by Bruce BethkeTaking a cue from Henry's column of yesterday, I've decided to declare this Dump On Wild Wild West Week here in The Friday Challenge. As of this month we're coming up on the 11th anniversary of the release of that career-crippling disaster, and if you have any questions about that turkey you've been dying to ask or a comment you're just itching to make; go ahead, get it out of your system.
Today, however, I'd like to talk about The Guns of Wild Wild West. Specifically...
Oh, there's just too much territory to cover, and too little time. I guess the basic lesson here is that when you're dealing with a clearly defined historical period—say, 1869—it's really not that hard to do some minimal research and get it correct for the period. As for myself, I knew I was in trouble when, in one of the early drafts of the script, West discovers that a certain of Doctor Loveless's fiendish devices is powerfully magnetic because his bullets stick to it. His lead and brass bullets.
One of the problems with working on a movie novelization is that you need to understand that the script is not Holy Writ; it's merely their best guess at the movie they think they're making today, and it may all change tomorrow. When I started writing that book I had the script—and then another script—and then the script after that one—and some sketches of some production art depicting what they thought certain key sets and props might look like. Another problem with that particular movie was that it was made by the same production company as and essentially as a follow-on to Men In Black, and one of the things they apparently thought was really effective eye candy in M.I.B. was Smith and Jones' arsenal of exotic weaponry. So the early scripts and production art had West and Gordon packing a lot of steampunked-up 19th weaponry that was never used in the movie and probably never even mocked up by the prop department, but I didn't find out about any of that until after I'd written a whole lot of scenes in which I tap-danced around the question of how West and Gordon were packing 1870's and 1880's weaponry in 1869.
Another problem is that Hollywood feeds on Hollywood. (Which is probably why they like vampire movies so much.) The people who make movies largely don't read—they have people they pay to read for them—they get all their ideas by watching other people's movies. The trouble with this is that if you're trying to make a new western by watching old westerns, you're probably not aware of how wildly historically inaccurate most of them are. It's not just guns: the clothing, the accessories, the scenery, the set-dressings, the props, the spoken language, and even the saddles are usually wrong for the period. The people who made those old westerns weren't making historical biopics and docu-dramas. They were making adventure stories, using whatever location they could afford to use in Monument Valley, whatever standing set they could get in Old Tucson, whatever clothes were handy in wardrobe, and whatever guns Stembridge Gun Rentals happened to have in stock that week. I've seen Hollywood westerns in which civil war soldiers were packing Trapdoor Springfields; fighters at the Alamo were carrying Martini-Henrys; and insurgents in pre-civil war Kansas were packing Colt Peacemakers. And don't even get me started on that magical 1892 Winchester carbine that John Wayne carried through time and space in film after film all the back to the 1840's.
Getting back to Wild Wild West, though. My biggest technical problem with the script was one that was, ultimately, simply insurmountable. The entire plot hinges on the Tarantula being a credible threat to the stability of the United States government.
Well, back before the Civil War, or maybe even after the war to some small and poorly equipped frontier garrison, it just might have been. But by 1869 the Mississippi River was full of Monitor-class ironclads designed expressly to smash and sink other ironclads—and besides, the Tarantula didn't float, couldn't swim, was too heavy to transport by ship, and was not nearly tall enough to wade the Mississippi. So I figured if Loveless really wanted to attack Washington D.C. he'd have to take the thing north, across the plains, and try to ford all those rivers further up the watershed; say, somewhere north of the confluence of the Minnesota, St. Croix, and Mississippi rivers.
Which would take him right past Fort Snelling, which is a park and a monument now, but which in 1869 was most definitely an active army base, equipped with a significant infantry garrison and a battery of heavy rifled eight-inch guns that would have made short work of Loveless.
The history is there. It's easy to research. Do it.
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