The (minor) Genius of Tombstone

I love the movie Tombstone. Good thing too, because it seems like it’s on just about every week. Between the Encore Western Channel, the Action Channel, TNT or any of the HBO’s, you sometimes feel like it has its own network.

At this point, I must have seen all or part of this film a few dozen times (including last night) and after many repeated viewings, I have some thoughts about why it’s so good. Why it worked so well originally and why it’s held up so well over the last fifteen years. (plus, I'm house-bound in a blizzard and I'm looking for things to write about)

If you recall, Tombstone is one of two Wyatt Earp bio-pics that were made in the early nineties. The other one you might remember was actually called Wyatt Earp. It was one of a string of Kevin Costner post-Dances with Wolves epics. Today that version of the Wyatt Earp story is almost forgotten, although I have heard that it is used in some hospitals to anesthetize patients who have allergies to traditional sedatives. It’s a sprawling three-plus hours long, and if I remember right, Costner really was striving for, and probably achieved, a high degree of historical authenticity with it. It covered Wyatt Earp's formative years, following him all the way to the famous showdown at the O.K. Corral. It just doesn't work though.

Tombstone, on the other hand, is blatantly and rather unapologetically inaccurate. I say that because it not only plays fast and loose with the facts of Wyatt Earp’s life (and the lives of his friends and family) it even goes so far as to begin the film with faked-up black and white newsreel footage. An accompanying Robert Mitchum voice-over informs us that the movie takes place in 1879. You don’t need a degree in film studies to know that showing newsreels from the 1870s is about as accurate as depicting Teddy Roosevelt debating the use of an atomic bomb.

And that’s just the beginning. The entire movie is a fantasy-version of Wyatt Earp’s life. The film omits members of his family, alters the timelines of significant events and treats actual historical figures as almost fictional characters. Two quick examples: the town Marshall Fred White killed by Curly Bill Brocius is played by an elderly man. The actual Marshall White was in his early thirties. John Ringo is portrayed (brilliantly, by the way) as a well-educated sociopath regarded as the fastest gun since Wild Bill. In truth he was probably something of a coward who was no better educated than anyone else, who might not have killed anyone and who didn’t die in a gun-battle with Doc Holliday, but probably committed suicide.

So why is it so damn good?

For one, because it isn’t tethered to the facts. Where Costner’s version tried to show a complete picture of the man Wyatt Earp, Tombstone may as well be a work of complete fiction. It has little regard for the actual chronology of all but a few iron-clad details. Rather than being a negative though, that's actually one the things that I think elevates it. Life doesn’t really work like the movies. It’s messy and illogical and doesn’t always make sense. By abandoning the real events to some degree then, Tombstone is free to tell an entertaining, if not totally true, story.

If you watch it closely, it actually works kind of like a stage play on film. The Cowboy Gang is introduced in a fast sequence right after the opening that establishes their brutality in about 30 seconds. Then, in short order, we meet Wyatt and his whole family at a train station where Wyatt rebukes a man for whipping a horse, showing his good-nature in even less time. A few minutes later we find ourselves in Tombstone itself, where Wyatt meets up with: Doc Holliday, the Sheriff, the Marshall, two of the men who will eventually join Wyatt’s “gang” and the entire acting troupe from which Wyatt’s love interest is drawn – all in one street scene.

Now, there’s no way all of those people would have met like that in “real life.” And we know enough about the real people that we can say for sure that it didn’t happen that way at all. But it doesn’t matter, because it works. We meet every major character and learn one or two key things about them in the time it takes to get the cellophane wrapper off of your box of Snow Caps.

A scene a few minutes later puts Curly Bill and Ringo face-to-face with Wyatt and Doc in the Earps’ casino, where Bill and Wyatt size each other up across the Faro table, as Doc and Ringo do the same in a clever display of Latin proverbs and hand-eye-coordination. Another great scene that is at once completely unrealistic and yet totally effective. From there, only a half hour into the film, every major conflict is not only well established, but is already well underway.

I could go on.

Most of the rest of the film plays out just like that. Every scene has a purpose and every scene moves the story along. Not like real life at all, and almost certainly not the way the real lives of the real Earps happened. But that’s fine. It's better that way.

The performances are excellent too. Tombstone is one of those movies where every actor is on his or her game, no matter how relatively minor their role might be.

Michael Biehn as the previously mentioned Johnny Ringo is my personal favorite. He plays the steely-eyed villain as an almost tragic figure, a lost soul whose background suggests wealth and refinement, but who somehow lost his humanity en route to becoming a feared gunfighter. So what if it isn’t true? The acting is brilliant and the character feels authentic.

Val Kilmer puts on a show of his own as Doc Holliday, in some ways the inverse of Ringo -- a refined gentleman who is also a ruthless killer, but who, is somehow a more benevolent scoundrel, and while suffering from tuberculosis, is somewhat tragic himself.

Kurt Russell in the Wyatt Earp role plays him as the reluctant lawman, drawn into a conflict despite doing everything to remain neutral. He’s the classic hero, slow to anger, but fearsome and bold when called upon. A less demanding role than some others, but Russell holds his own with just the right mix of intensity and warmth.

Again, whether Wyatt Earp was actually like that hardly seems to matter, because this isn’t a movie about the real Wyatt Earp. It’s a story about gunfighters and cowboys in a fictionalized Old West. It’s about a group of fully-realized characters who have the same names as people who were once real. It isn’t an attempt to re-create real people that results in a bunch of poorly realized characters.

And that’s why it works so well. Real events don’t tell stories. They just happen. We sometimes tell stories about real events, but those stories are easier to follow and more entertaining to watch if they follow a few basic rules of drama, of fiction in other words – set up the characters, lay out a conflict for them, let them try to figure their way out and see what resolution they arrive at.

That’s what Tombstone does, and what Wyatt Earp the film didn’t really do. That’s why it works, and why it’ll probably be on again soon.

Defending The Godfather

This might be unnecessary. The Godfather is widely recognized as one of the greatest American films. Perhaps even one the greatest films -- period. It certainly doesn't need me, a little-known fantasy author with a limited blog readership, to rise to its defense. But I'm going to anyway.

I was reading the newspaper the other day and I came across one of those human interest stories that runs from time to time. You know the kind I mean, it isn't really news, and much of the time it isn't all that interesting, either. It always goes something like this : "local boy/girl rises above adversity to accomplish something you don't actually care about but we need to fill space in the Arts and Life section."

That's written, by the way, as someone who was once the subject of just such an article when my first novel was published. Not sure too many folks in Cleveland really cared about it, but it was nice that the Plain Dealer ran a story.

Anyway, the one I read this week involved an NBA ref from New Jersey (which is probably why I read it in the first place) who at one time worked as an undercover agent infiltrating the mob in my home state. His undercover name was actually something like John Covert. Seems like an absurd name, I know, but he claims in the story that the word "covert" wasn't widely known in the 1970s. I'll take that on faith. Other than perhaps Meyer Lansky, mobsters aren't generally known for their intelligence.

At some point in the interview, the guy was asked how realistic mob portrayals are in the movies, based on his first-hand experience. This is a question that gets asked of everyone who's been on the inside, like Joe Pistone and Henry Hill. And they all say the same thing. Goodfellas is pretty much right on, and this NBA/Covert guy said The Departed was pretty close too. Then they always go on to say that The Godfather was total Hollywood nonsense. Every time. Everyone wants to take a shot at Vito and the Corleones.

By all accounts, there's no argument to be had on that point, of course. I grew up in New Jersey, and I heard the stories here and there. So and so owed the wrong people money and ended up taking a vacation -- permanently. Or someone else's Dad is "connected." Or we can't eat at that restaurant because it's "mobbed up." There's even a family story about my great-grandfather's bar in New York that was supposedly a hang-out for the local goombahs in the late teens and early twenties. Apparently they felt so comfortable there they used it to do some business (which ended up with some poor soul getting killed) and my great-grandfather sold the place the next day.

Nothing about noble sacrifices and honorable deaths, or even dramatic betrayals and family squabbles. Nothing like what you see in The Godfather.

And my point is this: So what?

The Godfather is not highly regarded because of its purported accuracy. It isn't renowed as a faithful depiction of the mafia, a word that famously isn't even used in the movie itself. The reason The Godfather is so respected has nothing to do with its authenticity -- or lack thereof. The Godfather is epic tragedy. It is to America what King Lear is to England. Or what Oedipus Rex was to Athens.

It's American Shakespeare, American Sophocles. It's the tragedy of power destroying those who wield it, even those who do so with the best of intentions. And just like the Elizabethans or the Greeks, it's about the way power is held and lost at the highest levels -- among kings and princes.

Does it matter that real mobsters didn't behave like Vito Corleone or Michael Corleone?

About as much as it matters whether or not a Greek king ever actually married his mother and killed his father.

Were any Greek kings driven to ruin by their pride and arrogance? Probably, but that isn't the point. Oedipus Rex isn't an attempt to chronicle the way actual Greek kings ruled their city-states. It's a morality tale about the dangers of those behaviors; and what bigger canvas could that lesson be painted on than the world of kings?

That's why I think that criticism of the Godfather for being unrealistic is almost superfluous. Sure, Goodfellas and The Departed more accurately represent how actual mobsters lived, but in a very real way, The Godfather isn't about the mob, at least not any more than Oedipus Rex is about Greek aristocracy. They're both about people, about us.

The Godfather is about the way a good but flawed man goes wrong by trying to do right. The way a man loses his soul by attempting to protect the things he cares about and the ideas he believes in, the way a good man becomes a bad man without realizing it. It's human tragedy of the oldest kind. It happens to be set among the mob because that world is possibly the nearest thing that 20th century America could have offered to compare with the bygone days of hereditary kings, loyal knights and court intrigue -- most of which was probably not as honorable or noble as the stories depict it anyway.

So The Godfather isn't realistic. Big deal. I suspect Hamlet isn't a particularly accurate depiction of ancient Danish princes either.

And it doesn't matter in the least.

Tolkien Lite

When I was a junior in high school I was very much into traditional fantasy fiction. I was in the middle of working my way through Robert E. Howard's Conan stories, and in between reading the actual tales I lived on steady diet of Conan and Kull comic books. I was only vaguely aware of Clark Ashton Smith and H.P. Lovecraft at that point, but I was already quite familiar with the Lord of Rings, first from the Ralph Bakshi animated film and then through the books themselves. Also around this time, I started playing Dungeons and Dragons PC-based games like Pool of Radiance.

One of my best friends at the time, a fellow geek and fantasy fan, was VERY much into the Dragonlance book series, and he repeatedly tried to sell me on it. He not only read the books, he bought up every ancillary publication that TSR sold, The Art of Dragonlance, The Atlas of Krynn, etc. We used to pour over these things studying the character designs, marvelling at the artwork and using it to build our own fantasy stories and art, as both of us considered ourselves budding artists/writers.

I was kind of a snob about it though, and we would often clash over whose fantasy was the "real thing" or whose was the best. I argued over and over for Robert E. Howard & Tolkien as the true fantasy, denigrating Dragonlance as a pale imitation. He argued that what I was reading was old and tired and that Dragonlance was new and fresh. I don't think I ever convinced him to read Conan or Kull (although I remember he gave more respect to Tolkien) but I did eventually attempt to read the first Dragonlance novel, Dragons of Autumn Twilight.

I hated it. I couldn't finish it and the experience only hardened my resolve that what Weiss and Hickman had done was to raid Tolkien's work, coming away with a bunch of transparent, poorly imagined copies masquerading as characters. Eventually my friend and I agreed to disagree and put the subject to rest. I put the book aside and never touched it again.

As I continued reading other fantasy over the years, Dragonlance never left my mind though. I always held that up as the standard bearer for everything that was wrong with the genre. In my opinion, fantasy fiction by the 1990s was a dying art. All sense of innovation and creativity had been beaten out of it by a legion of writers hacking away about enchanted swords, dragons, rangers, knights and mages; plumbing the depths of imaginary inter-racial politics between arrogant elves, hot-tempered dwarves, impossibly noble/impossibly evil humans and code-word-disguised versions of hobbits.

These books are still being written (and still being purchased in large numbers, for some reason) but since then a new breed of genre-bending, genre-blending authors have started to do things with fantasy that are finally making it exciting again. I've already mentioned on this blog my admiration for the UK's China Mieville, but there are also people like K.J. Bishop, Jeff Vandermeer and even R. Scott Bakker, among others, who are pushing the envelope of fantasy fiction into new and interesting areas.

There is new life in the varied realms of fantasy. But old habits die hard, I suppose. This week I was browsing my local Hollywood Video and I discovered that my old friend Dragonlance did not go away gently into that good night, after all. Apparently someone made an animated version of Dragons of Autumn Twilight, with no less a voice than Kiefer Sutherland lending his talents to the role of Raistlin Majere.

I had no choice. I had to rent it, just to see it. To see if it was as derivative and weak as I remembered.

I wasn't disappointed. Perhaps because I could only stomach part of the novel the first time around (in 1988 or so) the story was almost completely new to me this time. I remembered only a few details. And yet the details were somehow VERY familiar to me.

See if this sounds familiar: A conflicted ranger with ties to both the human and elf world leads a group of companions on a quest, included in his party are a good-natured old wizard, a dwarf, a half-sized creature and a human knight. In their travels, always on guard against the growing evil of a deity who has returned from a long-ago defeat, the good-companions pass through a haunted forest, a ruined city and enter a beautiful Elvish city where the residents are in the process of leaving, possibly forever. That's Dragons of Autumn Twilight.

Or how about this? Aragorn leading Gandalf, Gimli, Frodo and Boromir, among others, traveling through the ruined Mines of Moria on their way to see Galadriel, after passing through the realm of Elrond, which will soon be evacuated as the Elves journey across the sea. Always on guard against the likes of a re-energized Sauron and his minions, back from ages of slumber.

I think a guy named Peter Jackson did something with that storyline a few years ago, didn't he?

So please accept my apology John, if by some chance you're reading this. I know we put aside our little argument about Dragonlance almost 20 years ago. But after watching this pale imitation, Jack Bauer's efforts notwithstanding, I had to take one last shot.

And We're Back...

I took a little break from this blog last month. No particular reason. There just wasn't anything going on. At least not in the writing department.

Which is not to say that I haven't been occupied -- busy even.

Writing isn't really my job, it's more like a hobby that I occasionally get paid a little to do (very occasionally and very little.) Most days I wake up earlier than I'd like, after sleeping less than I'd like. I put on clothes that I'd rather not wear (after swearing when I was in high school that I would never wear a suit and tie everyday) and I drive to a place where most of the people I deal with are unhappy and/or insane.

That's not a slight against my office, although I suspect that most of the people I actually work with would probably agree that we all fit that description to varying degrees.

I'm a public defender. That means that I spend most of the day dealing with alleged criminals, bailiffs, prosecutors and judges. Last week I worked on a trial with another attorney defending a man who introduced himself to the jury as "The Prophet..." and who was so disruptive that the judge had him removed from the courtroom during part of the trial.

That was fun.

I also had the opportunity, since I live in the Tim Russert-dubbed "battleground" state of Ohio, to see Barack Obama speak at a rally here in Cleveland a week ago. Very interesting. Even if you disagree with him, you have to give the guy credit for bringing some new life to the national political stage. I've never seen people so genuinely enthusiastic about a candidate for any office, much less President. It was worth it to see him in person just to have the chance to experience that energy first hand. Plus anyone who knows me knows that I never really liked Hillary all that much anyway.

This blog is not for political posturing. It only exists because I write horror/fantasy novels, and I don't expect anyone to care one iota for my opinions on anything else (at least not on this forum.) But I will say this: love him or hate him (and I have friends on both sides of that divide) Barack Obama is a cultural phenomenon.

Moving right along, since the last post The Prometheus Gate has been reviewed by Kerry Estevez, the Acquistions Editor at Medallion Press and is working its way through the review process. I'm sure that will take a while. It's a 500-something page monster, and although I submitted a 5 page synopsis with it, the thing will take some time to digest.

Now I find myself a little bit lost. I have three things I've been working on sort of piecemeal while Prometheus was in progress. I can put that aside for a while, but I have to decide what else to concentrate on. At the moment I don't really know.

I was just in Arizona last month, so I'm leaning towards the idea I floated here a few months back about a western-horror, but that's the least developed of my current projects. The other two are a short vampire piece that I have to get out of my system and a steampunk-type novel about an alternate history version of New York City. I've been chipping away at the last one for several years here and there, and although I have about 30,000 words written, I'm stalled on it.

Sooner or later, I'll make a decision. Until then I'll just keep going into work, chatting with crack dealers, crack addicts, thieves, burglars and the occasional sex offender. Eventually I'll come up with something.