The Call of the West

What does it mean when an actor as good as Bill Pullman admits that of all genres, westerns push him beyond the line of make-believe? Recalling his time on the set of Lawrence Kasdan’s “Wyatt Earp” in 1994, Pullman says, “I noticed how potent it felt to be around that environment. It’s a different feeling: the guns strapped on, all these guys walking around. Who’s going to get the hat with the special rawhide strap? Do you look right? Can you ride a horse? You don’t want to think, ‘I’m a fraud.’ ”

Sam Elliott, the actor who has made dozens of westerns, including “Tombstone” and the recent “Hi-Lo Country,” puts it more simply: “It’s every actor’s fantasy and every director’s fantasy because it’s every kid’s fantasy.” Elliott will star as legendary Oklahoma sheriff Bill Tillman in “You Know My Name” on TNT in August.

After nearly a century on the screen--in stories as diverse in their telling as 1953’s spare classic “Shane” to Kasdan’s mock drama “Silverado” in 1985--the western remains a repository of American myth so deeply etched in our shared imaginations that we instantly recognize its symbols of men with guns on horseback thundering past high mesas and covered wagons creeping across the plains. The symbols remain as familiar to us as photos from a family album, and we know the stories they represent, of men challenged by outlaws and evil in a majestic land, standing up and being counted, deciding what’s right and fighting back, usually prevailing in the eyes of God looking down from the world’s biggest sky.

“It has to do with the creation of national narratives,” says Gregory H. Nobles, who heads the history department at Georgia Tech and wrote the 1997 book “American Frontiers,” reassessing the popular notion that the nation was settled in a single, expanding line of white conquest over savage natives, east to west. “Why aren’t there any ‘easterns’?” he asks. “There are many interesting stories, as interesting as the West and in some ways more complicated, taking place on the eastern frontier in the period prior to 1800. But nobody does it.”

The national narrative of the West has been in eclipse for years on the big screen, with a few notable exceptions (“Unforgiven,” “Dances With Wolves” and “Young Guns”). But its storytellers have moved back to television, where the western once flourished in episodic form and now is experiencing something of a rebirth in the form of television movies. TNT alone has made a dozen since 1991, many with top talent if not always with top scripts. Pullman, in fact, is directing and starring in a remake of “The Virginian” for the network, with a scheduled airdate in early 2000.

TNT scored the biggest rating ever for a basic cable movie in January with “Purgatory,” a sci-fi variation on an old formula that starred Sam Shepard and Randy Quaid as the murderous Wild Bill Hickock and Doc Holliday, having renounced violence and living in a mysterious “Twilight Zone” town invaded by a gang of bank-robbing thugs led by Eric Roberts. Its audience, for eight showings, was estimated at 31 million.

CBS brought forth “Outlaw Blues,” in which Willie Nelson and Kris Kristofferson were cast as aging bank robbers on a mission to avenge the murder of a former compadre in crime. Following a feverish viewer campaign to keep it on the air last year, CBS also brought back “The Magnificent Seven,” hoary throwback to the days of “Cheyenne,” “Rawhide” and the like, a weekly series about a gang of charming gunmen who protect a small frontier town from killers, bandits and thieves.

Though the network recently announced it would not renew the show for a third season, it has three other western pieces in the works--the third installment of “Sarah Plain and Tall,” currently filming in Kansas with Glenn Close and Christopher Walken reprising their roles; a telefilm about the life of Laura Ingalls Wilder, the author whose work was turned into the long-running series “Little House on the Prairie”; and in May the network will air its first “Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman” movie, starring Jane Seymour.

NBC is developing with Kevin Costner a miniseries called “Not Between Brothers,” set on the Texas frontier, that will trace 30 years in the lives of two families--one white, one Native American--caught in the political and military cross-fire between the United States and Mexico. And the network will also join forces with “Armageddon” producer Jerry Bruckheimer to create “Outlaws,” a four-hour gun-slinging saga about a corrupt small-town mayor forced into a battle of evils with an invading gang of desperadoes.

All of this adds to the evidence that the West and its riders of the purple sage are not going quietly into the Hollywood past as we head toward a new century. It may be that in this age of ambiguity viewers clutch at the western like a warm blanket to remind them of a time when men of action seemed to have control of their lives and Manifest Destiny explained everything. The power of the western surely lives on in the imagery and costumes of country music, the vogue of the suburban pickup truck (the closest thing on the freeway to riding a horse) and, yes, in these movies for television.

“It’s a great place to tell a story: a simple environment in which good and bad play out against one another,” says John Badham, the director of “Saturday Night Fever” and “Bird on a Wire,” who has directed his first western for HBO, “The Jack Bull,” which premiered Saturday night, with additional runs through the month.

Starring John Cusack in a tough story with a bitter ring of authenticity, “The Jack Bull” is a singular western indeed, an unsentimental tragedy about the cruelties endured by settlers on the Wyoming frontier. Written by the actor’s father, Dick Cusack, it traces one man’s obsessive search for justice in a land of primitive law, a subject familiar to Hollywood tales of the old West, but “The Jack Bull” distances itself from the cliches of the genre, reminding us of the mythic power of the West even as it circumvents it.

Maybe “The Jack Bull” stands out so sharply because of the low ambition of the usual westerns on television that trade crudely on the romance of the West and depend on the high jinks of melodrama and twirling six-shooters.

“The Jack Bull” instead reaches for a version of something truer--and harsher. Cusack plays a modest horse trader, Myrl Redding, whose simple life with his loving family is disrupted when a neighboring cattle baron erects a tollgate blocking his way to market. The spiteful neighbor (L.Q. Jones) takes two of Redding’s top stallions as collateral, and while Redding is away at the market, deliberately mistreats the horses and savagely beats a Crow Indian left behind to care for them.

From that point, it becomes a story of nearly mad retribution, with Redding’s quest for justice blocked by crooked courts and ambitious politicians angling to win statehood for the territory, while Redding starts a range war with a vigilante army. In the end, he is put on trial for his life, with John Goodman cast as the circuit judge who presides over his fate.

While it takes pains to show the West in a bleaker and less glamorous light, “The Jack Bull” is not based directly on history, at least not American history, though its events somewhat recall such antiheroic westerns as Steve McQueen’s “Tom Horn” (1979) and the notorious “Heaven’s Gate” (1980), which were based on real cattle wars and class conflict in the Wyoming territory, as was “The Virginian,” the seminal western first published as a novel in 1902.

Similar to the way Italian filmmaker Sergio Leone drew upon Kurosawa’s “Yojimbo” as inspiration for “A Fistful of Dollars,” “The Jack Bull” has its origins across the Atlantic in an early 19th century German novel, “Michael Kohlhaas,” by Heinrich von Kleist, that itself was based on a 16th century Saxon chronicle. Dick Cusack, who adapted the story, says he has no particular interest in westerns but was impressed by the novel’s tragic theme, “where little by little things get out of hand and unravel until what happens is what no one intended.” He simply sought a more modern period and location for it. (The title refers to a breed of dog so ferocious and stubborn that its jaws cannot be pried open once clamped shut on an enemy.)

“I thought it would not be a jarring transition to put it in Wyoming. I think it’s an easy fit. The justice system at that time was pretty rough. You could get hanged for stealing a horse.”

The myth of the West clearly is big enough to have absorbed stories with roots in other cultures, stories of archetypal conflicts restaged in the place that has held so many of our hopes and dreams. What the West was really like is almost beside the point anymore as Hollywood’s popular re-creations of it have supplanted history, picking up where Buffalo Bill Cody and others left off embellishing their own legends.

Willie Nelson and Kris Kristofferson, for example, were in no danger of being charged with even third-degree credibility in the bullet-riddled blood-and-yuks fest that was “Outlaw Blues,” an ersatz drama that contained lines like “It’s just a flesh wound” and featured appearances by fellow country crooners Travis Tritt and Waylon Jennings. John Ford can be grateful he did not live to see such as this.

Today’s westerns, at least the ones on TV, have updated the usual folklore with a certain amount of political correctness, as well as historical insight into the multicultural realities of the frontier. Native Americans now tend to be treated more sympathetically than in the days when John Wayne routinely wasted scores of “bloodthirsty savages” without blinking.

In “Purgatory,” directed by Uli Edel (“Last Exit to Brooklyn”), an Indian essentially played God, calling down lightning strikes to fry the villains and showing the way to the gates of heaven. Although billed as “not your ordinary damned western,” in the end it was completely ordinary as the newly minted Zen warriors Hickock and Holliday, being men in the West after all, had to find their guns and blow big holes in the bad guys, risking eternal damnation to save the peaceful town.

The most unusual thing about “Purgatory” was watching Sam Shepard, who once included a hilarious sendup of Hollywood western conventions in his hit play “True West,” now, as an actor, pretending to take such hokum seriously. But that’s show business.

John Watson, the British-born executive producer of “The Magnificent Seven,” describes his show as having “the feel of old westerns with more modern sensibilities.” Shot in Newhall, using the same main street that once belonged to “Gunsmoke” and employing the rousing Elmer Bernstein theme from the 1960 movie by the same name, “The Magnificent Seven” pretty much combs through the familiar archives of rustlers, wagon trains and trouble-making strangers, but Watson says, “We’re much more ethnically aware. We try to avoid those stereotypes of blacks and Hispanics.” (One of the new seven--Rick Worthy--is black, one more than in the movie.)

“We’re not making history lessons, we’re making entertainment, but we make every effort to determine that these things could have happened and that costumes and props are authentic.”

John Badham says that in preparing to direct “The Jack Bull,” he and his production team decided to take what he terms “a documentary approach” to try to achieve at least an aura of verisimilitude. “We realized right away that there’s been 60, 70 years of westerns going back to ‘The Great Train Robbery,’ I guess, and so many have fed off one another. We wanted to stay away from that.”

Badham took his cue from Leone, who shot his “spaghetti westerns” of the 1960s in Spain. “The reasons they looked so special is that his art directors didn’t know anything about the West and started from scratch. I thought, that’s the way to do it, learning as you go, figuring out how you might build a saloon if you didn’t have enough lumber.” Then he added music by “Unforgiven” composer Lennie Niehaus and Bob Dylan.

James Nottage, chief curator at the Gene Autry Western Heritage Museum and himself a native of Wyoming, says the scenario of “The Jack Bull” sounds plausible enough, “except that when people took the law into their own hands it was usually the big interests against the little guy, not the other way around.”

Historians like Nottage have often pointed out that the violence so pivotal to exciting action sequences was not nearly so common in the West as movies and TV shows would have us believe. “Detailed studies of Dodge City [Kan.],” he says, “have shown people were at much less risk walking down the street there than they are walking down the streets of big cities today.”

David Dary, a professor at the University of Oklahoma and author of critically acclaimed books about cowboy culture and frontier newspapers, notes that “many cowboys carried revolvers, but they were rusted and wouldn’t shoot. They used them mainly to hammer nails into fences.”

Ah, but who wants to hear that? John Ford and Sam Peckinpah didn’t want to hear it anymore than today’s filmmakers looking for a scenic battleground to stage classic face-offs between laconic he-men and black-hatted villains.

“A lot of the romance of the West was created by Americans out to make a buck,” says Dary, reminding us that the fascination with the West began long before movies and TV, with dime novels after the Civil War. “It was something to escape to. The cowboy--the people in the East loved to read about this character with a big hat and a horse. Then it was compounded by Hollywood.”

Larry McMurtry’s “Lonesome Dove,” made into an award-winning CBS miniseries in 1989, showed that the real lives of men on the range were often hellish, lonely and hard, yet the success of that book and miniseries seem to have done little to demystify the heroic notion of the self-sufficient man on horseback. For no matter how gritty or dirty or painful you make the story, the myth can withstand it, being bigger than life in the first place.

“The story of the West is so appealing because it seems simpler,” says professor Nobles of Georgia Tech, again contrasting it with the story of the eastern frontier. “You have to look at the 19th century fascination with images of the West, both written and painted--the landscape itself--and remember that the consumers of those images were largely an eastern audience.”

The audience long ago became national and international, but with revisionist history upon us and missions to Mars in our midst, how much longer can the western continue to keep that audience under its spell?

“There are so many story possibilities,” says Scot Safon, senior vice president of marketing for TNT, whose job it is to sell these stories to advertisers. (The TNT westerns are budgeted at $7 million to $10 million, less than a third of the cost of a typical studio feature.) “It’s amazing the flexibility of the genre. I’m surprised it ever fell out of favor.”

“It’s not a genre we’ve explored much, in part because Turner has made it their brand” says John Matoian, until last week president of HBO Pictures and the executive at the cable network who gave the green light to “The Jack Bull,” budgeted at around $10 million. “But I was drawn to this one because it broke a lot of the conventions of the standard western.”

To be sure, “The Jack Bull” is not the kind of story that would likely pass the “feel-good” test required by most studio executives looking for the next big date movie. It may go down as another example of TV taking chances the studios can no longer afford.

“There’s a difference between what people will watch on television and what it takes to get them out to a theater,” says Badham, who is best known for his work in features but who believes “The Jack Bull” could not have been made for the big screen. “It attracted me because I knew it was something that wasn’t going to be said any other way.’

“We were still trying to get it made as a feature, because I’ve never had experiences on anything but films,” says John Cusack, whose company, New Crime Productions, produced “The Jack Bull.” “I want to see things projected on a big screen. But HBO said, ‘We get it, we’ll make it right now.’ ”

As does the occasional theatrical western with a good story to tell, “The Jack Bull” will probably inspire some writers and directors to reexamine the genre and go searching once again through its bottomless trove of Americana--not that others don’t feel the long ride has come to an end.

“The western as I see it exhausted itself,” says Don Graham, a professor at the University of Texas, author of “Cowboys and Cadillacs: How Hollywood Looks at Texas.” “They’ve been talking about it coming back for 30 years, but as big box office I don’t think it’s ever going to come back.”

Maybe not in theaters, but television remains a refuge for this particular realm of our popular imagination. When actor Tommy Lee Jones, a Texan, wanted his first directing project to be a western, he found that Turner network executives were receptive to his ideas where studios were not. The result was the 1995 TV movie “The Good Old Boys,” in which he also co-starred with Sissy Spacek, Sam Shepard, Frances McDormand and Wilford Brimley.

And Sam Elliott is still getting work.

“There’s this audience for westerns and it’s never going to go away,” says Elliott, who wants to produce his own one day, from the book “The Outfit,” by J.P.S. Brown, a working cowboy in 1950s Nevada. Elliott has owned the rights for 20 years. “I may end up having to play one of the older characters at this point, but I’m going to do it.”

“There’s a scale you get that’s rejuvenating after you’ve dealt with the confines of something like noir,” says Bill Pullman, now busy planning his production of “The Virginian,” to be shot on the plains of Alberta, Canada, as were “The Jack Bull,” “Unforgiven” and “Lonesome Dove.” “It’s a way to arrive at a certain view of America. The West was really a brief time in our history, and I think that a lot of what you feel in ‘The Virginian’ is a sense of loss, a sentimental view of what had defined us and now was gone.”*