Due Date

Some Hollywood types are producing a movie which will carry that title. Some scenes for the movie are being shot near my home. That is the sum total of my knowledge about the upcoming film - except to say that Robert Downey, Jr., is in town, so we assume he is starring.

New Mexico is a big state - area-wise. At 121,593 square miles, it is the fifth largest state. With a population of under 2 million, it is only the 36th most populated state. (For comparison, New Mexico is more than twice as large as Georgia, but has only 20% of Georgia's population.

Those numbers mean lots of wide open spaces. Much of it is public land. White Sands Missile Range is 3200 square miles. That is about the size of South Carolina and is bigger than ten other states.

But, even on private lands, people are comparatively scarce - ideal for shooting movies.

Anyway, for "Due Date", the producers apparently want to run some cars off the side of an overpass. Now, in New Mexico, bridges on the U.S. Hiway system are quite attractive. I don't know what they are doing elsewhere, but when they build a bridge here, it is decorated in a Southwest motif and painted to match. Maybe that is why Hollywood likes this location. Maybe it is the aforementioned population scarcity.

Where U.S. Highway 70 runs through our town, there is a very nice frontage road along both sides of the hiway. If a stretch of hiway is blocked, it is very easy to divert traffic off at one of the exits, onto the frontage road, then back onto the hiway a couple of exits down the road, past the blockage.

New Mexico likes to host movie production companies. they pay the state to "lease" a chunk of our real estate. They hire a lot of local support people. The state was delighted to close down a short section of U.S. 70 for shooting film.

That is to say, the State Government is happy about the film shoot. A lot of New Mexicans are very unhappy about being inconvenienced ever so slightly. One reader of the local daily newspaper has even suggested a class action suit against the governor.

Since New Mexico is legally a bi-lingual state, you can call that either "selfish" or "egoista". means the same.