CowboySpirit.TV - It's a great day today and we have some very cool news! INSP has just announced that they will be having an all-day marathon featuring behind-the-scenes interviews with the cast of The Virginian. Check out their official press release below.
On Saturday, April 27th, INSP will air an all-day marathon featuring exclusive, behind-the-scenes interviews with the cast of The Virginian. Beginning at 1pm ET, the “Saddle Up Saturday” regular programming will be pre-empted to provide loyal fans an inside scoop from the actors themselves. The announcement was made by Doug Butts, SVP of Programming.
“Our April 27th marathon promises never-before-seen footage featuring The Virginian cast,” said Butts. “More content is available only online. As a matter of fact, viewers can watch The Virginian Cast Favorites Marathon sneak peak on INSP’s website now.”
James Drury, star of The Virginian, is thrilled that viewers will see his personal favorites, THE MOUNTAIN OF THE SUN and FELICITY’S SPRING.
“The entire cast is excited that INSP has put a cast-favorites marathon together,” said Drury. “It’s never been done before. No network has assembled the actors, asked about our favorite episodes and filmed our responses. They captured more than just our favorite shows; the stories that came out of these interviews are priceless. We’re all planning to watch – I sure know where I’ll be on April 27th!”
In addition to the “sneak peak,” INSP producers have uploaded one of the spots featuring James Drury himself. More interviews will be uploaded to www.insp.com over the coming weeks.
The Virginian Cast Favorites Marathon Line Up
1:00 pm James Drury The Mountain of the Sun
2:30 pm Sarah Lane The Beloved Outlaw
4:00 pm Roberta Shore The Evil That Men Do
5:30 pm James Drury Felicity’s Spring
7:00 pm Don Quine Yesterday’s Timepiece
8:30 pm Gary Clarke Duel At Shiloh
10:00 pm Diane Roter Nobody Said Hello
11:30 pm Roberta Shore The Evil That Men Do (Encore)
INSP is available in more than 73 million households across the U.S. via cable and DBS. Viewers can check their local program guides for channel information.
CowboySpirit.TV - 2012 was a wonderful "getting out of the blocks" year for Cowboy Spirit. We made our first feature film, Cowboy Spirit the Movie, and established our brand, growing our community significantly in the process.
Behind the scenes, we established our operating structure:
Cowboy Spirit Films is our film and video production division led by Bill Miller,
Cowboy Spirit Press, is our book publishing division,
Cowboy Spirit Music, is our music publishing division, and
Cowboy Spirit TV is our overarching online distribution platform to help distribute all of our creative projects.
However, as exciting as 2012 was, 2013 is the year we plan to really hit our stride. Not only will we be actively marketing the Cowboy Spirit movie, we will be developing our next film, Little Joe the Wrangler, based on the classic Jack Thorpe poem of the same name with an eye toward a 2014 release.
As part of the development of the Little Joe film, Cowboy Spirit Press will be publishing a companion novel of the same name on a variety of platforms, most notably on Amazon's Kindle platform, as well as in paperback form. Look for excerpts from the book on the Cowboy Spirit Blog along the way. We also have a number of short stories in the works, some of which will be blogged as well.
Also, we have plans to create and publish regular video blog entries as part of our overall community building efforts in the coming year. After all, we're in the film and video business, and so it's only natural that video should be an integral part of how we engage with our fans.
From Cowboy Spirit Music, stay tuned for details about the release of the official soundtrack from the Cowboy Spirit movie, featuring music written for the film by Ayla Brown and the team of Joe Hier and Ronny David.
Cowboy Spirit Movie
The year ahead is important for us as we move forward with distributing Cowboy Spirit and do our best to make it a financial success, in addition to being a creative success. Slowly but surely we will be rolling the film out onto various online streaming platforms in the first half of the new year, starting with Amazon, followed by iTunes and Hulu among others.
In addition, we will be experimenting with advertising driven viewership platforms, and putting together a selective theatrical schedule which will be targeted to areas where we already have a core Cowboy Spirit community presence. We'll be asking for leaders to take on the role of "fan wrangler", helping get out the word about screenings in those communities and making each one an event worth attending.
We'll also be looking for friends in our community that are willing to become affiliates and share in the financial success of the film by sharing news about the film with their friends and fans. You can find out more about how you can can become a Cowboy Spirit affiliate HERE.
We are so gratified by the overwhelmingly positive response the film has received from those who have seen it. Bill and I are very proud of our first project together and very excited that it has brought smiles to the faces of those who've had the opporunity to watch it.
However, simply stated, our great challenge this year and beyond will be to get the movie seen by as many folks as possible. To meet that challenge, we ask for your help in getting the word out and helping build our community. Please share and tell all your friends about the film and our other work. Thanks, as always, for being a part of Cowboy Spirit.
-Mike Allison
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CowboySpirit.TV - On Thursday, November 29th, we showed the Cowboy Spirit Movie to the public for the first time. It was a wonderful evening full of fun, music, and film in the sold out Orpheum Theater in Foxboro, MA.
Director Bill Miller and I couldn't have been more pleased with how the evening went, and it was a real treat to see so many new and old friends joined together in one place to see the birth of our new creation. I am so proud of the work that Bill and our editor, Mike Van Orman put into the post production of Cowboy Spirit, slaving away for five months over a burning hot editing bay, giving shape and substance to our film.
More importantly, I couldn't be more proud of the finished product that we have. I never could have imagined, given the constraints we had to work with, that the finished film would be so well done. A Texas-sized tip of the Resistol to Bill and the whole Cowboy Spirit family for creating a film that moves people.
Although a significant number of folks in the audience were family, friends, cast and crew, most were just regular movie patrons who wanted to see what they hoped would be an entertaining film. Well if the reaction of others who watch Cowboy Spirit in the future is remotely similar to those who attended the film's premiere, then the future is very bright indeed.
To see a film that was shot in just 12 days on a shoestring budget make a theater filled with 400 people laugh, cry, and cheer all in the course of 95 minutes, I believe more strongly than ever that our first project together as a production company truly is something special.
We hope to have DVDs available by Christmas and the film will be available on a number of On Demand platforms early next year. Stay tuned at CowboySpiritMovie.com. We hope you'll take the time to watch and enjoy. You won't regret it.
-Mike Allison
CowboySpirit.TV - This week for our Movie Review Monday, we have a great review on "A Fistful of Dollars" starring Clint Eastwood. User Bensonmum2 on IMDB.com writes:
A Fistful of Dollars is often incorrectly called the first Euro or Italian or Spaghetti Western. In fact, there were a number of Euro-Westerns made prior to Sergio Leone's A Fistful of Dollars. However, in comparison with Leone's first Western, the few Euro-Westerns I've seen tend to be little more than copies of American Westerns. Instead, Leone was first to usher in a new style of Western. Leone created a less romanticized Western where characters had faults, got dirty, and bled. A Western where the line between the good guys and the bad guys was blurred. A Western where events were unpredictable. A Western where the violence was over-the-top. The Spaghetti Westerns like A Fistful of Dollars may have had little in common with the real Old West, but neither did the Hollywood Western. And I'm not sure that Leone and the rest cared that their films lacked historical accuracy. The real West wasn't their inspiration – the Hollywood Westerns were their inspiration. These were entertainment pieces first and foremost. And if the audiences of the 1960s were entertained by this new style Western, Leone was going to give it to them.
It's impossible to mention A Fistful of Dollars and not discuss the genius of Sergio Leone. In this movie, you can see early examples of directorial flourishes that would become Leone trademarks. The extreme close-ups followed by enormous widescreen shots, the extended showdowns, and the use of music as an integral part of a film can be seen in his first Western effort. But just as amazing and genius as Leone and just as important to the success of A Fistful of Dollars is Ennio Morricone's score. I'm sure audiences familiar the Hollywood style of scoring were shocked by Morricone's music with its series of whistles, chirps, and other experimental sounds. It was a new sound for a new kind of Western. And it's brilliant.
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CowboySpirit.TV - This week for our Movie Review Monday, we have a wonderful review on "High Noon" starring Gary Cooper and Grace Kelly. User Bkoganbing on IMDB.com writes:
Grace Kelly had her breakthrough role in High Noon. She's a Quaker with deeply held pacifist principles. She's marrying a lawman, but one who's quitting that life. Her best scene in the film is with Katy Jurado who is Cooper's former gal pal. Katy explains the facts of life to Grace about marriage and the duty of standing by your man, long before Tammy Wynette ever sung about it. When the time comes, Grace does the right thing.
Like his rival in western films, John Wayne, Gary Cooper had one of the great faces for movie closeups. Back in the day it used to be a running joke about how Cooper's dialog used to be just "yep" and "nope." It was a good deal more than that. But High Noon's plot is carried quite a bit by the many closeup shots of Cooper. His face tells more than ten pages of speech and it keeps the tension of the film going. Man did not win two Academy Awards for nothing.
Of course the theme of High Noon is also expressed in Dimitri Tiomkin and Ned Washington's Academy Award winning song, sung at times during the film by Tex Ritter. However the big hit record of the film was from Frankie Laine. I doubt there has ever been a movie theme song that expressed everything you needed to know about the motivation of the central character in the film. I don't think High Noon would have attained the classic status it has without that song.
Another great performance in the film is Lon Chaney, Jr. as the former town marshal, old and cynical, who'd like to help Cooper out, but at his age and health realizes he'd be more of a hindrance. He's the only one that Cooper understands and forgives.
The final gun battle is choreographed like a ballet, it's that good. Maybe the best ever filmed. Can't describe it, you got to see it.
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CowboySpirit.TV - This week for our Movie Review Monday, we have a great review on "3:10 to Yuma," starring Russell Crowe. User Dan Franzen on IMDB.com writes:
This remake of the 1957 oater (that's movie talk for "western") is serviceable largely because of the earnest craftiness of its two leads, who skillfully play off each other in a battle of wills, if not morals. Unfortunately, while the motives of the good guy (playes by Christian Bale) are both noble and realistic, some of the actions of the bad guy (Russell Crowe) may leave you scratching your head, and while nebulous intentions can make for wonderful mystery, in the end you're still not sure why Crowe's dastardly Ben Wade has done what he's done, and what it all means.
Although there's plenty of gunplay and death by bullets, this is much more of a psychological drama than anything else. Wade, as played coldly (but not charmlessly) by Crowe, has two goals in mind: gain the mental upper hand on Evans, an untrained rancher, and gain his escape from the clutches of law and order. Meanwhile, although Evans' intentions are less murky, he's not some squinty-eyed sharpshooter whose aim is always true; he's not an iconic hero who you just know is gonna save the day. Bale is terrific; you can really see the anguish he feels as a supposed failure in the eyes of his sons. In the hands of lesser actors, these two complex roles would have seemed less symbiotic and therefore less sincere. For example, apparently Movie Guy Tom Cruise was initially supposed to have Wade's role; if that had come to fruition, we would have been distracted by Movie Star Tom Cruise, and the movie would have suffered terribly as a result.
But despite the wonderful performances by Bale and Crowe, the movie's shortcoming is that Ben Wade's intentions seem rather inscrutable. I don't mean that they're simply ambiguous (is he going to flee or help the good guys fight off Navajo Indians?), I mean that they don't make much sense. One minute, Wade is all set to get away from Evans and escape to the safety of his gang, but in the next he's actually fending off his gang as it attacks Evans. There's no explanation given for this change of heart, but the new attitude is gone as quickly as it arrives, leaving the viewer a little puzzled. Sure, some may explain this as "Wade comes to respect Evans and so doesn't want to see the rancher killed," but Wade's actions were much more than that. He wasn't just trying to save Evans, you see, he was actively trying to knock off members of his own gang, and the reason for that escaped me completely.
Still, 3:10 to Yuma is firmly entertaining, benefiting from two gritty, believable performances by Crowe and Bale, although it's marred by some unexplained actions on the part of its charismatic villain.
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CowboySpirit.TV - This week for our Movie Review Monday, we have a great review on the original True Grit, starring John Wayne. User Bill Slocum on IMDB.com writes:
"Come see a fat old man sometime!"
John Wayne's parting comment in this film is directed as much at us the viewers as it is at the young woman his Rooster Cogburn character is addressing. In a way, Wayne throughout the film plays off the image he cemented in dozens of great and near-great westerns, with a nod that by 1969, he along with the western genre had fallen behind the times, that his shoot-first approach to law and order had worn thin with the critical establishment just as it does in Judge Parker's courtroom.
In that way, playing a character of such dogged homicidal cussedness as the hard-drinking, one-eyed ex-Quantrill Raider Rooster Cogburn and giving him a teenaged girl seeking justice to play off so as to showcase his essential decency seems a clever means to win Wayne an Oscar, which he finally did here, a sentimental triumph over some more heralded performances. With such an attitude, you might think "True Grit" would come off a bit of a one-trick pony 37 years on. But it doesn't. In many ways, both the film and Wayne's performance come off better than ever.
Helping matters a lot is the support Wayne receives from two women. As the heroine, Matty Ross, Kim Darby provides Wayne with a fantastic foil, doughty to the point of rudeness, forever finding fault in others but earning your good will through her simple faith in justice and loyalty to the memory of her slain father, for whom she wants Rooster's help avenging. As she is told by a horse dealer she banters with: "I admire your sand."
The other is Marguerite Roberts, whose adaptation of Charles Portis' novel bristles with good humor and an ear for the period. "If ever I meet one of you Texas waddies who ain't drunk water from a hoofprint, I think I'll... I'll shake their hand or buy 'em a Daniel Webster cee-gar," Rooster tells his braggart riding companion, a young Texas Ranger played by country singer and ex-Beach Boy Glen Campbell.
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CowboySpirit.TV - This week's edition of Friday Friends comes from Chris Hicks writing for the Deseret News.
The Six-Gun Western is Not Dead
The Western is not dead, but it does seem to have been kicked to the curb.
While every other movie genre is well represented in the 21st century, a theatrical release of one or two Westerns each year seems like cause for celebration, especially if one happens to be a big-budget effort with a recognizable cast.
This is a movie form that was once at the top of the heap, far ahead of low-budget, B-level fantasy comic-book adaptations. But now, of course, colorful skintight costumes and super powers have usurped the 10-gallon hat and six-guns once worn by John Wayne, Gary Cooper, Randolph Scott, Audie Murphy, Joel McCrea and other stars that drew audiences to outdoor epics from the early silent era well into the 1970s.
As if to demonstrate the transition, ever since "Star Wars" critics have referred to sci-fi adventures as "Westerns in space." [Read the rest at: http://www.deseretnews.com/article/765560098/The-six-gun-Western-is-not-dead.html ]
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CowboySpirit.TV - Westerns have been front and center in movie releases lately. Whether it’s because the great western themes (justice, loneliness, strength through adversity) have particular resonance at the moment, or because the growing popularity of steampunk has reminded production houses of an under-served market, there’s no shortage of new westerns. Many of the new movies are sub-genre titles, particularly in the post-apocalyptic vein. Depending on which side of the fence you’re riding, this could be a good thing or a bad thing, but wouldn’t it be fantastic to return to the solid westerns of yesteryear, movies like Shane and The Outlaw Josey Wales, just for an hour or two?
Many predicted an early death for the western after The Postman, on a budget of $80,000,000, grossed just $17,600,000 in the US before being pulled from screens. This resulted in Hollywood largely avoiding westerns for the next decade. However, as the 2000s drew on Hollywood came back to its senses and green-lighted True Grit and The Book of Eli, both of which stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the great western classics. Fortunately for us, the success of these movies has more western films coming down the pipe.
Quentin Tarantino’s western homage Django Unchained is hotly anticipated by many western fans; Tarantino’s oeuvre proves he understands what the western is about, and few fear that the genre will suffer at his hands. More dubious are the announcements that the next Zorro installment, Zorro Reborn, will involve Zorro’s rebirth into a post apocalyptic western environment, and more bizarrely, that Arnold Schwarzenegger is set to star in a western by The Good, The Bad, The Weird director Jee-woon Kim, tentatively titled The Last Stand.
Perhaps Hollywood, with its endless search for the “twist”, has forgotten its past success with movies that are just westerns. The western does not require a twist: it is what it is, and what it is is good entertainment, often with subtexts and metaphors that go deeper than anything in Greek literature. Fortunately, the big budgets of Hollywood are no longer required to make good westerns as movie-house quality becomes achievable for filmmakers without studio connections. Cowboy Spirit’s ultimate goal is to share the love of all things western with the like-minded, and with our upcoming films, we hope to return to kindle the cowboy spirit and make honest western movies – just like they used to.
This week's Friday Friends post is by Sue Thurman of Examiner.com
William Sanderson Talks About His Role As EB Farnum in Deadwood
Horses and wagons swarm through the narrow muddy streets as sunrise brings the tattered town to life. Dirt caked miners set off to work their claims, while the Gem Saloon swings open their doors for business. One of the first people on the street is typically the mayor, Ethan Bennett Farnum (EB) ready for another day of greeting guests and catering to the breakfast crowd.
EB is an irritant to most that know him, however he is also a crafty, clever man always looking for an angle. His quick wit, stilted speech, and intelligence make him a worthy opponent. As one of the first settlers in the town of Deadwood in 1879, he also was elected the first mayor, which makes one wonder which of his qualities led to his election?
In the HBO series, Deadwood, EB Farnum was skillfully played by a wonderful actor, William Sanderson. William has a great sense of humor and was happy to talk with us about his experiences in the show. William said the one word that best described his time on the set was, fun.... [Continue reading on Examiner.com http://www.examiner.com/westerns-in-national/william-sanderson-talks-about-his-role-as-eb-farnum-deadwood]