1 - Dezert Light: What is Rainbowland?

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Patrick Hasson: Rainbowland is a roadside attraction, art studio, art gallery, art park, film/photo locale, event space, and one-day art retreat, where art of all kinds will be created and enjoyed!

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2 - Dezert Light: Where were you born, and what are some of your earliest memories of growing up there?

 

Patrick Hasson: I was born in Lebanon, Pennsylvania, and then lived in Trenton, New Jersey until I was eight, and then right outside Northeast Philadelphia until I flew the coop at 17.  My childhood was pretty oppressive and had absolutely zero support for any creativity that existed inside of me, so I’ve blocked most of it out.  My fondest memory of the Philadelphia/Trenton area was leaving it for Florida. 

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3 - Dezert Light: What’s your zodiac sign

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Patrick Hasson:  Scorpio:)

 

4 - Dezert Light: Before becoming a painter, you spent two decades as an independent filmmaker. What originally drew you to storytelling through film?

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Patrick Hasson:  After living in Florida for a couple of years, I enrolled in the Fine Arts College at the University of South Florida in Tampa. I had zero confidence in my creative skills, and while taking a Drawing 101 class, my instructor told me in no uncertain terms that I was a bad drawer and that perhaps a career as an artist wasn’t in the cards for me.  Because I never had any sort of mentor or creative support, I was really affected by this.  The following semester I discovered that the college offered some experimental cinematography classes, so I enrolled.  Always a fan of films, I absolutely loved the concept of creating art on celluloid, and I didn’t need to be a good drawer to do so:) I was introduced to the films of Kenneth Anger, Stan Brakhage, Maya Deren, and so many others.  I created several experimental short films on 16mm film during my time there, learning the art of directing and editing by just going out and doing it. Once I graduated, I really wanted to learn the art of narrative storytelling, so I wrote an experimental feature film entitled THE SPEED OF MIND. I wanted to challenge myself and see if I could write, direct, edit, and produce a feature film on my own.  As I was still learning the art of screenwriting, the story was a bit weak, but the visuals were extremely unconventional, and the film got some attention on the festival circuit.  I proved to myself that I could be a feature writer/director, but I really needed to work on my skill as a writer.  

 

For my next film, I wanted to do a dark comedy about the restaurant business (as I worked in it all through college and after), so I took extensive notes and made character sketches each night while working as a waiter at an Italian restaurant in Tampa. Over the course of a year, I wrote a screenplay entitled WAITING. I had met a producer in New York City while living there for six months, and he really dug the story and wanted to produce it. Turns out, he was from Philadelphia, so I moved back to Philly, and we started raising money to make the film. Within a year, we raised $25,000 and got a few name actors (Will Keenan, Kerri Kenney, Lloyd Kaufman) on board, shooting the film in Philadelphia over the course of a month.  Clearly, I had a knack for comedy as the film was a big hit on the festival circuit and won numerous awards, but as a storyteller, I felt I had taken a large step forward and was gaining confidence in my talents. 

 

I knew the next step for me was moving to Los Angeles and taking a shot at becoming a serious writer/director, so I wrote a Hitchcockian dark comedy (DEAD BROKE) about a broke guy living in a large communal house who becomes so desperate, he starts eating the cat food of the two cats who also live in the house…then the cats take vengeance on him.  I wanted to use it as a calling card to get representation, so I really took my time storyboarding every shot in the film.  I shot the film by myself over 13 days with hundreds of setups, but little did I know that this would be the last time I had total control of a project (which in hindsight was a great learning lesson). I moved out to Los Angeles in April of 2002, not knowing anyone and having zero clue about how Hollywood worked…I was in for a rude awakening. DEAD BROKE was well received, and I was invited to numerous film festivals, including the Berlin Talent Campus at the Berlin Film Festival, but I was discovering that getting work and trying to pitch new projects was extremely difficult without connections to the gatekeepers of Hollywood, especially when I was trying to pitch dark original comedies that weren’t based on IPs or comic book heroes. 

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Over the next few years, I wrote and directed two feature documentaries based on the various occupations I would find myself in trying to squeak out a living in Los Angeles. The first was MR. PATRICK & THE HOLLYWOOD STARS, a film based on the filmmaking workshops I used to teach to underprivileged middle school students throughout Los Angeles through a non-profit called L.A.C.E.R.  We shot the film over a school semester, and the film ended with a Hollywood premiere of the students’ film at the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood.  We shot a really amazing film, but the reality was we needed about $50,000 to hire a full-time editor to put the documentary together. I was barely making enough money to pay my bills working for L.A.C.E.R., but I managed to cut together a 10-minute work-in-progress trailer of the film in order to raise money. Unfortunately, after several years of trying, I was never able to pull it off. The same happened with the HOW I BECAME A PORN DIRECTOR documentary.  Working in the porn industry (as a video editor) for several years following my departure from L.A.C.E.R., I wrote and directed the film over the course of a year and cut together a 10-minute work-in-progress trailer to raise money to edit the feature. The trailer suddenly became one of the hottest projects in Hollywood as various parties wanted to raise millions to get the film completed (even though we only needed 50K for the edit). I had meetings all over town for the next couple of years, but just like the first project, I wasn’t able to raise the money to complete the film, and the project lost steam.  

 

It was during this time that I broke off my engagement to my long-time girlfriend, and I found myself living in a storage shed because I didn’t want to bug friends about crashing on their couch. Little did I know that my next screenplay would be based on this experience, especially after discovering there were other people living in the storage shed complex (which was extremely creepy hearing them moving down hallways late at night). After four months of living there, I finally got back on my feet and moved into an apartment and cranked out a horror script called BLOOD SHED. For the next three years, I pitched it around town, and sometime in 2012 a producer came on board and raised 2 million dollars for the budget, and I was green-lit to direct.  For the first time since arriving in Hollywood, I felt that I had finally ‘arrived.’ My project was funded, and we shot the film over a month in a storage shed complex in Mission Hills. We shot a really creepy film that, if edited correctly, could be a real hit.  Unfortunately, the producer took it over in the editing room, and instead of slowly building the story, he went for the cheap, big scares and ruined it.  The film was so bad I walked out of the editing studio and considered taking my name off the project.  On the night of the film’s premiere, instead of attending, I checked into a 30-day-rehab because my alcoholism and drug addiction had become so bad, I just couldn’t do it anymore.  12 years of trying to create art on film destroyed me.  I loved the art of storytelling, but hated the restrictions of trying to do it in Hollywood.  There had to be another way of creating art. 

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5 - Dezert Light: What inspired you to leave Los Angeles and build a new life in Joshua Tree? Was there a defining moment when you knew the desert was home?

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Patrick Hasson:  Well, carrying over from the last question, by the time I walked out of rehab in April of 2014, there was one thing I knew for sure…I was no longer happy being a filmmaker in Hollywood.  Yes, I loved films, and I loved creating, but I hated all the garbage that came along with raising money, navigating personalities on set, and then losing creative control of the project when it really mattered.  It grew even more tiresome while watching trust-fund kids getting their parents to finance million-dollar-projects or seeing nepotism in full effect as the relatives of famous actors/filmmakers/studio heads got all the directing jobs because of whom they were related to.  I’m not big on making excuses, but fuck, it was hard witnessing this each day. I didn’t want to do it anymore, and I was tired of struggling financially, knowing that I would never be able to afford even a tiny house in the worst part of South Central.

 

The one thing I had going for me at the time was that I was still employed as a full-time video editor at Playboy, so I had a record of steady employment. Another thing I had going was that I had been coming out to Joshua Tree for years after reading an LA Weekly article about Queens of the Stone Age and the whole Desert Rock scene (which totally blew me away…especially the DIY ethos of the place), so I was aware of what a magical place it was. Once I got out of rehab, I thought, “wonder what a house goes for out there?”  I soon found out you could grab a fixer-upper in Joshua Tree for as low as $60,000, so with my steady work history, I was able to finance an old, beat-up drug house for $73,000. My friends in the film world thought I was crazy, asking, “ What are you going to do out there…smoke meth?”

 

I really wasn’t sure what I was going to do with the house, but I knew I at least had a place I could die in, which was strangely reassuring.  I started staying out there on the weekends and discovered that tweakers would knock on my door at all hours of the night because they still thought they could score meth here. So the first order of business for my new house was painting its shit brown exterior a different color…something so different that EVERYONE would know it wasn’t the meth house anymore. I chose Summer Citrus Orange, an almost neon shade of orange paint (Behr Paint) from Home Depot.  At this time (2014), Joshua Tree was basically two colors, brown and beige.  Color, especially bright colors, was not part of the landscape as they are now, so my neon orange house immediately got lots of attention (a lot of it bad)...but the good news was, the tweakers stopped coming, so mission accomplished. 

 

What really struck me was the transformational power of color, especially with a simple coat of paint. This brilliant shade of orange paint took my dingy, depressing, shit brown house and gave it new life.  The orange exploded against the high desert sun and intensified everything around it. The sky was bluer, the Joshua trees were greener, and my little house suddenly seemed like a work of art against the desert landscape. It was in that moment that everything changed. I didn’t know it yet, but from that day forward, I would never be able to exist in a white or brown environment again.

 

Back inside the house, I stared at its dirty white walls. I felt like I wanted to scream; it all had to change. I thought back to the color wheel I learned in art school…you had your primaries - blue, yellow, red – and your secondaries - orange, green, and purple. I spent the next few weeks over at the Yucca Valley Home Depot, trying to find the most saturated shade of red, blue, purple, etc.  I bought countless test samples and painted each on the walls of the various rooms. The kitchen became Citrus Splash Yellow, the living room Song Bird Blue, the living room Grenadine Red, the master bedroom Orchid Kiss Purple, the bathroom Limeade Green, and the other bedroom Summer Citrus Orange. 

 

After months of driving out from LA on the weekends and painting non-stop, my ugly little meth house became a beautiful, rainbow-colored home that I couldn’t be more pleased. Only problem was, I was still living in LA and had no idea how I was going to make money if I stopped editing porn (which I had to, otherwise I’d be back to drink and drugs in no time). Maybe I could turn the house into a writer’s retreat? I knew lots of writers, but I didn’t know a lot who had the money to rent a retreat. Then, one day while talking to a friend, he pitched the idea of putting my house on Airbnb.  Seemed like a possibility, but I needed to decorate the house as it was pretty barren with the exception of the colorful walls.

 

I started hitting the Olvera Street Market in Downtown LA, buying $10 mini guitars and inexpensive Mexican blankets for the house. I scoured the thrift stores in Joshua Tree and bought $20 tables and chairs (back when you could find them). With the leftover house paint, I splashed the six colors onto the guitars and tables, Jackson Pollock style. It was the first time I had attempted any sort of ‘art’ since my drawing professor eviscerated my confidence back in college. The effect was magical. Something about those six colors together triggered something in my brain. I wasn’t trying to chase the rainbow, but something way bigger than myself was in play, and for a few hundred dollars, I had furnished the house in a very unique way.

 

I called my Retreat RANCHO EL REPOSO, and soon after putting it on Airbnb, the reservations began coming in.  I was shocked–having no idea if people would be interested in renting a house that looked like a set on Sesame Street–but they did.  And the reservations grew.  And the reviews were great.  And suddenly I had an unexpected income stream coming in…not enough to pay all my bills, but enough to consider the idea of pursuing this further. I was coming up on a year of sobriety and my life, for the first time in a long time, seemed hopeful. And then I made the mistake of visiting a friend from rehab who had fallen off the wagon…

I stopped by his place in Azuza, and things were not well. He was smoking heroin and meth in 10-minute intervals and had clearly fallen from grace. I tried talking him into going to an AA meeting with me, but he had no interest. So, instead of leaving the apartment (as I should have), I noticed the small piles of pills on the glass table, including some which I had been horribly addicted to (Xanax and Percocet). For whatever reason, I thought to myself that I could have ONE Xanax…I had been doing so well the last year, and one pill wouldn’t do much. So against all good judgment, I took one xanax (and then many more).  Three days later I would awake from a blackout in the middle of an AA meeting next to my sponsor, who was none too pleased with me. I soon discovered I had taken my one-year cake totally fucked up, and my entire home group knew of my relapse.

 

Why do I bring this up?  Because I was so embarrassed that I drove out to my place in Joshua Tree trying to figure out what to do next. I had let all my friends in AA down. Should I just go back to drinking and drugging? Back to editing porn and trudging through Hollywood?  Or, should I just kill myself?  And there I sat on my couch, eyes closed and weeping, thinking back across the last year. I had done all 12 steps with my sponsor, attended meetings each day, made hundreds of amends to so many people, and was really starting to turn my life around…but I blew it. I relapsed. I was at my absolute lowest point…and then, the strangest thing happened. I encountered what they call a ‘spiritual awakening.’ There are really no words to describe it…All I can say is that my body was enveloped in a warm embrace, feeling something much greater than I taking over, extracting all the pain and sorrow of so many years. 

 

Then, a voice spoke to me. A voice that told me everything was going to be alright. I was exactly where I was supposed to be, and the people who had hurt me growing up could no longer do so. I had never believed in the Catholic ‘God’ I was raised on, but this was something. God? Perhaps. A Higher Power? Most likely. The voice told me I was on the right path, and it was right there and then that I knew Joshua Tree was my home. Whatever this colorful path of paint was about, I would continue to explore it, and I would listen to that voice from here on out (and get back to meetings).