SHOOTING FLAT OUT

Come Along For The Ride As A Pair Of D-FW Filmmakers Mine The Rich Soil Of
West Texas And Come Up With A PBS Documentary

LOCKNEY – From the air, the West Texas landscape reveals itself as a flat,
treeless grid. Each patch of land is a cotton field, now mostly picked for
the season. Swirls in the dirt represent the traces left behind by an
underground irrigation system.The ground may be dusty, but an aquifer helps
make this region the world's largest cotton producer outside Egypt.

Mark Birnbaum and Jim Schermbeck, a pair of North Texans who are producing
a PBS documentary in these parts, have shot the pancake vista from every
angle. The first thing they ask of everyone they interview? "Describe the
West Texas landscape."

But now, as Mark flies from Love Field to Lubbock, he has something else on
his mind: On this, his 12th trip to the area, one thing is still missing:
an intimacy with the townspeople, especially with the film's chief subject,
Larry Tannahill.

Larry is a 36-year-old farmer caught up in battle he couldn't have imagined.

When the Lockney school board started drug-testing all seventh- to
12th-graders in early 2000, Larry and his wife, Traci, were the only
parents to object.

They sued the school board – and a judge has since ruled in their favor.
The Tannahills and their son Brady, who was 12 when the testing began, were
represented by the American Civil Liberties Union, an organization they'd
never heard of.

Larry also lost his job at a farm-supply store, then his house. He and his
family have become outsiders in their own town.

It didn't help when the media descended. For a year, Mark and Jim have been
trying to separate themselves from the pack.

Over four days last month – before the Tannahills won the case on Thursday
– the pair raced up and down the plains, cajoling their subjects, facing a
skeptical Lockney school board and reflecting on the progress of their
project. Sometimes, they even made it up as they went along.

WEDNESDAY, FEB. 7

10:15 a.m. At the Lubbock airport, Mark meets up with Jim, a lifelong
environmental activist and aspiring filmmaker 10 years his junior. With
time to kill before a noon interview, they repair to Uncle Daddyo's
coffeehouse.

It was Jim's idea to make a documentary about the drug-testing case,
initially conceiving it as a courtroom drama. But when both sides agreed to
the facts – allowing U.S. District Judge Sam Cummings to simply rule on the
law – there was no trial to shoot.

Jim, a 42-year-old Fort Worth native, had just moved to nearby Slaton – and
in West Texas, nearby nearly always means at least an hour's drive – when
he started reading about the case.

"To me, it's a kind of High Noon situation, where a guy is literally taking
on the town," he says. "When I saw how far the school district was going, I
knew nobody else in the country had tried this and that it was going to be
precedent-setting."

Before long, he enlisted Mark, a 52-year-old veteran documentary and
commercial maker; Dallas' KERA-TV (Channel 13); and the Independent
Television Service to make Larry v. Lockney, which they hope will air on
PBS this fall.

Jim talks about an article last year in Spin magazine that outraged the town.

The captain of the Lockney High football team posed like the Coppertone
girl, his partly bare backside to the camera as he urinated into the Cap
Rock Escarpment, an area where the High Plains give way to a series of
canyons. The locals felt burned.

Enter Mark and Jim.

"Our initial reception in Lockney was chilly, to say the least," Mark wrote
in an interim report to ITVS, which is funding the film. "But we have
persevered. Four months of showing up at football games, civic events, the
Dairy Queen and any place we thought we might engage the citizens of
Lockney paid off."

On earlier trips to Lockney, Mark and Jim interviewed 56 people, including
the principals in the lawsuit and their attorneys. In trying to put the
case in context, they have looked into a local bust that prompted school
officials to start the testing – which also includes screening for alcohol
and tobacco – media coverage of the case and the larger war on drugs. They
also followed the cotton harvest.

"I don't think it's as simple as a lot of the headlines portray it," Jim
says at Uncle Daddyo's. He and Mark want to go deeper, beyond the
stereotype of rural rubes violating the Constitution.

While some folks have loosened up with the filmmakers, others remain
fearful, especially in the Hispanic community.

Jim lays out why: Hispanics make up two-thirds of Lockney's 2,200 residents
but hold only one seat on the school board. All of the defendants in the
bust that prompted the drug testing were Hispanic, and some people believe
the policy targets that group.

11:55. At David Martinez's law office, they spend about 20 minutes setting
up lights. The former assistant district attorney represents two of the
defendants in the Lockney drug bust.

12:25 p.m. Jim asks the attorney to describe the West Texas landscape.
Because they plan to use no narration – Mark is a student of cinema vérité
– such descriptions will lend context.

Mr. Martinez is a catch. He's the first Hispanic who's agreed to speak on
the record, other than a family that supports the testing.

They discuss a similar drug case in Tulia, a small town north of Lockney.
Mark and Jim are interested in that case because it also led to drug
testing in schools. That policy was thrown out by a federal judge in December.

The filmmakers believe the two cases may wind up in the Supreme Court.

3:40. Mark and Jim stop at the house of Ignacio Mondragon, a Lockney High
student Jim arranged to interview today. Two younger kids are lying on the
porch, looking bored. Ignacio says he'll meet them in 10 minutes at the
school. Mark and Jim pass the town's "Wall of Pride," an elaborate tile
mural designed by high school art teacher Lisa Mosley.

4:00. The general opinion among Ignacio and three of his skateboarding
friends is that the Spin piece was out of whack. "I didn't like what they
wrote about the town," says senior Jim Weeks, 18. "That's what I thought
when I moved here. Now I defend it."

"They were just trying to make themselves look good," says a 15-year-old
who will only give his first name, John.

The wide-angle lens that Mark favors can take in a lot while also getting
up close with the subjects. For almost an hour, the students calmly
deconstruct their town, their school and the drug testing.

All four say Lockney is boring. "It's a little town," Jim Weeks says.
"Everybody knows your business."

4:55. Mark is quietly ecstatic. "We needed that interview bad," he says,
slapping Jim's hand. "Excellent." Then worry sets in. Editing a four-person
interview will be hard.

6:35. Mark and Jim plan questions for Traci Tannahill. They haven't talked
to her on camera since August and want to use Saturday's interview to mark
the progress of the story.

9:15. After dinner at the Schermbecks' in Slaton, Mark has a flash. "You
know, at some point we're going to have to make a movie out of all this,"
he says. "That just struck me."

THURSDAY

8:05 a.m. At breakfast inside the Phillips 66 convenience store, Mark
orders eggs, a once-a-week ritual usually reserved for his Saturday
breakfast with a group of artists, doctors and media types.

A Baltimore native, Mark moved to Dallas in 1973 to work for Newsroom,
KERA's legendary newsmagazine. Jim Lehrer had just left, but the
Rockefeller Foundation money was still flowing.

"It was the heyday of public television," he says. "And it was a great way
to learn about Texas and Texana."

A graduate of the University of Maryland, Mark made his first films in
South Vietnam, where he was an Army photographer in "psychological
operations."

He came back to Baltimore wanting to be a fashion photographer but wound up
at the Maryland Center for Public Broadcasting, where he connived his way
into a job. Before it was over, he had produced everything from
documentaries to costume dramas.

"It was my film school," he says.

Since losing his KERA job in a1976 budget cut, Mark has divided his time
between making social documentaries with what he calls "hand-raised money"
and producing slightly more commercial fare for PBS and the Discovery
Channel and doc-style "business films" for paying clients.

"The work," he says, "is totally unpredictable."

9:15. It's unseasonably warm. Mark and Jim agree that the key shot today is
"Larry and Gary vérité." They have no footage of Larry with his Tulia
counterpart, Gary Gardner, the father of the boy who successfully
challenged the drug testing there.

10:25. They arrive at the house of Larry's father, Eugene. Larry, his wife
and their two sons moved here after Larry lost his job. "I haven't gotten a
nice long shot of this house," Mark says.

Larry is rail-thin in that rural-American way. Mark rides with him in his
truck for the trip to Tulia – about an hour away, of course. On the way,
Jim talks about his divided loyalties.

An activist since he started raising money for Cesar Chavez's grape boycott
in high school, he also became a film lover during his adolescence in the
'70s.

Since working for Ralph Nader in the early '80s, Jim has moved back and
forth between the organizing and filmmaking worlds, in some cases marrying
the two.

During his last job, organizing the opposition to the burning of hazardous
waste in Midlothian, he made two short films about the risks from the
cement plant.

Now, he says, he's retired from organizing.

11:20. Gary Gardner is not only Larry's physical opposite – a big, round
guy in overalls – but personality-wise they're miles apart. Larry is quiet,
to himself. Gary's a dynamo, a West Texas "character," and he knows it.

He says he's lined up a group of black Tulia residents for Mark and Jim to
interview. They'll meet at the house of Alan Bean, a white minister also
concerned about the wave of school drug testing.

"It'll lend it some color. If you want, I can cuss the sons a' bitches," he
says, referring to those behind the testing.

Too bad Mark isn't rolling yet. While he and Jim set up lights, they urge
Gary to save it for the camera.

Gary, a white former school board member who voted against drug testing, he
says he's most upset at what he sees as "racial profiling" in the Tulia
drug sting. "People don't understand how a guy who talks like me could come
at it that way."

11:45. Gary's brother, Ben, shows up. "He told me Ken Burns was going to be
here."

1:10 p.m. At Alan Bean's house, Mark moves quickly. He decides there's
enough light in the living room and begins shooting almost immediately. He
uses his handheld camera without a tripod.

Besides Larry, Gary and Alan, there are two other people in the room: a man
named Freddie whose son was busted in the Tulia sting, and Billy Wafer, who
was arrested but never tried.

As they tell horror stories of shaky evidence and long sentences, Mark
moves around the room like a ballet dancer. His camera reacts to the
conversation's flow with fluid moves toward whoever's speaking.

2:40. At Gary's urging, lunch is on Mark and Jim at the El Camino
restaurant, the closest thing to fine dining in Tulia. Mark says his biceps
hurt from 90 straight minutes of shooting.

3:40. Mark wants to nap, but there's no time. There are exteriors to shoot
in Tulia, including the courthouse and jail where the drug trials played
out, the public housing where some of the defendants lived, the house of
the supposed "kingpin," and the schools that reacted with a testing policy.

All this before 7:30, when Mark is scheduled to talk to the Lockney school
board.

5:00. Jim has wrestled a tumbleweed into the car. Mark wants a shot of one
rolling along the ground. For 10 minutes on a side road, Jim tosses the
tumbleweed into the wind and runs out of camera range. There's so much dirt
in the air that not chewing grit isn't an option.

7:30. When Mark tells the school superintendent, Raymond Lusk, that he and
Jim will be editing the film, the superintendent asks: "Can we help?"

This is the chilliest reception so far. Board member Dan Smith, who once
came at Mark's camera in anger, says that people can be made to look bad if
their comments are cut off. Jim answers that their film is not about sound
bites.

9:45. At dinner, Mark gets a call: John Travolta has agreed to be in a film
that he hopes to make for the Discovery Channel. It's about a Love Field
outfit that tricks out plane interiors for fat cats. The movie star/pilot
is a client.

Mark notices that his favorite cap, from the Hot Springs Documentary Film
Festival, is missing.

FRIDAY

8:15 a.m. It's cold today, the wind chill somewhere around zero. Mark still
can't find his hat.

9:30. Justice of the Peace Michelle Araujo, one of the few Hispanic elected
officials in West Texas, is a no-show for her interview. Mark tracks her
down at home. She's sick with food poisoning.

9:40. Mark has an idea. Why not head to Lockney High and see whether the
principal, James Poole, will walk them through the drug-testing procedure?
This is a piece of the puzzle they don't have.

"Improvisation," Jim says.

While they set up, the principal jokes about his shiny head. He's loose,
talking easily about his grown daughter and about the need for paddling.

He details the testing procedure, including how cardboard is used to cover
the windows of the gym during the testing and how the kids can't leave
until they give a sample in the restroom, even if it takes all day.

To make sure no one is cheating, the temperature of the urine is taken
immediately.

10:35. Mark pushes his luck, and it works. He'd like to shoot a classroom
or two. The principal lines up several. In the hallway, Jim sees Ignacio,
who hands over signed parental release forms for him and his friends.

On the second floor, there's a poster for the Marines: "Don't wreck it with
drugs."

Mark is especially active in the science lab, where the kids are conducting
a DNA experiment. He reacts swiftly to activity in another part of the
room, swooping down, unafraid to get close.

As Mark films, two students discuss a state drug survey being conducted at
school today.

12:20 p.m. Mark and Jim are in Floydada, the county seat, to shoot archival
pictures of Lockney at the county museum. During lunch, diners at the next
table discuss church opposition to a Vegas night at the high school.

1:20. Mark improvises a copy stand by stacking genealogy books. "Now we
have the Ken Burns thing going," he says.

2:30. Mark closes his eyes while Jim goes next door to the Floyd County
Hesperian-Beacon to see whether editor Alice Gilroy is ready for her closeup.

"Don't you think everybody's tired of me?" she says.

Jim says since the film isn't out, no one has seen her yet.

Alice, an ex-cop, says the town is getting used to Mark and Jim. "They're
not just the people from Dallas anymore."

4:15. Mark is exhausted. Alice offers her house as way station.

"I have company," she tells a caller. "Well, they're not really company."

8:00. Mark and Jim are late for the varsity basketball game, which Mark is
shooting for atmosphere. In the foyer, a school board member says that the
board never intended to turn Lockney into a test case.

"It's not for everybody," he says of the drug testing, "but it's for us."

Mark and Jim have been to half a dozen sporting events, part of the blitz
that gained them respect. This is where the town comes together, and the
audience is full of familiar faces from school.

Mark moves from a midcourt seat to the edge of the hardwood and back again,
alternating between game and crowd shots. He captures a successful
three-pointer and the player's happy reaction, then backpedals and spins to
get the crowd stomping their feet and clapping in unison.

"I love shooting anything if it's moving, yeah," he says.

9:00. Mark low-fives Jim again. "Good day," he says. "We got what we were
afraid to ask for."

SATURDAY

9:15 a.m. Jim says Larry has called to remind them to bring tapes of the
first interview they did: Larry and his wife, Traci, telling their story
for two hours. "It was a nice start, actually, and we haven't heard from
Traci since – until today," Jim says.

First, though, is an interview with a former Lockney student. On the way,
Jim pulls out a typewritten piece of a paper with his further thoughts
about the film.

"If you've heard about this story, you may think you know what it's about.
You don't," the first note says. "Nobody followed it more closely in the
media for longer than I did ... I believe we'll be able to show that
complexity better than anyone to date."

Jim also praises Mark, says he feels like he won the lottery and is
"beginning to see the real beauty in West Texas."

10:00. Going over Jim's list of questions for Traci, Mark wants to push
harder. "There must be a deeper level where she's pissed off about what
it's meant for her kids."

They also plan to ask about strains on the marriage and how she feels about
having to move, something the Tannahills declined to let Mark and Jim shoot.

Jim wonders about warm-up questions; Mark says not this time. He wants Jim
to probe, beginning with an inquiry into when their younger son, Colby,
will be subject to his first drug test.

Mark thinks she knows the purpose of the interview, and he wants to
establish the tone early.

10:55. At the Lockney Dairy Queen, Mark tells Leticia Garcia that they've
made friends over time.

"It's not hard in Lockney," she says.

A 2000 graduate of Lockney High, she's moved to Lubbock, the big city. Of
the landscape where she grew up, she says, "It's flat, and it's always been
flat."

When it was first announced, her classmates thought the drug testing was
"the stupidest thing," but she favors it. She says she knows two people who
were helped. Others have been discouraged from trying drugs.

She admits it made her feel uncomfortable to take the test. She couldn't
produce right away, and had to wait in the gym for two class periods.

12:55 p.m. At the Tannahills,' Traci wants to know how the filmmakers feel
having a journalist following them around. Larry is watching Run Silent,
Run Deep on TV.

"We didn't ask for it," Mark says.

"Neither did we," Traci says.

She's nervous. "I don't like being the center of attention."

1:35. Mark has set up his most elaborate array of lights yet. Contrary to
their earlier conversation, Jim starts with easy questions. They've heard
that Traci's back in school.

Unprompted, she says the Constitution is intended to protect the minority
from the majority; she recently learned this in a government class.

Not realizing how articulate she is, she keeps interrupting herself.

"We had media coverage from all over the country, and the town didn't like
that...People were mad. They felt like the whole world was against them. We
felt the same way."

2:48. When the interview resumes after a break and Traci is asked about the
lowest point, tears come. Mark asks for a tissue for her, and she talks
about being hurt by the attacks on Larry.

There are some things she won't talk about, including race relations in
Lockney. Mark and Jim decide to forego asking about the impact of having to
move.

3:45. Jim hugs her. Mark acknowledges putting her through the wringer.

3:48. Larry hands Mark his Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival cap. He
had left it in Larry's truck.

SCREENING NOTE

Mark Birnbaum's latest documentary, Salsa Caliente!, premieres at 7:30 p.m.
March 15 at the Dallas Video Festival. For more information, call 214-428-8700.