Wild Bill

Wild Bill (1995)

The Name Is Legendary. The Man Is Real.

Biopic about famous gunslinger Wild Bill Hickock. The early career of legendary lawman is telescoped and culminates in his relocation in Deadwood and a reunion with Calamity Jane.

Date of release
1995-12-01
TMDB
5.7 / 10 (183)
Runtime
1h 38m
Genres
Western
Director
Walter Hill

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Budget: $30M

Wild Bill is a 1995 American biographical Western film about the last days of legendary lawman Wild Bill Hickok. The film was written and directed by Walter Hill, and based on the 1978 stage play Fathers and Sons by Thomas Babe and the 1986 novel Deadwood by Pete Dexter. It stars Jeff Bridges, Ellen Barkin, John Hurt, and Diane Lane, and was released by United Artists on December 1, 1995. It was a box-office bomb, grossing $2.1 million on a budget of $30 million, and received mixed reviews from critics.

Production

The script was based on several sources. One of them was the play Fathers and Sons which had been on Broadway in 1978, directed by Joseph Papp. It was written by Thomas Babe, and focused on Hickok's last days in Deadwood, placing the action in the saloon where he was killed. Babe says he entirely made up the nature of Jack McCall, whom he turned into Hickok's illegitimate son.

Meanwhile, the team of Richard and Lili Zanuck had optioned a 1986 novel about Hickok called Deadwood. They had hired the author, Pete Dexter, to write the script for the movie Rush. The Zanucks said they were interested in the project because it explored the nature of celebrity in a Western context. "Figures like Wild Bill were like rock stars," said Lili Zanuck.

"He's a gutsy director," Zanuck said about Hill. "He's kind of a male-oriented director, and he has great knowledge of the West and all of the folklore and all of the heroes."

Hill wrote a script based on the play, the novel, and Ned Wynn's screenplay. Hill says he took details of the town from the novel but the relationship between McCall and Hickok was mostly from the play. Hill took material from Dexter's novel for the atmosphere of the town and relied on Babe's play heavily for the third act, the last hours of Hickok.

Hill said the script was based on "character rather than incident. Because I think it's not so much the fights, it's his personality, his sense of humor about himself. He seemed to understand his own legend. He both fueled it and was a prisoner of it, that it was his raison d'etre, and at the same time he felt himself very constrained by it."

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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