Directed by Howard Zieff
Written by Rob Thompson: An Iowa farm boy rides the Celluloid Trail.
With: Jeff Bridges as Lewis Tater aka Neddy Wales, Andy Griffith as Howard Pike aka Billy Pueblo, Blythe Danner as Miss Trout as the script supervisor, Alan Arkin as Bert Kessler the Director, Richard B. Shull as Stout Crook, Alex Rocco as Earl the AD, Anthony James as Lean Crook, Matt Clark as Jackson
The mythology of the frontier plays a large role in American life. Whereas ancient civilizations had to dream-up the appearance of Zeus, Thor, Moses or Jesus, we have photographs. Wild Bill Hickok with his brace of Navy Colt revolvers, Sitting Bull and Wyatt Earp. We sculpt the image to suit our needs, although Wild Bill and Sitting Bull were the real deal and Wyatt Earp was not the man myths make him out to be.
A man too lazy to work who resorted to pimping and gambling for a living, only becoming a law man because there was no heavy lifting involved. He was never marshal of anything, let alone Dodge City or Tombstone. However; that image did not suit the myth of the gunfight at the OK Corral, and the Buntline Special Colt revolver that existed only in dime novels.
Lewis Tater hopes to escape the dreary life on the farm and aspires to become a myth-maker like his idol. As it is 1933 you might expect him to emulate Hemingway, Fitzgerald or Sinclair Lewis, but no, he models himself after the western mythologist Zane Grey, a writer largely forgotten these days and with good reason.
Grey was an exact contemporary of Edgar Rice Burroughs, whose works have endured far better, although in a largely butchered form thanks to Hollywood.
Tater falls for an ad found on the back cover of a pulp western magazine for a correspondence school for aspiring western writers, much like the scam Famous Writers School founded by Random House publisher Bennett Cerf in 1961. Not content with classes by mail, he throws caution to the wind, packs his clothes and typewriter and heads out west for the main campus of the University of Titan Nevada, in the foothills of some fictional mountain range.
The University of Titan turns out to be a post office box. Tater runs afoul of the two crooks running the con, and unintentionally takes the school’s treasury when fleeing into the desert.
He stumbles into a location shoot by a Gower Gulch type production company, Tumbleweed Productions. It isn’t long before his fortunes improve. He is hired as a stuntman, and is befriended by the comely script-girl, a trouser wearing Katharine Hepburn type, Miss Trout.
His edger to please, goofy innocent charm leads the director, a John Ford wannabe, Bert Kessler, to offering him a starring role in a two-reeler. All this time he keeps at his typewriter, pounding out first love, “Western Prose”.
The crooks are hot on his trail, wanting a measure of revenge along with their missing treasury.
As this is a comedy, and a charming one at that, you can expect Tater finds the success and respect he seeks, and the beginnings of a fine romance with Miss Trout, all the while mentored by stunt player Howard Pike, former Western star Billy Pueblo, well played by Andy Griffith, who gives the movie a special authenticity.
Howard Pike: “If a person saying he was something was all there was to it, this country’d be full of rich men and good-looking women. Kings and queens… you know what I mean? Too bad, it isn’t that easy. In short, when someone else says you’re a writer, that’s when you’re a writer… not before.”
Lewis Tater is a writer.
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