Goddamn!, you guys. Last time we posted a proper update about the western the Cobras are making (working title “The Sun Sets There: A Goddamn Western”), we had just sent a scouting expedition team into the Ojai valley area of California, looking for beautiful places to shoot beautiful folks. Well, they found some places. And we’ve been working our tails off all summer on this thing. But the time has finally arrived for us to Go West, and West we are going!, en masse!, this week! We’ll be joined by friends & lovers from up & down the California coast, as well as migrants from other lands East and South, and if all goes according to plan, we start shooting on Saturday.

But how did we get to this point? Well …
1. We watched a lot of westerns. A lot. Clint Eastwood. John Wayne. Sergio Leone. We especially dug My Name is Nobody, Once Upon a Time in the West, Lucky Luke (a French film based on a Belgian comic book about the American west), Cat Ballou, The Professionals, The Proposition and, of course, Petticoat Planet. We also highly recommend West World, though we’ve got our own ulterior reasons for that.

2. We watched so many westerns they all jumbled together in our brains into one big cowboy cowgirl barber shop guitar strumming card playing whiskey drinking lusty dusty hootenanny dream. And then …
3. Have one writer make a script, then schedule and shoot it? Yellowbelly. Set a date two months out, give yourself a four day shoot, and try to rustle up a story collaboratively through meetings with giant drawings and diagrams and lists taped to your friends’ walls in the heat of a Brooklyn summer? That’s how Cobras roll. And after many sweaty, hungover Sunday brunch meetings, our collective cowfolk feverdreams found their way into some semblance of a narrative, a tale of the old ways vs. the new, land rights, leaving home, coming back, lust, murder, duty and the power of the stories our ancestors gave us.
4. But what words will our cowboys, cowgirls, villains and varmints say? What pictures will capture these themes? Katie & Matt got to work with nouns and verbs and all that fancy screenwriting stuff, and worked with folks like Greg & Luke & Ian to storyboard the whole thing.
5. We had a lot of meetings. We met to decide about when to meet. We met to decide not to meet. We met and then forgot why. We filled our meetings with whiskey & smoke & passion & pride, and our producers, Molly & Sarak, had the patience to poke and prod everyone enough to keep us on our steel-toed boots.
6. Is there anything better than 100 proof whiskey, 90 proof women and 14-carat gold? Of course not. So we’ve been getting out and test shooting with our cast, costumes and cameras, on the streets, in the alleys and behind the Cobra Compound in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. The proof is in the pictures, folks. So …
We’re ready.
But is the West ready for us?
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Brooklyn Rehearsals

Behind the Scenes Pre Teaser