Hollywood Trail Boss: Behind the Scenes of the Wild, Wild Western
Burt Kennedy
1997; Boulevard / Berkley Publishing
This is a good, fast, entertaining (though a bit repetitious) autobiography from Burt Kennedy, the writer-director of a few fistfuls of westerns. While he is still perhaps best remembered as the writer of a few Randolph Scott westerns directed by cult fave Budd Boetticher, Kennedy also spent a good 25 years behind the camera directing more than adequate western programmers, including the riotous spoof Support Your Local Sheriff (eons better than Mel Brooks’ appalling Blazing Saddles) and The War Wagon (my favourite John Wayne western not made by John Ford or Howard Hawks). While reading it, we are reminded of the tunnel vision we often apply when we evaluate filmmakers. We so quickly drop the names of “auteurs” and make references to their individual styles that become an in-joke strictly for the cinema-literati. Too often we short-shrift the people who didn’t attach some great universal statement or personality to their works, yet just made good pictures.
Thankfully, this does not read like a conventional biography. It does not open with a defining moment of one’s life and then flash back to when they were a babe in arms. Kennedy’s prose is actually conversational, stream-of-conscious; for instance, stories or ideas get interrupted by a thought that had just occurred to him. Instead, the chapters are grouped with remembrances pertaining to a single subject matter, and they do not necessarily unfold chronologically. His WW2 years in his late teens, for example, are chronicled in the second-to-last chapter. Kennedy quickly breezes through his career near the beginning, then hunkers down for some chapter-length remembrances. What you get, then, is the essence of a life instead of a documentation. You know more what it feels like to be Burt Kennedy, other than receive an exhaustive documentation of names and places. There is one chapter, for example, which collects extracts from his journals. There are entries from a couple of dozen days over the period of four years, which illustrate the unglamorous side of this crazy business: travel, location scouting, deal making, more travel, more scouting, more meetings… more scouting. You see that this dream job of being a director really is work.