ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1995, Roanoke Times
DATE: Saturday, December 9, 1995 TAG: 9512120001
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 12 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: LOS ANGELES
TYPE: MOVIE REVIEW
SOURCE: JAMIE DIAMOND THE NEW YORK TIMES
Historians don't seem to know why ``Crooked Nose'' Jack McCall shot James Butler ``Wild Bill'' Hickok in the back during a poker game one August day in 1876 in Deadwood, S.D., other than that the young man craved immortality.
And he achieved it. Among other things, he showed up in 1978 in Thomas Babe's play ``Fathers and Sons,'' opposite Richard Chamberlain's Wild Bill. In 1986, McCall put in an appearance in Pete Dexter's novel ``Deadwood.'' And in Walter Hill's new film ``Wild Bill,'' playing at the Grandin and Tanglewood Mall Theatres, McCall (played by David Arquette) gets a chance to gun down Wild Bill (played by Jeff Bridges) yet again.
Hill drew details about the town of Deadwood from Dexter's novel, but he went back to Babe's play for much of the relationship between Hickok and McCall - making the film unusual in that the screenwriter turned not to the historical record but to two literary sources to shape his story.
For his play, Babe wandered so far into fictional waters that he made McCall into an illegitimate, homosexual son of Wild Bill who had committed incest with his mother.
``Apparently the historical Jack was a town drunk with a mean streak,'' Babe said by telephone from his home in Darien, Conn.
``I made up everything about him; I chose lurid,'' the playwright says. ``That he would drown cats, sleep with his mother, put on a dress was a portrait of nihilism. He was someone Wild Bill would not want as a son.''
Babe's play opened at the Public Theater in New York, then moved to Los Angeles in 1980, where Hill, who had been thinking about making a movie about Hickok, saw it.
``I was interested that Wild Bill was in love with the thing that finally killed him, his own legend,'' Hill says. ``He was this kind of expansive American personality, a historical artifact.''
The bearded, bearlike director is seated in his trailer at the Santa Clarita Studios, where he is directing ``Last Man Standing,'' his adaptation of Akira Kurosawa's ``Yojimbo'' as an American gangster film.
``Babe was more interested in Jack and the Oedipal issues, questions of identity and sexual identity,'' Hill says. ``So what was at the heart of his play wasn't for me. But everything around the heart was.''
He optioned both Babe's play and a screenplay about Wild Bill by Ned Wynn. Then, in 1989, he wrote his own script. It languished on the shelf while he went on to direct other projects.
But Jack McCall did not slip into oblivion. The producing team of Richard and Lili Zanuck read ``Deadwood,'' Dexter's novel, after they had hired him to adapt another book to the screen.
``Deadwood'' is a bawdy, character-filled western in which Jack McCall guns down Wild Bill and, for the rest of the book, some zany villains scheme against one another.
What attracted the producers to the story was largely the opportunity to explore the ramifications of being a celebrity in a western context. ``Figures like Wild Bill were like rock stars,'' says Lili Zanuck. ``They had sex appeal.''
Dexter adapted ``Deadwood'' for the screen, and the Zanucks sent it to various directors. That script also landed on the shelf until the Zanucks sent it to Hill's agent on a whim.
Hill and the Zanucks formed an alliance to make ``Wild Bill,'' which also stars Ellen Barkin as Calamity Jane, John Hurt as an English sidekick and Keith Carradine as Buffalo Bill Cody.
The plan was that Hill's film would relate the final days of the weak-eyed, opium-addicted gunslinger Hickok. When Hill sat down to write a shooting script, he had no dearth of sources. On one side was the play, concerned with incest, homosexuality and Oedipal issues; on the other was the novel, a portrait of a Western town bursting with colorful characters. Both had to then be converted into Hill's minimalist, laconic style.
What Hill found useful in Dexter's script was the setting, in particular Hickok's involvement with Chinese settlers and opium. What he liked about Babe's play was that it provided a third act for his film, a look at the final hours of Wild Bill's life.
``History gives you lots of material, but it isn't a good dramatist; it doesn't structure three acts for you,'' Hill says.
Zanuck concedes that the shooting script owed more to Hill's own script and Babe's play than to the Dexter script that they sent Hill's agent. Yet Hill does not underestimate the importance of ``Deadwood.''
``I really believe that had the Zanucks not bought Dexter's book, there'd be no credits to analyze,'' he says.
For the record, the credits on ``Wild Bill'' are ``screenplay by Walter Hill, based upon the play `Fathers and Sons' by Thomas Babe and the novel `Deadwood' by Pete Dexter.''
LENGTH: Medium: 90 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: Jeff Bridges (shown here with Ellen Barkin as Calamityby CNBJane) is the latest incarnation of Wild Bill Hickok. color.