December 10, 2005
Beautiful day out. No clouds, mid-seventies. delightful. Drove out to Mike Pelligatti’s house near Anthem this morning to try out his steady-cam teleprompter. Tom, the technician was there with two of my True West Moment scripts and we walked around the front yard testing the teleprompter to see if I could read it, in the sun, in the shade and on the move. I easily could and we wrapped the experiment after about a half hour and made itinerary plans for Tuesday.

I came back to the TW office and wrote up another four scripts for the shoot and Emailed them to Jeff Hildebrandt in Denver and Mark Boardman. So far I’ve got 16 scripts in the can for the two-day shoot.

Yesterday we got some really outrageous research info from Tom Bicknell, who is the Man when it comes to researching the legendary Ben Thompson. According to several newspaper reports, when Ben and King Fisher were riding down from Austin to San Antonio on the train, Thompson got in a fight with a porter, got blood on his "tall beaver" hat, ended up sticking a butcher knife in the hat and leaving it there when he got off the train. He was in his cups, of course (drunk). At some point he took the knife out and cut off the crown and wore just the brim as he sauntered around San Antonio for the last time. Amazing. You can’t make up funnier stuff than the truth. And if I saw it in a Western I probably wouldn’t believe it. Ha.

"Partying is such sweet sorrow."
—Old Vaquero Saying