NYT Magazine. "Hollywood Goes West."

"From the beginning, the western has been saturated with nostalgia, mourning and the sorrowful reckoning of lost things and times past," writes AO Scott in a historical overview of the genre that might as well be an introduction to a special issue of the New York Times Magazine. "The sun has been setting for as long as anyone can remember. The official death of the West, after all, was virtually synchronous with the birth of the movies."

All five features have sidebars; for this one, novelist Robert Stone revisits The Searchers. And there's an accompanying video: "American Character and the Western."

With the eagerly anticipated release of Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood well over a month away, Lynn Hirschberg's got a long profile of Daniel Day-Lewis, who tells her, "Where I come from, it was a heresy to say you wanted to be in movies, leave alone American movies." Hirschberg:

He is most voluble and passionate on the subject of film. He loves even bad movies and likes to analyze the work of actors past and present. Day-Lewis reveres the greats - Brando, DeNiro - but he is intrigued by all kinds of performances. He dislikes John Wayne, loves Gary Cooper, prefers the Jimmy Stewart of Capra's classic pictures to the Stewart of Anthony Mann's westerns and is fascinated by Clint Eastwood. "I used to go to all-night screenings of his movies," Day-Lewis recalled. "I'd stagger out at 5 in the morning, trying to be loose-limbed and mean and taciturn." He paused. "My love for American movies was like a secret that I carried around with me. I always knew I could straddle different worlds. I'd grown up in two different worlds and if you can grow up in two different worlds, you can occupy four. Or six. Why put a limit on it?"

The cover piece gets two sidebars: "Daniel Day-Lewis's All-Time Top Westerns" and Jane Smiley on Broken Arrow: "Peace, as the movie shows, is often dangerous and difficult, but worth it. That wasn't a bad lesson for a girl growing up in the shadow of the cold war."

Walter Salles, currently working on an adaptation of Kerouac's On the Road, goes searching for the essence of the road movie and considers the first documentaries, Paris, Texas, The Searchers, Detour and Easy Rider: "Such films suggest that the most interesting road movies are those in which the identity crisis of the protagonist mirrors the identity crisis of the culture itself." Sidebar: Nicole Krauss on that Wenders movie: "It took a German to capture on film the seduction of American space, and how it would look to vanish into it."

Philip Weiss's feature is two things: a profile of maverick producer William Pohlad and a primer on a modest yet respectable segment of the business, namely, making movies for grownups that cost somewhere between $10 million and $40 million."

Sidebar: Jonathan Lethem on at least two great death scenes in McCabe and Mrs Miller.

"No Country for Old Men is sort of a western, and sort of not," Ethan Coen tells Lynn Hirschberg. And cast members of various Coen brothers films poses for a fashion show.

"Food issues - a sign of weakness in many parts of our nation - are celebrated personality traits in Hollywood," writes Jennifer Steinhauer. "Refusing to eat food the way it is meant to be prepared is apparently one way of projecting discipline and by proxy its close cousin, power."

"I had written a novel, a western called Appaloosa, about two gunmen, Virgil Cole and Everett Hitch, who come to free a town from its thrall to a thuggish rancher." And so it came to pass that Robert B Parker would meet Ed Harris, who'll direct and star as Cole. Viggo Mortensen'll play Hitch.

"The current crop of westerns may not yet represent enough swallows to officially constitute a summer, but certain themes are visible," writes Luc Sante in a short yet fine essay. "The principal one, naturally, is violence. We are at war again, after all, and the world looks even more lawless than it ever has. And moral ambiguity runs a close second."

"As a professor of American history at the University of Colorado at Boulder and the chairwoman of the school's Center of the American West, what do you make of the flurry of new films that revisit Jesse James and the town of Yuma and the empty space of the desert landscape?" Deborah Solomon asks Patty Limerick. And the prof's got a pretty good sense of humor about it, too.

Cowboys and Aliens. There it is. "'I just really liked the title,' said Roberto Orci, who helped write Transformers and recently signed on as a producer." But the focus of Ben Ehrenreich's piece is on Platinum Studios' "full-circle commercialization" model.

"Respect for stark contrasts - visual, moral - may in fact make today's videophiles the ideal audience for westerns, just as audiophiles were once the ideal audience for recorded jazz," suggests Virginia Heffernan.

"The selling of the West preceded the settling of it." That's a quote from Larry McMurtry and it nicely introduces Rob Walker's piece on Buffalo Bill Cody.

"In a culture industry fueled by formula, no genre has been more important to Hollywood than the western," writes Tom Schatz, author of The Genius of the System. "From the birth of 'the movies' through the classical Hollywood era (1920 - 1960), the western played not only a vital role as a popular narrative form - and one that would comprise nearly a fifth of all feature films from the silent era through the 1950s - but also in shaping the business of filmmaking itself."

William Safire has some fun with "Hollywords."

Posted by dwhudson at November 10, 2007 2:41 PM