“My dad had a well service and we drilled water wells all over West Texas and up into the San Antonio area. In 2010, I came to Midland and bought a friend of the family, Gene Wheeler’s, water well drilling company from him – just a rig and the pulling unit. They had been doing vertical wells, but fracking was really starting to take off. They were using a lot more water on the fracks on the horizontal wells and so the water well business was absolutely insane.
I ended up having four rigs and we were drilling water wells for Pioneer Resources and all the majors. I went from a little Mom and Pop to a pretty damn big company.
In June 2014, I sold it to private equity and then oil started going down and then it crashed. Ninety percent of my business was oilfield related and a little bit of agriculture – I would say 80/20 – and so they went bust. I was able to buy back my non-comp and I started over again in 2016.
The water well side is really taking off. It’s been an exciting journey. Every day I wake up excited to get up and go over [to the site]. I have my pilot’s license, so I’m flying all over the place, running parts and going to meetings, so I stay very busy. I have two Cessna 185s – actually, one was my dad’s, and that one’s going to be my son’s one day.
I had talked to the filmmakers about using our rig, but they were going to use a different rig. Then they called me on a Monday and needed it there on Wednesday. That rig – an Atlas Copco RD20 III drilling rig – does not always work on top of that substructure, and I had pieces in El Paso, and then we had the substructure here in Midland, and so I started having to orchestrate all my trucks to move everything. It was quite a feat. We got part of the rig there and other pieces were on the way and they had to start shooting, so we got it up on that substructure and put it at some angles because you can’t shoot something and add something in a different scene. I spent quite a few days on location and then, when we moved into that field in Bartlett, I was there a few days.
They asked me if I wanted to get in that scene, but I didn’t want to wear coveralls and stand out there all day, every day. They told me they would put me in the nightclub scene – when Erwin (Rudy Pankow’s) phone rings and everything gets destroyed – and I asked them to get my friend Stanley Koenig in there, too, and they were like, “Yeah, sure, no problem,” because we kind of saved the day, since they were without a rig.
They wanted us there in the afternoon and they had already done one scene and they actually had some of those fake bullets go off and break some stuff, so they had to reset everything. Stanley and I were like, “[Forget] this movie.” Koen Wooten, the producer, heard us and he said, “Y’all can’t leave; you’ve already been in the scene. We’ll make sure and get y’all in the front.” We were not very happy about being movie stars at that point, but they treated us really well throughout the whole process. I want to say this, too – Koen was absolutely fantastic; he was great. And Mark Bristol, the director, was really cool.
My partner Joe Willeke and I helped with the lines where Virgil (Michael Denney) tells Erwin all the potential dangers of working on a rig – getting your toes chopped off, your teeth knocked out, blown up or electrocuted – and then says, “Death can come from anywhere at any time. Welcome aboard.”
[Spoiler alert.] We were very much involved in the scene when they hit oil because we used our air compressor on the rig to blow “oil” – not real crude oil, some kind of Hollywood oil – up into the air. They had some ideas on how to do it and we told them how it should be done and it worked out awesome. I think there was a rainbow over it. Carrie-Anne Moss (who plays Faye, the café owner) was so excited she gave Chris, one of my crew members, a hug. He called me and told me that they were all happy.
We spent a lot of time bullsh*tting with Thomas Haden Church. He has a ranch down in [central Texas] and actually knows some cousins of mine. I have a ranch, too, so he and I connected on that and we spent hours out there BSing with him.
My tool pusher wasn’t in the movie because he’s a grumpy guy. He was mad that we were out there and he didn’t like any of it because he’s just a sour guy. He’s from Mexico and he’s got a pretty strong accent. After every scene in the movie, the filmmakers would say, “Beautiful, beautiful – let’s shoot it again,” And my tool pusher would say, “If it’s so beautiful, why do they have to shoot it again?” So, that’s our joke on the rigs now. When something’s good at work, I say, ‘Beautiful, beautiful – let’s shoot it again.’”
– As told to Rebecca Ponton
Headline photo: Casey Hutto (center), owner of Santa Rosa Well Service, with his son Casen, and the rig crew on Hutto’s ranch in Pandale, Texas. Photo courtesy of Casey Hutto.
Oil and gas operations are commonly found in remote locations far from company headquarters. Now, it's possible to monitor pump operations, collate and analyze seismic data, and track employees around the world from almost anywhere. Whether employees are in the office or in the field, the internet and related applications enable a greater multidirectional flow of information – and control – than ever before.
