Jonathan Storm: Calif. plays Kentucky on 'Justified'

FILLMORE, Calif. - East of the I-5, Henry Mayo Drive swings past Valencia Travel Village, clotted with hundreds of trailers and RVs, where the snowbirds stay in winter. Then it skirts the Chiquita Canyon Landfill and its huge earth movers and compactors, organizing garbage into mountains.

Migrants work the lettuce fields as the road changes counties, crossing from Los Angeles to Ventura, and changes its name to Telegraph Road. You're traveling to a wondrous land whose boundaries are those of imagination. There's no signpost up ahead, but your next stop is - Kentucky.

"You've got to be able to fake Kentucky," says TV director Michael Watkins, who's spending this January day doing just that in sunny Southern California. He's aided by three entertainment pros who grew up in Philadelphia, and are now helping to make an episode of FX's Justified, perhaps the best drama on TV, which returned for its second season last week. (You can catch up Tuesday night, from 11:59 p.m. to 1 a.m. Wednesday, when FX repeats the episode. The show is telecast regularly Wednesdays at 10 p.m.)

After a monumental gunfight in last season's finale at a lonely shack in a place called Bulletville (played by another part of California), Kentucky's Harlan County has lost its prime public enemy. Bo Crowder seemed irreplaceable, but Mags Bennett will give it a go in Season 2.

Margo Martindale, better known for playing nosy neighbors (The Riches) or warmhearted, if officious, file clerks (Dexter), appears to be having the time of her life as the matriarch of a clan with a long history as eastern Kentucky's top pot growers. She's no swaggering gunslinger like Bo, but her influence runs deeper, and she may be more evil.

There's a Bennett town police car right next to the Harlan County sheriff's car, in the lot where people wait for the shuttle up a rutted ranch road to the shoot. Marshal Raylan Givens' big Lincoln is up where cameras are rolling.

Givens, played by Timothy Olyphant, is the soul of the show. Created in a short story by crime-writing legend Elmore Leonard, he's a former Kentucky coal miner, son of Arlo Givens, a two-bit crook whom Raylan plugged last season before he went after Bo.

On the docket today is a complex scene in which poor Arlo gets shot again.

"I didn't do it," says Olyphant, in a moment between takes. This time, it's an unseen sniper trying to send Carol Johnson, played by Cheltenham High grad Rebecca Creskoff, to her reward, as she speaks with Arlo on the porch of his dilapidated house. Instead, a bullet hits Arlo in the leg.

There's a safety meeting before the first take, as there always is in Hollywood (or Kentucky) when charges (called squibs) are going to be set off, and the explosions could injure cast or crew. One of the three cameramen hides under a blanket.

Squibs that represent bullets hitting the house explode behind panels made of balsa wood, minimizing shrapnel danger, as Raylan, crossing Arlo's front yard and shooting back, herds his dad and the woman into the house. But one also has to explode on the leg of Raymond J. Barry, who plays Arlo.

Special-effects foreman Ryan Senecal explains that a steel plate on top of padding is affixed to the leg to protect it, with the charge on top of that, accompanied by a blood pack. "We score the wardrobe to make it rip realistically and let the packs work." They're usually made with corn syrup and food coloring.

Playing Arlo's run-down home is a beautiful frame house on the edge of what was once the nearly 50,000-acre Rancho San Francisco, much of it now owned by a land management company. It's the homestead of a farming operation that includes oranges, lemons, peppers, cilantro, parsley, pumpkins, corn, and other produce.

Many of the crops, especially the orange groves, are visible in the distance, but Watkins' cameramen need only be careful they don't allow nearby non-Kentucky geraniums and baby palm trees into their shots.

Hollywood magic has faded and dirtied the house's gleaming white exterior, but inside something's still the same: Nole, Jo Jo, and Alby, the resident cats.

"We just left them in there," says the man who lives in the house and would identify himself only as Jeff. The kitties must just love the blasting, as Watkins shoots take after take.

It's nearly 50 miles each way for Olyphant from his home in Los Angeles to the soundstage in Santa Clarita where interiors are shot, even farther out here to Kentucky.

"Apparently, we're still in L.A. County," he says. "It's in my contract that we make the show there." When told he's about five miles over the county line, he says, "I'm glad we're having this conversation. I see a lawsuit in my future."

He comments more seriously on the state of the business, in which it has become cheaper to film almost anywhere than in California. "I moved out to L.A. nine years ago because they used to make movies out here. It's very nice, and people work really hard to shoot this thing here so people can go home and be with their families. It just means the world." He and his wife, Alexis, have two girls, 11 and 7, and a boy, 9. He asked that their names not be publicized.

In Raylan, Olyphant has created a stunning lead character. His very walk is mesmerizing. He has had help, first from Leonard, whose books have spawned so much good film (3:10 to Yuma, Get Shorty, Out of Sight) and TV (Karen Sisco, Maximum Bob). Leonard himself calls Justified "terrific."

Olyphant says, "There's a line in a David Mamet movie [Heist] where Gene Hackman says, 'I think of a man smarter than me, and I ask myself what would he do.'

"That's kind of what it's like playing in Elmore's world. I just think of a man a lot cooler than me, and I ask myself, 'What would he do?' "

On the set, Olyphant is never far from Raylan's voice. "In Elmore's world, everybody's got a little sumpin' to 'em. Sumpin' how they move, sumpin' how they talk, sumpin' how they walk. It feels like it's always very thoughtful, from Elmore, and I just try to do it justice."

Dave Andron, who moved to Wayne, Pa., as a 10-year-old and graduated from Conestoga High School, is one of the writers who creates new material while channeling Leonard. He's pretty new to showbiz, having struggled, he says, six or seven years in San Francisco to write fiction before moving to Los Angeles with - like every other taxi driver, bartender, and personal trainer - a script.

"I gave it to anyone who would look at it," he says. Justified showrunner Graham Yost, who has had a distinguished writing and producing career, including an Emmy for HBO's From the Earth to the Moon, liked it and gave him a job on the short-lived Jeff Goldblum gumshoe show Raines.

"All of a sudden, NBC offered me a pilot, and I wrote a movie that [was] bought in a bidding war, and I just kind of never stopped. In 2006-07, I went from having nothing to buying a house. It's been a lot of fun."

One of the episodes he wrote last year, "Hatless," recognized something else that has helped create Raylan. Some thugs took his beautiful cowboy hat. "He was kind of emasculated," says Andron. "It was a nice through-line."

Damien Quinn, who dropped out of Lincoln High in ninth grade and left Holmesburg for the green pastures of L.A. more than 20 years ago, is the hat wrangler.

Actually, Quinn, who has worked on scores of films and TV shows, is a set costumer. "I caretake the clothes on the set and dress the actors," he says. "I'm also a continuity expert. I have to make sure the costumes in the scenes add up."

Raylan's lid is not really a cowboy hat. It was custom-made by Baron Hats in Burbank, whose founder, Eddie Baron, made most of John Wayne's hats, as well as ones for Harrison Ford in Indiana Jones, Jim Carrey in The Mask, Marlon Brando in One-Eyed Jacks, and all the hats for the old-time TV shows Bonanza and Maverick. Baron (pronounced Bah-RHONE) even made the chapeau of Smokey the Bear.

"I keep it in the hard-shell cover, and make sure it doesn't get any stains on it while he's doing his action scenes," Quinn says. "When it blows down the street, hopefully, by the grace of God, it doesn't get into an oil stain."

It was a tough winter in L.A. "We had rain for weeks. That could have been a nightmare for me," Quinn says.

What's more important, the actor or the hat?

"Both. Him being happy and him having that hat on. It's both my responsibilities, but that hat, it's gold."

Perhaps it's not surprising that there's figurative gold everywhere in Justified. In 1842, more than 150 years before the neighborhood became Kentucky, California's first major gold strike took place just a few miles down the road.

Television

Justified

10 p.m. Wednesday on FX