Gallup’s cinematic connection with Route 66 really begins in 1937, when R.E. Griffith decided to open the El Rancho Hotel right beside it. As the brother of film director D.W. Griffith, he used his Hollywood connections to pitch the El Rancho as a rustic slice of L.A. on the New Mexico ranges, and many actors stayed there while making Westerns up north in the Four Corners region and in Red Rock Park just east of town. Those who didn’t come by train could reach Gallup by car, and in 1939, John Ford’s production crew rolled through town during on-location shooting for The Grapes of Wrath – which established the western mystique of Route 66 as the route by which families of displaced Midwesterners escape the Dust Bowl. A decade later, Billy Wilder gave 66 the ultimate roadside attraction with Ace in the Hole. Wilder commissioned the enormous mountain set where Kirk Douglas’s amoral newspaper reporter exploits a man trapped by a cave-in, and then lures passersby into an ever-growing carnival. Gallup residents were hired as extras, and the sea of cars they parked beside the highway can be seen when Douglas is hoisted to the top of the mountain. By the 1960’s, the newer and wider Interstate 40 supplanted the old two-lane Route 66 as the best way to drive across northern New Mexico, but 2003 saw the death of Gallup’s second-most colorful roadway when U.S. Route 666 was officially re-designated as U.S. 491. The old number apparently had too many unlucky connotations (earning it the nickname, “the devil’s highway”), but stuck around long enough to make a memorable appearance in Natural Born Killers, thanks to one-man media circus Wayne Gale and a couple of psychopaths using the road for thrill killing. We see a bullet-riddled sign for U.S. 666, then Gale standing on the desert road, noting how it runs through “towns like Cortez, Shiprock, Sheep Springs, and ending in Gallup, New Mexico. To some a beautiful stretch of the American landscape, but to Mickey and Mallory Knox, who are still at large, it is literally a candy lane of murder and mayhem.” To exercise their demons, the killers pull off the devil’s highway and onto the Navajo reservation — the last note in the old road’s cinematic swan song.