the groundhog day project

Electric guitar... a bunch of young actors. The Western is being reborn (or attempting it anyway) with Young Guns . But then they've got to go and have 50-year-old Terence Stamp as Tunstall. Tunstall was 24 when he met Billy the Kid... Emilio Estevez (Billy) is 26, about 8 years too old. Kiefer Sutherland at 22 is actually 7 years younger than his character, Doc Scurlock. Lou Diamond Phillips is about the right age for Jose Chavez y Chavez (Phillips 26, Chavez 27). Charlie Sheen, at 23, is 5 years younger than his character Dick Brewer. Casey Siemaszko, 27, is 3 years younger than his character, Charlie Bowdre. (Odd detail, that I only noticed because I was recently there. Tunstall tells Billy he can stay at the ranch or, if he wants, the Santa Fe leaves out of Albuquerque in the morning. That's a good distance to get by morning. Tunstall's ranch was south of the town of Lincoln, not sure how far, but from Lincoln to Albuquerque is 185 miles. The Pony Express riders were ...

Today, Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid . (But first, a story: Meant to be home in Los Angeles tonight. Stuck in Arizona instead. Car trouble. Up until the car trouble, today was going pretty well, though. We stopped off at Meteor Crater-- --and hiked down into Walnut Canyon-- --and that was before lunch. Car was making noise and I figured I'd get back to LA tonight, get it looked at in the morning. But, the car had other plans. Instead, we are still in Arizona, about 30 yards from this: And, really that's all you need to know about that.) That this film begins with old man Pat Garrett getting gunned down and, plotwise, is much the same as the later Young Guns II makes for a nice echo of that later film, starting, as it does, with Brushy Bill Roberts, AKA (claiming to be) old man Billy the Kid. Immediate impression of the casting... Coburn is good as a "lawman" and Kristofferson seems good as the outlaw but both seem a bit old for their roles, by...

(There should have been at least one sentence at the end of the blog entry for yesterday . I think that when I switched from tablet to phone to post what I had written, it didn't load the final version of the file in Pages . There was something--after the line about Crabb's various occupations--about him being an everyman, except that the only occupation of his that seems to have any success is not an occupation at all, but rather his role within the native tribe. I said it very briefly, but not particularly cleverly, and I am glad it was lost. It was a very long day, traveling through New Mexico. (Today was long, as well, so I don't imagine too many words today, either. And certainly nothing clever.) So, as for Crabb's... Little Big Man's success, it would fit well with the anti-establishment, satire side of things. The white man, even if he is an everyman, cannot rightly exist--or at least, live successfully--in a world where "human beings" exist. On ...

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...

Billy the Kid was likely a teenager when he hooked up with Tunstall. Tunstall was only 24. Here, though, in The Left Handed Gun Paul Newman, age 32, portrays Billy. Colin Keith-Johnson, age 62, portrays Tunstall. But, maybe the bigger problem right off the bat is the title. Billy the Kid was not left handed. The famous tintype of Billy-- --was reversed and, I guess, no one noticed for a long time. So, Billy was "left handed" even though he wasn't. By the way, that gun is on display at the Autry here in Glendale: But, let us return to that first image for a moment. Back in... the early 90s--I forget which year for sure. A couple of my sisters were in college out of state and we drove to visit them or drop them off or pick them up... This isn't much of a story, this part, with all these vague details. Anyway, we drove through Fort Sumner, New Mexico, where Billy is (allegedly) buried. (More on that detail in a few weeks when I watch Young Guns II .) In a little...