Thursday, December 16, 1999
A Little Comic Relief
What might Hollywood do to Buffalo
Gap?
By Bill Whitaker
An interesting movie script is being shopped around Hollywood
these days. It’s about a testosterone-overdosed man who ascends
to heaven, only to be ordered back to earth to help his disillusioned
widow, except he must return in the form of a Christmas elf …
and in drag.
The good part: He gets to return to Buffalo Gap.
Don’t worry. It’s all for yuks. At least, that’s
how many of therapist-turned-scriptwriter Trudi Spring’s
friends in the Gap view it. If they didn’t, they’d be
mounting a tar-and-feather party for Trudi out in Buffalo Gap
tonight rather than their first-ever Christmas tour of homes.
Pals such as Rhonda Minzenmayer, who runs Los Acentos in Buffalo
Gap, say the movie idea sounds like so much fun, they can’t
imagine it not being filmed. What’s more, they’d love
to see it premiered in Buffalo Gap, even though that would mean
throwing a sheet up between two post oaks come sundown.
That would be OK with Trudi, even better with husband Bob Allison.
After just six months of living in congested, expensive and occasionally
snooty Los Angeles, where Trudi fine-tuned the script Cosmic Christmas
Conspiracy with veteran screenwriter Camilla Carr, Trudi and Bob
decided they had to return to Texas.
Specifically, Buffalo Gap.
“It happened suddenly,” Trudi admitted of their return
to West Texas Nov. 1. “In the middle of one night, my husband
jumped out of bed in his BVDs and said, ‘I can’t live
like this!’ I mean, he really hit the wall. We were out of
there in two days, too, listening to Jerry Jeff Walker all the
way back to Texas!”
Cosmic Christmas
Whether in West Texas or the West Coast, Trudi has had Buffalo
Gap much on her mind this year. The fact that she and Camilla,
author of the bizarre novel Topsy Dingo Wild Dog, set their Christmas
script in Trudi’s beloved Gap has made Trudi a local celebrity,
even though she concedes any accolades are ridiculously premature.
When I caught up with Trudi this week, she and friends were
preparing for “Candlelight & Carols in the Gap,”
a festive walking tour of the town organized by the newly formed
Friends of Historic Buffalo Gap. Tonight’s tour runs from
5:30 to 8:30 p.m. with $5 tickets available at Perini Steakhouse
or Buffalo Gap Historic Village.
But Trudi thought about more than just quaint Buffalo Gap homes
during her script-writing days in Los Angeles. For instance, she
patterned one of the places in the screenplay after the Buffalo
Gap Store, a rustic haunt north of town boasting a couple of laid-back
buffalo in a pen out front.
“I had to have things like that in the script,” she
said. “You know, that place is so homey. You go in there
and everyone knows your birthday. And in L.A., it’s not that
way. There is no sense of neighborhood. In the script, I called
the Buffalo Gap Store ‘Lolly’s Emporium.’ It’s
where everyone meets for coffee and talks about life in Buffalo
Gap.”
Things typically happen fast for Trudi, already author of a
published book called Psycolorgy, about the impact of colors on
our psyche. It was Bob who prompted their hasty flight out of
Buffalo Gap earlier this year after he resolved the town of several
hundred was getting too crowded for an old country boy from Muleshoe.
The notion came to him when he and Trudi were availing themselves
of a hot tub at their 10-acre Buffalo Gap spread. That’s
when they heard new neighbors 100 or so yards away.
“He just came to the conclusion Buffalo Gap was getting
too big. And, well, we thought we’d test the waters, so we
sold our log house. We sold it in 45 minutes. We had two girls
already living in L.A., and when this script I’d been working
on was briefly optioned by Big Daddy Productions, my collaborator
said, ‘Since you don’t have a house, why don’t
you move out here?’
“So we took a sabbatical and went out there. Of course,
we didn’t know it was a sabbatical. We thought we were going
to be out there for the rest of our lives.”
Hollywood hiatus
With the money they made from the lightning-quick sale of their
home in Buffalo Gap and the promise of a new future ahead, Trudi
plunged into her work with her collaborator. Along the way the
screen-writing duo worked with the William Morris Agency, shopping
the script around to such figures as Oscar-winning actress Holly
Hunter and actor/director Billy Bob Thornton.
“It’s really a fun script,” Trudi said. “It’s
about this angel named Bobby who is your stereotypical UT football
player type. His punishment after death is that, to help his wife,
he has to come back to earth in drag as a Christmas elf. That’s
why we thought Billy Bob Thornton would love to do it. Oh, yes,
and his name is ‘Bambi.’”
Considering the fickle ways of Hollywood, there’s no telling
what fate will befall Cosmic Christmas Conspiracy, but friends
hope a little bit of Buffalo Gap survives all the cuts and changes
and creative tweakings any Hollywood script must undergo.
“It seems like she has a lot of Buffalo Gap pretty well
covered,” Rhonda said of her friend. “I mean, things
like the gang that meets at the Bar-B-Que Barn and the fellow
around here who walks his feral hog every day and jokes he’s
going to eat him when he gets fat enough. You know, there’s
a lot about Buffalo Gap they might not believe in Hollywood.”
All things considered, though, a heaven-sent elf in drag might
just fit into the rustic mix.
Bill Whitaker, who doesn’t even want to think about
elves in drag, can be reached at 676-6732 or whitakerb@abinews.com.
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Copyright ©1999, Abilene Reporter-News / Texnews
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