thornton‘s Tommy Norris.
Christian Wallace should know what is true and what is fictional when it comes to what happens around the Permian Basin of Texas; it was his 2019 podcast Boomtown about big oil that inspired Taylor Sheridan to embark upon Landman for Paramount+.
Ahead of Landman‘s first season finale on Jan. 12, Wallace — who’s both a co-creator and writer with Sheridan on the series that also stars Jon Hamm and Ali Larter — answered a few burning questions about the making of the show and whether he’s actually ever met a landman who’s as fearless (and badass) as Tommy himself.
Can you explain how your role worked on the series? Were you a part of the writer’s room?
CHRISTIAN WALLACE Yes. Taylor and I were the writer’s room. We spent about two years talking about the show, the characters, the storyline before any scripts were written. Taylor asked me to write a spec script based on the stuff we’d been talking about. I went and did that and he told me, ‘okay, you’re going to be the co-creator of the show.’ We would talk about scenes, dialogue, things like that. And then Taylor would actually go and write the episodes. I was on set throughout the duration of filming to help with anything I could help with, whether that was rig stuff or costumes or dialogue or whatever.
So as someone who’s done a podcast about big oil, how accurate is the show?
WALLACE A lot of it is very accurate. Some of it we had to kind of squeeze together to make it make sense for our characters. And it’s funny, it depends on who you ask. My uncle who works in the oil field for the last 30 years will nitpick every little thing. But I think for the most part, it’s safe to say you get a decent sense of what it’s like working in oil and gas out there.
Well, the big factor is obviously the cartels. Is that something that you addressed in your podcast? Is that a reality out there?
WALLACE I didn’t address the cartel issues very much in the podcast, but it is a real issue as far as the drug trafficking through that region. There’s oil theft, there’s equipment theft. It is kind of the wild west in certain ways out there. And so that part is accurate. The relationship between the cartel and [the fictitious oil business] M-Tex is fictional, but I suppose it’s in the realm of possibility.
Bringing in the National Guard to help keep the cartel away was a great plot point. Does anything about that ring true?
WALLACE That is part of Taylor’s specialty, being able to take a scenario and drum up the action and the intensity to that level. I mean, he’s just so good at spinning a narrative up to its utmost height. And so the National Guard is all credit to Taylor.
So what specifically in your podcast became a storyline in the series?
WALLACE There are things throughout the entire show that are little call-outs from parts of the podcast. We’ve had a ton of people asking me if there are really bikini-clad baristas serving coffee to guys on their way to work in the oil field. And the answer to that is, yes, there really are. We actually had an episode of the podcast where we spoke to some of these baristas. Sex work is a huge part of any boom town that is a part of the economy. It’s part of what happens, and then there are the deaths on the rigs in the oil field. Those are things that really happened. We touched on that in the podcast. We went deep into some of the oil field accidents and safety. Some of the scenes are directly from that, such as the pipe crushing scene. That’s a real story that I heard from my uncle growing up. It was a pipe rack that fell on him and not pipes, but he really did call his wife before he passed away. Some of the things that almost seem unbelievable are actually based on reality.
I’m assuming you’ve met a few landmen in your time out there?
WALLACE Yes. One of my best friends is actually a landman.
Is he just like Billy Bob’s Tommy?
WALLACE He does like Bud Light! The role of a landman in our show is much more exciting than 99% of the work that landmen do in the real world. Billy’s character, Tommy, he’s really kind of a Swiss army knife of roles at M-Tex, so he’s doing a lot of different jobs that a traditional landman probably wouldn’t do. That’s part of how we wanted to show so much of the industry and the patch and being out there. We needed Tommy’s character to be able to go and do all these different things. Otherwise, he’d be on his computer looking for leases and doing regulatory compliance things, and nobody is going to watch a show about that.
Tommy is obviously quite fearless. The real landmen that you’ve met, are they like that?
WALLACE I think it varies quite a bit. Some of them are more like pencil-pushing nerds who are probably more suited to going through files at the courthouse. Others are very bold and can sit through a multi-million dollar negotiation with nerves of steel. So with any job, they kind of run the gamut.
There’s been a couple of speeches in the series addressing the oil industry and talking about the folly that is renewal energy. Is that all from Taylor’s head or is that something that you addressed in the podcast?
WALLACE We do talk about renewables in the podcast and how solar and wind are proliferating in the Permian Basin. There’s really not an antagonistic stand towards them if they are bringing jobs. However, Tommy’s monologue is very much how a lot of people feel and is just a little bit of a counter-narrative to the one that we typically hear. And yeah, those are conversations that you would hear in West Texas, those types of monologues.
What do you think about the women in Tommy’s life? Does an Ali Larter exist out there and does she look as good as Ali does?
WALLACE That’s a funny question. I don’t want to get in trouble with any Midlanders or Odessans. I will say, you can ask almost any West Texan if they know some loud, audacious, bold women, and you’ll almost certainly get a resounding yes. There is that big Texas personality to both Angela [Larter] and Ainsley [Michelle Randolph]. And I think that is one of the things that I personally love about them. There is just so much comedy and lightheartedness in those characters that really bring something to the show that has men getting crushed by pipes or burnt at an oil well. You need that levity. The show wouldn’t be what it is without having them.
Viewers have certainly learned a lot about the industry from this show. Are you hearing that a lot?
WALLACE Yeah, I have. That’s something that I was hoping that would come about through the show, that at least it would get people interested and maybe invite them to learn more. This is definitely not a documentary. People won’t be able to have a full understanding of the oil and gas industry by watching our show, but I think it should prompt people, or I hope it would prompt people to look deeper because it is such an important industry that touches our lives on a daily basis. Most people don’t know anything about it or don’t think about it ever. So if this show helps ignite that conversation, I think that that’s a good thing.