Announcing New Mexico Film Properties LLC

    Offering filming rights for variety of New Mexico-curated writings

A new company formed in scenic and historic Las Vegas, New Mexico, the long-time film capital of the Southwest, is now offering filming rights to a series of publications by several authors, including some from the region. Native Las Vegan Jim Terr is well-aware of the film location potential of his home town, "the original" Las Vegas, founded in 1835, mainly because it has been the locale for so many feature films and TV shows (see below).

Although his new venture, New Mexico Film Properties LLC, includes several projects which could be shot in Las Vegas, NM, he says that is not his main thrust. "I've simply been lucky enough to encounter some brilliant writers and come across some very cinematic scripts and plays," he says, "and I'd like to see them shot, whether in New Mexico or not."

Terr's 1992 video production, Las Vegas, New Mexico - America's oldest film location, with over 70,000 YouTube views, made a good case for the town's eminence as a location even before No Country for Old Men, Longmire, Outer Range, and Roswell, New Mexico used it as a primary filming spot. 1984's Red Dawn was shot there entirely.

It was when Terr recently acquired the movie rights to a series of books by the late historian Howard Bryan that he started to think of the film potential of many properties he had personally been associated with. Bryan's best-selling history, Wildest of the Wild West, makes the case that Las Vegas, NM, was much more violent than any of the fabled towns in the West, and Terr recently made a demo video called Vultures of Vegas: Notable Villains of the Wildest Town in the Wild West to test the concept.

A review in the Santa Fe New Mexican called Bryan's writing "morbidly funny," and Terr realized that the many stories in these books would be excellent material for streaming video channels. He also took inventory of other properties he says he has been "lucky to be entrusted with," to promote for film and TV use:

• Babe, Inc., written by award-winning playwright playwright Rosemary Zibart. Terr says he saw the original stage play in Santa Fe in 2008, and the play was also staged in New York and London. "I was floored," Terr says, "and the description proves that its time has come: In the year 2108, men can order robotic women as mates, but due to a snafu in the system, a real woman gets substituted for a robotic "Babe" to accompany a man to his mother's funeral.
  

• Sherlock in Vegas by Jim Terr. In a new weekly feature, The Las Vegas Optic present a serialized story by local writer Jim Terr, involving a visit to Las Vegas by famous detective Sherlock Holmes in 1899. The original Sherlock Holmes stories are among the most popular and most imitated in literary history. Those stories were "as told by" Holmes' friend Dr. Watson; this story is told by Andrieus A. Jones, one of Las Vegas' most famous residents, who as a US Senator headed the committee which enacted Women's Suffrage in 1919.
  

• Consumption by author Allison Dickson. Dickson's best-selling mystery thriller, The Other Mrs. Miller, was published in 2019 by Putnam and has been optioned as a Hollywood screenplay, but Terr says the unconventional Consumption is even more chilling, and a staged reading before a live audience convinced him it had that effect on others as well.

• Defiance in New Mexico Dr. Michael Sweeney of Ohio State University published his acclaimed book, Secrets of Victory, in 2006, and one dramatic chapter, Defiance in New Mexico, struck Terr as a natural for production. It tells the story of KFUN radio in Las Vegas, New Mexico, being the only station in the country to defy a World War Two government ban on broadcasting in a foreign language.
  
  At the risk of losing his livelihood and his radio station, owner Ernie Thwaites argued that Spanish is not a "foreign language" in northern New Mexico, and in a long battle, he fought the government to a draw. Sweeney died of cancer in 2021 but insisted that Terr continue to pursue a production of this gripping story.
  
             HEAR INTERVIEW ABOUT PROJECT ON KTRC/SANTA FE 2-6-24
  
  Terr's own scripts include one which he says late Santa Fe resident Alan Arkin was fond of "except for its lack of funding" (about a bitter, retired businessman who finds true happiness in a native casino); a historical drama about "Mother Jones" recorded as a two-hour radio play for KUNM-FM public radio in Albuquerque; and several projects attached to Iraqi-American actor Suhail Dabbach, a friend of Terr's who was the unforgettable "Man in Black" suicide bomber in 2008's Oscar-winning best film, The Hurt Locker and the star of the Netflix critical hit, Mosul, produced by the Russo brothers.
  
  "I'm not trying to be a 'capital A' agent," Terr says. That is a very complicated, highly defined business. I was a film and theater reviewer on KUNM public radio for years," he says, "And I've seen many original plays that would make excellent movies. I would be happy to get those circulating in Hollywood or to find them the financing they need to be made into films -- either here in New Mexico or elsewhere -- and that is my mission with this venture."
  
  While most popular films are budgeted at $50 million or more, Terr says, a good, successful, "simply staged" movie can also be shot for as little as $50,000, The Blair Witch Project being the most-often-cited example. Terr says he is open to all financed proposals -- including investment -- on any or all of these properties. More information on these projects is at www.nmfp-llc.com .