Permian Podcast a Boom for West Texas Journalist

AAPL chats with Christian Wallace, creator of the Boomtown podcast that inspired Paramount’s new Landman series

by/ RACHEL STOWE MASTER, editor of NAPE — The Magazine for Dealmakers

This article appeared in the November/December issue of the Landman magazine.

Christian Wallace grew up in a West Texas family of cotton farmers, cowboys and oil workers. Andrews, his small hometown, got its start in agriculture and cattle before oil and gas became king. But from an early age, Wallace wanted to be a writer.

The first in his family to go to college, Wallace graduated from Texas State University with bachelor’s degrees in history and English before traveling some 4,500 from home to earn a master’s degree in writing at the University of Galway in Ireland. He returned to the Permian oil patch with advanced degrees and knowledge — and the student debt that so often accompanies them — so spent a year as a roughneck before pursing journalism full time.

Within a few years, Wallace joined the staff of Texas Monthly — also known as the “National Magazine of Texas” — as a fact-checker, working his way up to staff writer and senior editor. His work includes tales about cowboys, oil field medics, honkytonks and larger than life legends. Three of his stories have been optioned for Hollywood adaption by HBO, Tom Hanks’ Playtone and Leonardo DiCaprio’s Appian Way Productions.

Wallace’s work drawing from his oil "eld roots is claiming the biggest spotlight at present. His story about the 2018 Permian Basin oil boom led to Boomtown, a wildly popular podcast about the people, economics and geopolitics of the historic surge. Written and hosted by Wallace, the 12-episode documentary has close to 5 million downloads and is the inspiration behind Yellowstone creator Taylor Sheridan’s new Landman series on Paramount+. In the lead role, Billy Bob Thornton plays Tommy Norris, a landman and oil industry crisis manager. Other Hollywood heavyweights include Jon Hamm as an oil baron named Monty Miller and Demi Moore as his wife, Cami.

As the world’s leading association for landmen, AAPL provided educational material and insight to the producers, including suggesting that changing the show’s original two-word Land Man title to the single-word Landman would more accurately portray the vital real-world profession. AAPL headquarters in downtown Fort Worth was even the setting for a long day of filming.

As excitement was building for the show’s Nov. 17, 2024, premiere, we asked Wallace to share about his road from the Permian oil "elds to podcast host to co-creator and executive producer of Landman.

AAPL: You grew up in a small town in West Texas. Tell us about your family ties to the energy industry.

Wallace: My uncle has worked in oil and gas pretty much my whole life. He’s been a tubing tester. He was on a casing crew. He was a diesel mechanic. Back in high school, my dad worked for a "shing and rental company — an oil "eld service company. Right now my younger brother works as a hotshotter in a shop working on BOPs [blowout preventers]. So it’s definitely been a family affair. And the thing is, when you grow up in the middle of the Permian Basin, oil and gas is all around you. It’s just the water that you swim in. It’s immersive.

AAPL: How did the Boomtown podcast come about? Was that your first podcast?

Wallace: It was my first podcast and probably will always be my only podcast. Imperative Entertainment, a Hollywood production company, was trying to get a podcast division started, so they partnered with Texas Monthly magazine to create a podcast. Among the ideas that were pitched was a story I had written about the 2018 boom in West Texas.

That served as the launching pad for the idea for Boomtown, and then we spent about a year working on it, reporting and gathering tape out in West Texas. It came out in November of 2019, and we wrapped right before COVID hit.

AAPL: Tell us about the path from podcast to a Paramount+ series.

Members are welcome to log in and read more of our interview with Christian Wallace in the November/December 2024 issue of the Landman magazine.