Probably Unanswerable Questions
Does Kevin Costner make this movie better or worse? Would a Kurt Russell reconstruction of Tombstone as the Western Godfather be worth watching? Why does this always happen to Westerns?
In the discussion (4)
Approx. transcript time · 01:05:13Read transcript
- Does Kevin Costner make this movie better or worse? In a sense he did make the movie; it cannot be made without Russell, since Costner at that point was in his own head about being an auteur and was too famous, while Russell is the right level of famous; Wyatt Earp is so long because it details his romantic relationships from his teens through law enforcement to Tombstone.
- Russell has said he was given all the footage to reconstruct the movie, that the real film is a Western Godfather quite different from what was released, and that he has not done it because he has a life, though while moving he found the hospital scene between Wyatt and Doc that he wrote; whether anyone would want to watch a reconstructed Tombstone is the question.
- Interest in director's cuts and reconstructions, like the chronological Godfather and the Apocalypse Now cut, has faded with the home-entertainment market, so it would probably not make money and might be a Netflix eight-episode miniseries instead, though there may not be enough footage; The Other Side of the Wind, reassembled from film found in Slovenia and Paris, is an amazing document but not an amazing movie, and a reconstruction risks feeling like what they wanted without being it; the hosts like Tombstone's messy flaws.
- Why does this always happen to Westerns? They are expensive and tough to manage, you easily fall behind with horses, weather and the elements, and nobody makes a fast Western; it always has to be sprawling.