Al Adamson made thirty-three features between 1965 and 1983, and the way to read that list is as a record of what the drive-ins were buying. Bikers while bikers sold, then monster pictures, then westerns, then blaxploitation, then kung fu, then nurses, then stewardesses. Blood of Ghastly Horror. Satan's Sadists. Dracula vs. Frankenstein. Girls for Rent. Black Samurai. Nurse Sherri. A good number of them were assembled by buying somebody else's unfinished or foreign film and shooting new scenes into it until there was something with a title on it to sell.

Blazing Stewardesses is that method in the open. A stewardess picture crossed with a western, shot in fourteen days in March 1975 at a guest ranch outside Palm Springs. It began as The Jet Set and was renamed to sit near Blazing Saddles on a marquee. Later it went out again as Texas Layover, then as Cathouse Cowgirls, then as The Great Truck Robbery. Four names, one negative.

This is one frame off those fourteen days. Masked riders coming out of a dust cloud in denim and gun belts, the desert going white behind them, holding together as an image with no dialogue underneath it to explain what is going on.

Somebody had to be standing there with a stills camera while all of that happened, and on this picture it was Hedy Dietz. Her own credit stamp is on the back of this print, telephone number and all, the way a working photographer marked prints so the credit travelled with them.

Adamson kept going until 1983. In 1995 he was murdered by a contractor who had been living at his house in Indio, and buried under the tiles where his hot tub had been. Thirteen miles from the ranch where this photograph was taken.