August 22, 2007 Bonus Blog
Finishing the Matt Warner shootout at Dry Fork, Utah. Meghan is editing it right now. Utilized two books, Matt's own "Last of The Border Riders" and a book I got from my friends in Helper, Utah earlier this summer, "The Wild Bunch at Robbers Roost" by Pearl Baker. I had forgotten that Butch Cassidy and Elzy Lay robbed a bank in Montpelior, Idaho to pay for an attorney to defend Warner and Wall in court. Those Utah outlaws were pretty wild up there.

Speaking of outlaws, Meghan forwarded me a link to an MTV interview with the director of the new 3:10 to Yuma, which we are featuring on the cover. Here are two comments I thought were interesting:

JM: I felt that the Western had been hurt by a couple of things. One is the over historical epic-ization of the Western. The Western was never about historical accuracy or teaching a history lesson, not the great ones anyway. They were about character. To my taste, one of the mistakes in Westerns I’d seen was this ponderous sweeping Remington painting kind of Western with the big sweeping strings where suddenly I felt it was more about someone getting lost in the idea of making a Western than actually making a story about characters living in the West.

MTV: It sounds like you didn’t want to make “Wyatt Earp.”

JM: Could be. And then there was a post-modern thing where I felt like a lot of Westerns had just become tributes to movies. I didn’t arrive on set everyday with a frame blow-up of a Sergio Leone or John Ford movie. At a certain point I think it’s incumbent upon you to just let go. Shoot it like George Stevens would shoot it. Shoot it the way John Ford would shoot it which is to say without some kind of compendium of DVDs in your trailer. Just do it. Be in the moment and make the movie. Look at the people and what they’re doing and the sets your friends have built and make the movie. That to me was the critical mental adjustment I wanted to make.

You can access the entire interview at MTV.com

Classic Onion Headline de Jour
Cases Of Glitter Lung On The Rise Among Elementary-School Art Teachers

"There is very little difference in people. But that little difference makes a big difference. The little difference is attitude. The big difference is whether it is positive or negative."
—W. Clement Stone