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.
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?
