MURRIETA'S LEAP ... creator notes

Murrieta's Leap is a story that B Budd and I have kept fermenting inside us since we were kids on our grandad's Ojai ranch. That ranch is now flooded under Casitas Lake but the seminal Coyote Creek still runs untouched from way up in the mountains down into the lake. My grandad, also John Selby, was born in the 1880s in Ventura, just downstream from Ojai on the Pacific coast. He settled his beloved Santa Ana valley around the turn of the century, and lived there until he passed on at 86.

He told me in his last weeks of life that yep, there had indeed been a large family of Chumash Indians living up Coyote Creek when he arrived in the 1890s – but they just kinda slipped off up the creek and away ... and were gone. All that remained were the stories that Gramps told us. And one of the most compelling and upsetting myths was the leap of the last Chumash chief's daughter off Topa Topa cliff.

A hundred years before Gramps settled his ranch, the Chumash were fighting Spanish soldiers invading the Ventura region. Gramps was what was called an Injun Lover – and he told me tearfully how Chief Matilija in desperation took his beloved daughter up to the top of Topa Topa in east-end Ojai, and ceremonially sacrificed her to the Chumash gods to drive the goddamn Spanish away.

As Gramps' version of the story goes, she voluntarily took that fateful leap right off the Topa Topa cliff. As a young kid, that story struck me to the quick. You'll note when reading the screenplay that there are several fateful leaps in the story that drive the plot. And of course we all must take fateful leaps in our own lives.

RAW INDIGENOUS SPIRIT

The Chumash sacrifice obviously didn't work – but the myth certainly worked its magic on me. That raw indigenous spirit has manifested most strongly in two film projects, Heart Force (High Heart) and Murrieta's Leap. In fact, after struggling to tell the Murrieta's Leap story in third person narrative, and then in my own first-person voice, I ended up writing the novel version in Gramps' voice, and in present-tense which I otherwise never use in fiction. Only Gramps' voice could tell this tale – such is the continually uncertain ground upon which writers write.

As a kid I personally knew most of the characters in Murrieta's Leap. I've done my best to truthfully honor them – and at the same time I've taken full liberty to transform them into more-mythic characters. And there actually was a bank robbery by some guy named Murrieta that kicks off this story, and the cop did get shot right down from our ranch. Also, I had a wild cousin married to a drunk rock and roll musician and she did try to commit suicide at the Casitas dam.

And yeah, I did go on my solo bow-and-arrow deer-hunt pack trip up Coyote Creek behind the ranch – and I had a remarkable encounter with a young buck that stimulated my own mystic awakening up there. But of course, a lot of what happens up Coyote Creek in the movie is far beyond my own youthful experience.

Murrieta's Leap the movie actually begins very briefly back in the 1850s with another of Gramps' old Murrieta stories. Grandad was was so certain the historic Juaquin Murrieta did rob that stage coach and then go hide up Coyote Creek, that he spent a lot of time off hunting for that gold himself – sometimes with us tagging along on our ponies. A lot of this screenplay comes from real life and enduring myth – but of course the rest is the product of an over-fertile imagination. B Budd and I struggled literally for years with the ending in particular, writing very different versions – but then suddenly one night I woke up from a lucid dream, got up and pounded out what I'd dreamed – that's where the film's climax came from.

THE END IS THE BEGINNING

For me the ending makes perfect sense, even though it leaves the reader/audience entirely up in the air as to how they're going to interpret what happens in the climax. I leave to others to philosophize on meaning. I am content to live with the mystery – because in the mystery of the ending I find a meaning I can't conceptualize, and yet at mythic (and even perhaps quantum scientific) levels it makes perfect sense.

All of my local California novels and screenplays are an expression of a unique West Coast literary voice that's still struggling for recognition. Those of us born around Ojai were strongly influenced by the Okie migration and dialect – even the Beatles and the Stones took on that Okie drawl. I'm hoping these screenplays will be shot in deference to the local culture they reflect.

For most of the current High Heart films I'm quite willing to let go and compromise with producers and directors, and allow the original vision to evolve as a team effort and expression. But not with this story – it's already somehow solidified into some kind of new mythic tale – and I'll strive toward its true manifestation. The filming itself will be a remarkable experience for me, even if I'm just observing. A writer lives for these unexpected eternal stories that seem to arrive as lucid dreams, as gifts from beyond. And for such tales there's a professional responsibility demanding inviolate expression.

Oh yeah!

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