Focus : Westward, Ho! : NEW DOCUMENTARY, ‘THE WILD WEST,’ FOLLOWS SUCCESSFUL BLUEPRINT USED FOR ‘THE CIVIL WAR’

The Old West has spawned so many legends and myths, the truth has often been lost in the shuffle. A new 10-hour documentary, “The Wild West,” attempts to tell how the West was really won.

“The Wild West” premieres Monday on the commercial Prime Time Entertainment Network, a conglomerate of independent TV stations, including KCOP, around the country that are owned by Chris-Craft Industries.

Like “The Civil War,” Ken Burns’ acclaimed 1990 PBS documentary series, “The Wild West” features vintage photographs from the period, excerpts from diaries and letters read by well-known actors, interviews with historians and music from the era. Jack Lemmon is the narrator.

Dick Robertson, president of Warner Bros. Domestic Television Distribution, which is distributing the series, says the success of “The Civil War” and ABC’s recent four-hour documentary “Lincoln “ proved that the public can find documentaries appealing.

“There’s a recipe for success by taking the actual words people wrote during that period of time, and then re-creating them through the voices of famous actors over original photographs,” Robertson says. “What that does, it connects you in an emotional way to this history, rather than being sort of preached to and lectured to. It is regular everyday people and the lives that they lived.”

Putting together the documentary series was a vast undertaking for its producers. Given a timetable of 14 months in which to complete the project, executive producer Doug Netter (“The Sacketts”) and producer John Copland decided to narrow their focus to the 30-year period after the Civil War. Because they were novices in the documentary field, they brought in co-producer Jamie Smith, a 15-year veteran.

“Assisting Jamie were four full-time researchers,” Netter says. “We divided all the museums and historical societies into four sections. We simultaneously put in a new visual data base which could receive photographs in the data base and catalogue them. There are over 12,000 photographs in that data base.”

More than 3,500 photographs were used in the documentary, which is divided into such topics as “Cowboys,” “Settlers,” “Gunfighters,” “Indians” and “Soldiers.”

“ ‘The Civil War’ used 1,200 images for all of their 10 hours,” Copland says. “They repeated a lot of images. Soldiers look like soldiers, but in dealing with 30 years of history, we knew we were going to be a lot broader.”

In order to personalize the stories, Netter says, “we tried to access as many of the letters, diaries, anything of the written word, that we could find so we could attempt in every instance to personalize the story.”

Netter didn’t want to take the romance out the West: “I love all of those John Wayne movies. But at the same time, we tried to separate fact from fiction.”

More than 400 historical societies and museums were involved in “The Wild West.” Netter says the production had no problem getting cooperation, despite the fact that Ken Burns is making his own PBS documentary on the West. Burns announced his project a few months after “Wild West” went into production.

“We were there first,” Smith says. “We were doing the bulk of the work ahead of him. We were kind of the big gorilla.”

In order to expedite the project, subjects were assigned to teams of writers and producers. “Our staff came from a wide background, but a lot of them came from news,” Smith says. “They knew how to work fairly, accurately and quickly. We didn’t have the luxury of time.”

Besides the short production schedule, the filmmakers were confronted with a creative challenge. “This series was going out to a commercial audience, not necessarily an audience who is familiar with a lot of documentaries,” Smith says. “I think as producers, to hold true to our material and be authentic and be accurate and tell the best possible stories in the most entertaining fashion, it was always kind of a challenge. That was tough because docs are easy to do in a dry fashion.”

Oscar-winner Jack Lemmon was Netter’s first choice to narrate the series. The two had worked together on “How to Murder Your Wife” and “The April Fools.”

“He is such a fine actor,” Netter says. “Also so American, so smart. I felt he could give an interpretation of the narration that we might not get from anyone else. He is a real student of American history. He would read the scripts thoroughly. He always gave his interpretation.”

Because the series is being telecast on commercial stations, the producers knew they had to keep the attention of the audience every hour or run the chance of losing viewers to other programming. So they decided to interweave various themes, such as the roles of women and ethnic groups, throughout every hour. “Among all the threads, we tried to do the common human experience of life, death and the struggle to survive,” Copland says. “We tried to make each act compelling and intriguing to people.”

Though the format is similar, Netter hopes audiences will find “The Wild West” vastly different from “The Civil War” or “Lincoln,” because “you know the scenario (of those documentaries) pretty well. (“The Civil War”) is down material. All of these thousands and thousands of Americans killing each other. And Lincoln, you know what is going to happen. But in ours, the scenarios are not known. We are dealing with a very positive people. The expansion of the West was one of the most exciting periods in our history, and maybe the history of the world.”

Making the documentary proved to be an educational experience for the producers.

“Everybody thinks the American West was made up of hundreds of Gary Coopers,” Netter says. That’s not true. Twenty-five per cent of the population was foreign-born.”

The West, Smith discovered, wasn’t quite so violent as portrayed in films and literature. “It’s not that a gunfight didn’t happen, but the volume and the amount were quite minimal,” she explains. “The Indians were looking to survive, and the cowboys were looking to do their job. If they could keep their noses clean, they could do what they needed to do.”

Copland was surprised to learn most cowboys were quite literally just boys. “Cowboying was really kind of a vocation that people passed through,” he says. “Their career as a cowboy lasted until they were in their late 20s, and then they kind of moved on and did something else. One of the things that was surprising was that so many characters had five or six or seven careers. Bat Masterson started out as a buffalo hunter, then he became a lawman, then he became a sporting promoter and then he became a newspaper columnist. I think one of the reasons people passed through careers was they were always other opportunities they could try if something came to a dead end.”

The stations carrying the “Wild West” are committed to repeating it in December. Warner Home Video is releasing the series on cassette and Time-Life Books is publishing a companion coffee-table book featuring the photographs from the documentary.

If “The Wild West” proves to be a ratings success, Prime Time Entertainment Network plans to do other documentaries. Robertson acknowledges that “The Wild West” may not be a huge moneymaker. “But you never know,” he says. “It may make a lot of money. If it is not successful, I will not look very smart. If it is, then everybody will take the credit. You know how that works.”

“The Wild West” airs Monday-Thursday at 8 p.m. and March 28 at 8 p.m. on KCOP; weekdays through April 3 at 12:30 a.m. on XETV.

WILD FACTS ABOUT THE WILD WEST

The last stage coach robbery took place in 1899. It was committed by a woman, Pearl Harte.

Wild Bill Hickok began to wear glasses after he shot his own deputy, having mistaken him for a gunman.

After outlaw Jesse James was killed in 1882, his brother Frank became a shoe salesmen in St. Louis and died in an old-age home in 1915.

Because of the invention of the telegraph, the famous Pony Express was only in business for 18 months.

Buffalo bones were used as legal tender in tough Dodge City.

The members of the 9th and 10th Cavalry were all former slaves and called “buffalo soldiers” by the Indians.

From 1869-1890, the population of the western United States grew from one million to nearly nine million.

By the year 1883, cattle barons and ranching syndicates held 13 million acres of land and owned nearly 23 million cattle.

A cowboy earned on the average of $30 a month; mail-order cowboy boots cost $25.

After the Civil War ended in 1865, the U.S. Army’s ranks shrank from one million soldiers to just 25,000 troops which were scattered throughout forts in the West.

By the 1870s, more than 25% of the population of the American West was made up of immigrants.

Cowboys had little contact with Indians--the Indians’ primary enemy was the military.