Amargosa

Fascinating documentary about an aging ballet dancer in... Death Valley.

Free use, by Tuxyso / Wikimedia Commons / CC-BY-SA-3.0, link here.

Amargosa (2000). Grade: A-

In 1967, Marta Beckett, a touring ballet dancer in her 40s, pulled into Death Valley Junction’s only gas station to get a flat tire fixed. Waiting for the fix, she wandered around the nearby few buildings, and found one that had a decrepit, decaying auditorium inside.

And so began a 40-year dedication to her particular art. In a long-abandoned former railroad stop for the local salt mines. Where Beckett would perform her own dance/musical creations. Even to an audience of one. Even if the audience existed only in her imagination.

Beckett’s the subject of Todd Robinson’s 2000 documentary, named for the auditorium/opera house she repaired and hand-painted. (It’s the original name of the town, and a mostly dry river that disappears underground nearby.)

Born in 1924, Beckett was fascinated with painting, and especially ballet, at a very early age. Her mother encouraged these pursuits; her father thought they were exhibitionist. Become a piano teacher if you want, he told her — but to be on stage was shameful. (Naturally he was having illicit affairs.)

Beckett eventually made it to New York, where she won positions in the chorus line at Radio City Music Hall and on various Broadway productions. Eventually she wrote a one-woman show of her own, consisting of various acted/danced segments playing various characters, some autobiographical in nature.

There’s a few snippets of this one-woman show in Amargosa. It’s not said if the whole show was filmed, or what year, or by whom. The clips we see are silent, but in good, vivid color, and Beckett looks to be around the age she was when she moved to Death Valley. So they’re filmed a little before or a little after that.

These clips are mesmerizing. I’m not anywhere near versed enough in the fine arts to say if they constitute “good” ballet. What storylines I can make out from the clips (and Beckett’s description of them) seem pretty cheesy… but aren’t the plots of most famous operas or ballets pretty cheesy? And at least one audience member told Beckett that one of the stories — about a young woman trapped into a lonely life of looking after her ailing mother — felt like her life. (And it had some resemblance to Beckett’s own.)

Even more mesmerizing is the theater itself. Once Beckett (and her then-husband) had finished repairing it, she set about painting it. In the style of an opera house from, say, 1700 or so. Lords and ladies of great wealth, nuns and monks of great piety, beautiful courtesans and the Native Americans who would have traveled Death Valley in 1700. The audience Beckett always dreamed of performing for. So, in a sense, she always did.

This is from San Diego Magazine, and they credit it as “courtesy of Amargosa Opera House.”

Impressive enough… click here for a bigger look. Or, on the Amargosa non-profit’s own website, you can find a neat interactive panoramic view.

All this is to say that for a pretty low-budget documentary filmmaker, Robinson here has a very good visual eye. And it’s not in a showoffy sense; he’s trying to show the world as Beckett sees it. (There’s also sweeping helicopter shots of Death Valley that won cinematographer Curt Apduhan an award. Back before everyone had remote-controlled drones, getting those shots wasn’t cheap or easy!)

Robinson’s also very sensitive in his interview clips (he keeps himself offscreen and unheard). Most are with Beckett; some are with another older lady who helps out at the opera house gift shop; some are with a quirky, lovable codger/handyman/jokester named Tom “Wilget” Willett. He took up residence in one of the building’s adjacent hotel rooms in the early 1980s, did repairs to pay his rent, and eventually performed as sort of a vaudeville-comic figure in Beckett’s shows. (He died in 2005 of a stroke; Beckett continued dancing for a few years, then performed only by singing in a wheelchair, then “retired” at age 87; she died, at home in Amargosa, at age 94.) And there’s also the late science-fiction author Ray Bradbury, who is probably speaking for Robinson when he praises how Beckett followed her vision no matter what.

Does Beckett come across as a bit of an odd duck? Sure. But many artists do; if they’re not a cruel movie director making actors do 100 retakes, what of it? Beckett has lots of pets, and feeds wild horses/burros in the area. She believes that animals are better than people; I’ve known more than a few folks who feel the same way, if enough humans have treated them shabbily. (Beckett’s husband, who was kind of her tour manager in the 1960s and helped repair the opera house, was also a serial cheat; in Death Valley Junction, you would really have to work at being a serial cheat!) Willett and the gift-shop lady and Bradbury all seem to love Beckett, in their own ways. Beckett believes she’s seen ghosts, and the others believe her; she wants to be reincarnated as a nearby spirit. Why not, and who’s to say she hasn’t?

A friend helped Beckett buy the opera house, and the surrounding buildings, for setting up a non-profit dedicated to historical preservation and the arts. It’s still there, barely. The hotel appears to be running, with 16 bare-bones rooms, and no televisions or phones (but they do have A/C, a must in Death Valley). There are still tours of the Opera House. And a tribute performance to Beckett coming up in a few weeks! (It’s sold out.) The opera building itself has some structural issues that need fixing; it may not survive a great deal longer.

If you or anyone you know are traveling in the region anytime soon, I would strongly suggest checking out this amazing creation. (I haven’t, but I’ve been through Death Valley Junction, many years ago; I saw the outside of the opera house, and assumed it was abandoned. If I’d only known I could have seen inside!) It’s not too far from Vegas; bring water when traveling in the desert, and CALL before you come to confirm that tours are open. The nearest gas is about 20 miles away.¹

You can check out that nonprofit’s website, too, which has links to this very good article and this Atlas Obscura one with some neat photos. You can read this nice account of her memorial or this obituary; the latter has some YouTube footage of Beckett onstage:

And you can also get this beautiful little movie from your library. It’s on various streaming services, for now; you can check IMDb for details (and I’ll always link that page under the title up top, too.)

In a better world, or better country, we wouldn’t have memorials and museums preserving the birthplaces of or buildings made by the rich, the powerful, the famous. We’d preserve things like the lovely theater it took Marta Beckett four years to paint. Celebrating, instead of glory, the mere and greater dream of finding joy in making something beautiful. But we don’t live in those better spheres.

1. There does seem to be a weed/edibles store open in Death Valley Junction, at very reasonable prices!