In 2009, Ty Roberts received an email from his father telling him that a family friend had acquired the rights to an oil field book and wanted to make a movie. At the time, Roberts was living in Argentina and working on a documentary about the spectacled bear (the only native bear species found in South America). Roberts had originally ventured from his hometown of Midland to Argentina in his early twenties to pursue an offer at an oil exploration company. The plan was to follow in his father’s, grandfather’s, and great-grandfather’s footsteps and begin a career in the oil and gas industry. But Roberts soon realized his passions lay elsewhere—specifically, behind a camera.

Roberts eventually made contact with the friend, a man named Steve Massey, who had moved to Midland in the eighties to work as a roughneck and had later grown his own business as a pipe salesman. Massey had no real concept of moviemaking, but he was passionate about The Iron Orchard. Over the next couple of years Roberts helped him develop a plan. In 2011 they had a script written and began shopping it around without much success. Eventually Massey told Roberts that his option on The Iron Orchard was about to expire and that he did not plan to renew it. Roberts felt as if two years of work and a dream had just vanished. Then he had a screwball notion. He contacted the Van Zandt children and pitched them his idea: sell him an eighteen-month option for $1, and he would use his Midland connections to raise the millions needed to cover the production costs. The Van Zandts were skeptical, but they agreed to the deal.

As Roberts went back to work looking for patrons, he decided that if he was going to spend this much time and effort on the project, he would direct the movie himself. “It would be my calling card,” he said.

But the oilmen Roberts was certain would line up to throw money at the project proved to be less than surefire bets. Though he quickly covered his development costs, the rest of the process proved slow-going. The option expired again. This time Roberts had to pay in full. Then, in 2015, the price of oil crashed, and the already slim pickings shrunk to almost none. Roberts realized that if he were going to make this film, he’d have to do it with far less money than he had originally hoped.

With a significantly trimmed bottom line, he moved forward once again and finally made some progress. A casting director put him in touch with Lane Garrison. The Dallas native is not the typical Hollywood leading man. He’s built like a bull rider and his lip is often fat with a wad of Skoal. His personal history includes both tragedy and a remarkable display of bootstrap ambition that tracks in an eerily similar way to the character he portrays in the film. After a few conversations with Garrison, Roberts knew he had found his Jim McNeely. (Despite his Texas bona fides, Garrison received some good-natured ribbing for his pronunciation of “oil” from some Big Spring locals visiting the set. “Oy-yell,” they howled. “It’s uhl!”)

In 2016, Roberts and producer Houston Hill managed to put together enough financing to set a date for production. Two weeks away from the first scheduled shoot day and still underfunded, Roberts connected with Greg McCabe, of the Wildcatters Network, an online investment platform. McCabe proved to be the angel Roberts had been hoping would appear to help cover the remaining deficit. “We took a big leap of faith, and it paid off,” Roberts said. It seemed The Iron Orchard movie was going to be made at last.

There’s a scene in the book where Jim McNeely, having tasted mild success from his first gusher but not yet curdled by the glut of excessive wealth, drives out to Scurry County to inspect a block of leases for sale. The area is unproven, and the geological features aren’t overly promising of any oil underfoot. Still, McNeely has a good feeling. It’s the only time he prays, not to God but to Saint Rita, the patroness of impossible dreams, whose name has been invoked by oilmen since Frank Pickrell drilled that first successful well in West Texas.

There are multiple accounts of how Pickrell’s Santa Rita No. 1 came to be. The version you’ll hear most often from the old-timers hanging around oil patch cafes is that Pickrell’s success was blind luck. In 1919, the wildcatter had come into some oil and gas permits on a stretch of drought-ridden sheep range west of San Angelo. Few believed that the land or what lay beneath it was worth anything, but Pickrell was determined, and after two years he managed to raise the funds to start drilling. The story goes that the transport hauling his rig broke down before it reached its intended location. The eighteen-month drilling permit was set to expire at midnight, so Pickrell unloaded the rig off the wagons and started drilling right there on the spot.

Progress proved slow. Pickrell was using an old cable-tool rig run by crews that knew more about cowboying than they did oil wells. Several times the money ran out and operations came to a halt. At one of these low points, Pickrell climbed the derrick and released a handful of rose petals he’d been given by a group of Catholic investors. He decided then to name the well after the patron saint of the impossible.

“There’s an element of luck in all business,” he says, “but in the oil business, luck is the queen of destiny.”

Twenty-one months after drilling first began, the Santa Rita No. 1 gushed into being. People from as far away as Fort Worth came to witness the oil spraying, which continued to spew for a month until the casing arrived and a packer was set. It’s hard to overstate the importance of this discovery to the region and the state. Pickrell had found the Permian Basin oil reserve, which would yield years of production, and because much of the region is state university land, the riches that have since flowed from those wells have filled the coffers of the Permanent University Fund, to the tune of $17 billion. The real kicker, as the old-timers will tell you, is that soon after, another well was spudded where the first one was meant to be drilled, and it turned out to be “as dry as popcorn.”

McNeely isn’t so lucky. In the novel he goes against his gut feeling in Scurry County and decides not to buy the leases. The decision haunts him for the rest of his life. Someone else took the chance, and soon, “glinting silver in the sun like a well-tended orchard of iron, were fifty-six of the finest oil wells ever drilled in America.”

There’s a line in Van Zandt’s book that his son, Ned, delivers in the film. “There’s an element of luck in all business,” he says, “but in the oil business, luck is the queen of destiny.” The idiom is certainly true for wildcatters, but surely Van Zandt knew that luck plays an equally monarchical role in the business of creating art that endures.

Back when The Iron Orchard was still the focus of editorials, the Star-Telegram wrote that the novel “shows every sign of a long life as a dependable producer . . . A Hollywood offset is already spudded in with excellent prospects.” For all of his brushes with success, Edmund Van Zandt did not live to see this proverbial well come in. He published two more novels—neither of which earned the attention of his debut—before he died on July 22, 1972, at the age of 56. The year before he passed, the cinematic adaptation of The Last Picture Show premiered to critical acclaim and went on to win two of its eight Oscar nominations.

Half a century later, the other co-winner of the 1966 TIL fiction award will at long last have its day at the movies. Given the trials and tribulations that have plagued its path to the theaters, it’s no coincidence that Ty Roberts named his production company Santa Rita Pictures. As of this writing, Roberts was still a few weeks away from finally finishing the film. He hadn’t yet sold it to a major distribution studio and was still waiting to hear if it had been accepted to any of the major festivals. But like Pickrell and McNeely, Roberts was hoping that against seemingly impossible odds, sooner or later, his effort might strike it big.