FARMINGTON -- As VerNon Griffeth walked through the old Davis County Jail, he admitted the current color scheme is, shall we say, a little off.
"That color came from the movie 'The Crow,' " he said, pointing to a dark gray wall in the first holding cell, a place where many a dejected driver started sobering up over a long, dark night.
Walk with Griffeth, a 30-year county employee, and he'll show visitors a multicolored jailhouse that includes the prison bars of yesterday.
The aging slammer, nearly a half-century old, sits behind the Davis County Memorial Courthouse and is no longer a jail.
But it had a second career, reborn as a movie set before it became a public building on its last leg as an extremely secure storage closet for the county.
Yet, touring celluloid history in Davis County soon won't be easy, as officials plan to plow under the building.
"We plan to tear it down later this year or perhaps at the start of the year," said Barry Burton, the Davis County Planning Department director.
The one-story, concrete-block building in Farmington has its secrets, despite its occasional close-up on the big screen.
For example, there is a rarely used, rarely seen, underground tunnel connected to the nearby courthouse.
"I haven't been down here for 20 years," Griffeth said, leading a private visitation that passed through aging dust bunnies to a low-hanging passageway used for access to utilities.
Griffeth, 64, headed both the administrative services and the purchasing departments before he retired. He watched the jail age, mostly in its second occupation as a home to cameras watching actors, not prisoners.
The jail opened in 1963, housing thousands of prisoners; that prompted an add-on portion in 1981. The second-floor addition and building extension would later become home to the county health department and other public agencies.
When the jail shut down, the empty building became a magnet for film. It had the look, Griffeth said.
Besides the 1994 movie "The Crow," the jail became a set for the 1990's television series "Touched by an Angel" and the 1986 NBC show "The Deliberate Stranger (The Ted Bundy Story)."
In all, more than a dozen film or TV show producers paraded with their gaffers or grips through the halls to shoot segments after the jail closed its doors to forlorn prisoners in 1991.
"It's the last of the old-time jails in Davis County," said Capt. Kevin Fielding with the Davis County Sheriff's Office, another longtime employee.
Fielding has an active interest in history. He's working on saving parts of the jail for posterity.
One possible item on the save list: a series of levers and wheels, in a box, that were used to open and close the jail doors. The mechanism is a far cry from the computerized contraptions that secure modern correctional facilities.
Perhaps not high on the list is a prisoner dining table with the words "puke, you pigs" carved on the green tabletop.
Hand-written logs of the prisoners are still in the hands of the sheriff's office, but many of the county records have been disposed of as governmental agencies regularly purge their archives.
History still has its place, for now, at the county complex. Just walk the musty halls and hear the stories of famous prisoners: serial killer Ted Bundy or the airmen murderers of 1974, called the Hi-Fi killers.
Skinny windows along one portion of the building let in outside light -- the passing of the fall sun -- to parts of the facility.
"This was one of the most popular parts of the jail," said Griffeth, as he pointed to the extra-long hallway that movie producers liked for their shots.
Originally, the jail was generally painted off-white and prison orange. Yet, parts of the joint currently are baby blue or yellow -- colors chosen by producers, who thought it would create a jail-like ambience.
But movie producers thought the building had aged well. Perhaps, too well.
The dark gray in the first holding cell and other parts of the building was artificially aged by moviedom to make it appear even older on camera.
"It looks much worse than it ever was; it was never that bad," said Fielding, who started at the sheriff's office in 1982.
As cameras went elsewhere and the building morphed into a storage place, Griffeth said he has been forever warning people about closing doors that would not open easily.
It's difficult, he would point out, for a jail to change its stripes -- the building was designed to shut tight.
But late one Friday, he was inside the jail with someone who shut a door they could not unlock. Griffeth began to prepare for a long, perhaps hungry, weekend in the former jail.
But someone happened to come in, and its last "prisoners" were let loose.
"That was the closest I got to being locked up here," he said.
Griffeth, who served as a Navy chaplain, will be one of the county employees tending over the destruction of the jail.
A new jail already sits elsewhere in the county, and a new campus of county buildings will preside over the jail grounds.
"I hate to see it close," said Fielding. Color him blue; the nostalgia is clear in his voice as he talks about the jail's end.
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