the groundhog day project

This morning in the hotel breakfast room, there was a guy who works on scripts for AMC and the History Channel--their war shows--talking with his friend about script policies. Among other things, he said they had to downplay battles that we lost and to avoid referring to any time that we retreated. Scripts needed "high five" moments. I imagine the Western genre as something a lot like this, promoting the Western myth as fact, though cloaked in fiction. Today, for example, we were driving up the 70 to Roswell, New Mexico and we passed the location where John Tunstall was murdered (a moment we've seen in The Left Handed Gun already this month and that we will see a couple more times; the Billy the Kid story is one that bears repeating. I was surprised at how the location was situated in a nice green valley, surrounded by hills. I seem to recall the location being depicted more like a desert in film. Even when we emerged out of the valley, there were low hills and grasslan...

(Before I even get to the movie for today, a couple things. The least important right now is that I am writing today in Arizona, about 27 miles outside Tombstone. Got a little roadtrip going. On the one hand, this is the second trip done for the blog. On the other hand, spending some time with the kids, dragging them to some boring old west landmarks and maybe going to see some alien stuff as well in Roswell. We're finalizing the details as we go. Gor a few days to make interesting. Unfortunately, and why it isn't that important today, Tombstone is not related to today's film. I've been taking these things in chronological order and I won't get back to the Earps or the Cochise County Cowboys for a while. I will share the picture when they are more relevant. The more important thing--today Rick Ducommun died from complications related to diabetes. While I had room to talk about Harold Ramis for multiple days in this blog when he died, since the blog is not speci...