GUNFIGHT AT OK CORRAL SCREENWRITER HOW TO

GUNFIGHT AT OK CORRAL SCREENWRITER HOW TO

Of Virgil, Morgan, and Wyatt Earp he writes: “Few frontier lawmen had clean records the idea was that men who had broken laws themselves would understand best how to prevent others from doing the same.”īut when the Earps arrive at Tombstone, the vast amount of historical material about the politics, economics and personal feuds that led up to the famous gunfight and its bloody aftermath seems to overwhelm Guinn. Guinn, author of a highly readable account of Bonnie and Clyde, “Go Down Together,” is good at understanding the thankless lot of the frontier lawman. The reader’s attention is already wandering a bit before the Earp family even shows up. The cover isn’t the author’s fault, but he can be held accountable for rambling opening chapters such as “The West,” which attempts to sum up decades of the American frontier in a handful of pages. Second, the subtitle promises to tell “how it changed the American West,” but there is no evidence that it changed the West at all unless one means through its depiction in Hollywood films. Corral) was far from the last gunfight of the Old West. Corral (in fact the gunfight in back of the O.K. Jeff Guinn’s “The Last Gunfight” hits a bump - two bumps, actually - starting on the cover. It’s important to praise the ones that get it right and hold accountable those who don’t. “This is the West, sir,” the reporter tells James Stewart in John Ford’s “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.” “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”įord should have known: His films contributed to the tall tales of the West as much as anything else, and that included the story of Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday in “My Darling Clementine.” It’s taken decades for historians and novelists to dig their way out of the fog of myth surrounding Earp and Holliday, and the results have sometimes been a mixed bag. Digital Replica Edition Home Page Close Menu

Gunfight at ok corral screenwriter