Leap of Faith turned Plainview into Rustwater, Kansas, and the name stayed up for 24 years.
Updated: Oct 4
TEXAS TOP 50; #48 Leap of Faith (1992)
If you are looking for where Leap of Faith was filmed, the answer is the Texas Panhandle. Plainview played the fictional Rustwater, Kansas, with additional work in Groom, Amarillo, Claude, Tulia and Happy, and interiors finished at Las Colinas Studios in Dallas. Principal photography ran June 21 to September 1, 1992.
It was the first major motion picture shot on location in that part of the state since Hud was made in Claude and Amarillo in 1963, a gap of nearly thirty years. Texas Monthly sent Joe Nick Patoski up to write about it, and his August 1992 piece is the best contemporaneous account of what a studio production does to a Panhandle town.
What was shot where.
Plainview, population about 21,700 at the time, supplied the town. Juanita McElroy's Quick Lunch diner held several major scenes. The entire strip of storefronts along Seventh and Ash downtown was dressed and shot.
Groom supplied the rest: the Tower Truck Stop, the high school, the Our Place Motel, and the western horizon, which that part of the state is justly famous for at sunset. The revival tent that anchors the film went up near Groom. It was built over three months by Mike Sandone Productions in Dallas, ran thirteen thousand square feet, and could hold as many as a thousand background actors.
A detail worth having right, because people get it wrong: the 190 foot cross that Groom is known for today is not in this film. It had not been built yet. The tent went up on ground that would later hold it.
The weather did the opposite of what the film needed.
The script wanted a drought. The Panhandle, which can usually supply one on request, had heavy rains that summer and turned green.
So the production browned it. Dirt and dead boxwoods were trucked in. Two Texas A&M agronomists were hired to advise on making living grass look dead. Wind machines were set up to fake dust storms, foliage was hidden, and cars were coated with dust.
The set publicist, Vic Heutschy, gave Texas Monthly the line that sums up the whole shoot: "The irony was fantastic. We were doing a scene where everyone is praying for rain. But if it did rain, which it looked like it was going to do, we couldn't shoot."
That is the entire job in two sentences. You do not get the weather you scouted, and the schedule does not move.
Eleven days of shooting, two months of preparation.
The Texas Film Commission, marking the film's twenty-fifth anniversary in Plainview in 2017, put numbers on it: two months of preproduction and eleven days of actual shooting in Plainview, with more than a million dollars into the local economy and residents working as extras.
Those two figures next to each other are the most useful thing in this entry for anyone scoping a small-town shoot. The eleven days are what a schedule shows. The two months are what actually makes the eleven days possible in a town with no crew base, no stage, no equipment house and no hotel inventory to speak of.
The water tower.
The production repainted a water tower east of downtown Plainview with the name and mascot of the fictional town: Rustwater Bengals.
It stayed up. Not for the shoot, not for the season. Until 2016, when the tower, long retired from the city's water supply, was slated for demolition. Twenty-four years of a made up Kansas town's high school mascot standing over a real Texas one.
I would like to nail this one down further. The 1992 repainting is thinly sourced, and the town is the only place that can settle it. That is a phone call I have not made yet, and I would rather tell you it is thin than pretend it is not.
Who made it.
Richard Pearce directed. He had come out of documentary, shooting for Fred Wiseman among others, and had made Heartland and Country before this, both films about people losing ground on land they work. That background is visible in how this one photographs the Panhandle.
Janus Cercone wrote it. Michael Manheim and David V. Picker produced.
Steve Martin plays Jonas Nightengale, a revival preacher running a fraud with a full production crew behind him: spotters working the congregation for information, a radio feed, a light and sound package. Debra Winger is Jane, his manager. Liam Neeson is the local sheriff. Lolita Davidovich is Marva, the waitress. Lukas Haas plays her brother Boyd. Meat Loaf is Hoover. Philip Seymour Hoffman is in it too, early.
What critics praised.
Roger Ebert found the mechanics fascinating: "The behind-the-scenes stuff is fascinating, as we see spotters gathering information from the unsuspecting congregation so the preacher can pump it back to them later."
On Martin: "It's quite a performance, when the spirit takes him and he leaps about onstage, pumping energy into his lethargic audience with show-biz cunning." On Winger: "Debra Winger, who is not in nearly enough films, does a wonderful job of grounding the movie in reality."
It later became a Broadway musical, with music by Alan Menken and lyrics by Glenn Slater. It opened at the St. James Theatre on April 26, 2012, twenty years after the film, ran nineteen performances, and was nominated for the Tony for Best Musical. Raul Esparza played Jonas.
The money.
Paramount released it December 18, 1992. Box Office Mojo records $23.4 million, domestic only, which places it at forty-eight on this list.
My read.
Steve Martin can do anything, and this is one of the films that proves it. Martin, Winger, Neeson and Davidovich is a hard combination to miss on.
The producing lesson is the ratio. Two months of prep against eleven shooting days, in a town of twenty-one thousand, six hundred miles from a crew base. Everything that made those eleven days work was decided before anyone rolled: where the tent got built, who browned the grass, where a hundred crew slept, which storefronts came down and went back up.
That ratio has not changed. It is still what a Panhandle shoot costs you in preparation, and it is still the thing that gets underestimated when somebody looks at a map and sees cheap open country.
If you are looking at the Panhandle.
The light and the horizon up there are genuinely unlike anywhere else in the state, and that is why films keep going back for them. What comes with it is distance from everything: crew, equipment, catering, hospitals, hotels.
I have written about where Texas doubles for somewhere else and about what shooting a feature in Texas actually taught me about the budget. If you are scoping something rural and want the honest version of what it takes, start here.
Who will be next in the countdown?
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