August 26, 2003,
Last night the History Channel played both Old West Tech shows and a show on Sex in the Wild West. I thought the Tech shows played very well and the production values were quite good, especially the animation. Now we’ll see how they did by the numbers. According to a friend of mine who knows, a .8 is typical of a run-of-the-mill cable show, anything over a 1.0 is good and a 1.5 would make them ecstatic. As a comparison, the new Tom Berenger series, Peacemakers is hitting a 5.0 and the USA Channel is completely thrilled.

Henry Martinez in Reserve, New Mexico has gotten final approval to do a statue and museum dedicated to Elfego Baca. TW has been supportive of this effort and I have been advising him ever since we ran our Classic Gunfights episode featuring the fight in September of 2000. Henry wants us to do a billboard for the site, stating that this will be the future site of the Elfego Baca memorial. I would like to do a one or two page update on the memorial in an upcoming issue and in production we need to produce the sign. More on this later.

The rankings for movies came out today and Open Range held onto third place and has grossed $29 mil (it cost $26M), so it looks like we may be vindicated in terms of Westerns still being viable. Emma Bull read yesterday’s critique of the movie and added these comments:

“I spent the first ten minutes of the movie pretty darned confused. Huh--here's Boss moving a herd through open country. He's only got three cowboys with him, and only one of 'em appears to be of much use. Is that why, when night and a rainstorm catch them, he doesn't bother to send anyone out to ride night guard? Maybe he wants to give the other two some practice in rounding 'em up in the morning, when the herd has scattered into the next county. But wait--these cowboys can't even keep track of the half-dozen or so horses they've got with them? They've gone south, too?

“After ten minutes of that, I was longing for someone to take over Boss's cattle and show him what to do with them. Breaks my heart to say such a thing about Robert Duvall, but darn, those were the most incompetent cowboys ever to ride the screen.

“It was a swell gunfight, though. Swell enough that I didn't ask very often, ‘What happened to the plan that involved hiding a lot of weapons at the livery stable and waiting for the bad guys to come to them? The one that had Boss holding a shotgun? You know, the good plan?’"

“I kind of had fun anyway, though.”

Deena came home last night to visit her dog Buddy. He’s going in this morning to lose his manhood. Kathy advised me to be good or I’m next.

Read a book on Nick Eggenhofer over the weekend that really impacted me. His famous dry brush technique is quite striking and still works. I was inspired to do more iconic images, spurs, high-back saddles on a fence post, pistols and quirts.

“The worse I do, the more popular I get.”
—John F. Kennedy, after the Bay of Pigs failure