POWERS BOOTHE: THE GUARDIAN OBITUARY

My obituary of Powers Boothe went up at the Guardian online yesterday, you can link to it here. He died in his sleep at only 68, a surprise because of the incredible energy he brought to his roles. Yet the seeming easy with which he pulled off intensity was amazing, and it was what made him one of my favourites.

I was thinking about how much fun he seemed to be having when he acted, that well studied sense of not having studied at all. And how much fun the set must have been on so many of his films, and what good ensembles he was part of. Extreme Prejudice is like a Hall of Fame of B movie villainy: Rip Torn, Michael Ironside, William Forsythe. Walter Hill had worked with Sam Peckinpah, and this was very much like a movie Peckinpah might have wanted to make. The same with Southern Comfort, another Hill effort, with Keith Carradine, Fred Ward, and Peter Coyote. Or think of Tombstone, with such great turns by lesser stars like Val Kilmer (the definitive Doc Holliday) or Kurt Russell as Wyatt, but tremendous work from Michael Biehn (Ringo Kid), Stephen Lang (Ike Clanton), Bill Paxton (Morgan Earp) or Joanna Pacula (Big Nose Kate).

But the two roles that might be his best performances are his breakthrough part as Jim Jones, which he played like a demented summer-camp director, which made it easy to see how he might get typecast as charismatic villains, and his take as Al Haig in Oliver Stone's Nixon: another film where he shines amidst a wonderful ensemble cast. He gets the lightly hidden drive for power behind Haig, and the way he succumbs to the opportunity to grab it, the way a vampire might succumb to the smell of blood.

There are similarities in many of his roles. Obviously he played a lot of corrupt people with power. But even in two of his starring roles as a hero, he winds up being converted to his heroic role (A Breed Apart and Emerald Forest). The latter in particular is very interesting because he starts off not to far from his character in Red Dawn, which possibly inspired Ironside when he played in Starship Troopers. As an aside, I saw a preview of Red Dawn at the DGA in Los Angeles with a friend of mine, and my ridicule of the movie forced my host to tell me to keep it down lest I offend anyone connected with the film who might be in attendance. It's kind of like the creation myth of the Tea Party militia.

Writing the obit was not easy: there were lots of half-way details about his life, especially his personal life. I found lots of gossip clippings about him and Rebecca de Mornay, which might help explain why his long marriage eventually failed, but was nothing important enough nor solid enough to warrant inclusion. Then, as it turned out, the Guardian was contacted to say his marriage had not ended in divorce, and the alleged second wife and two sons did not seem to exist. It was easy to say wikipedia was wrong, but I hadn't followed Wiki blindly; it was sourced (perhaps from wiki) in many places, and what had given the second wife idea credence was one source that actually was correcting wikipedia regarding dates. If this were a hoax, it's hard to conceive of why it would be done. In the end, finding no evidence to confirm either second wife or children, we corrected the piece, with apologies for distress it may have caused.

To add to the confusion, I also discovered an artist named Power Boothe, who made a short film called Overture, which some listings credit to Powers Boothe. I eventually found the correct name on a sale listing of old VHS art tapes. I assumed it was this Boothe who had also done the art work for Todd Solandz's first film, which also gets credited to Powers.

Most interesting, however, was one source, which appeared to get repeated, saying Boothe had appeared as an extra in Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid, as a Bolivian bandit. The timing was not impossible; he might have been between college and graduate school, though location shooting was done in Bolivia. I felt that had that story been true, I would have found Boothe talking about it at some point, especially considering his success in westerns. I did manage to find a still from the scenes in Bolivia, and in the back is someone who looks an awful lot like Boothe, although not necessarily the 21 year old Boothe. I never made contact with someone who could tell me definitively, but I feel like this is apocryphal, much as I would have liked it to be true.

Boothe also thrived in the quality small-screen dramas that have changed the face of film-making in the past 15 years.  This should not have been a surprise, because his best lead role as a non-villain was as Philip Marlowe, in the HBO series Marlowe, as I describe in the obituary. That series was produced along with London Weekend, the kind of deal that was the forerunner for the modern style of subscription channel offerings. Showtime's Fallen Angels was another similar series, though better written, directed and shot.

Boothe didn't fit my idea of Marlowe, but he got the character and interpreted it deftly. Latterly he stole scene after scene from Kevin Costner and Paxton in Hatfields and McCoys; he and McShane were a terrific double-act in Deadwood, and he was born to play Connie Britton's dad. There would have been more television greatness to come for sure; he was gone too soon. RIP.

"I'LL DO BOSCH AS LONG AS THEY'LL HAVE ME": TITUS WELLIVER & MICHAEL CONNELLY TALK THE NEW AMAZON SERIES

Friday 13^th is not the most auspicious day to launch a new series, but the success of Michael Connelly's Bosch on Amazon Prime is not something that will depend on luck. Because this project is driven by Connelly's will to see his character depicted on the screen the way he was conceived on the pages of his novels. Connelly has taken huge risks, and been rewarded in the sense not only that the finished product reflects his own work, but the ensemble work of people who seem to be just as driven by their ambition to make something deep enough to encompass the silences that fuel Connelly's writing at its best.

Having watched the first four episodes of Bosch, I can confirm that it's a show both satisfying to long-time followers of the books, but in no way dependent on them; it has its own context and dynamic. It's different, as it should be, but what is consistent is the world-view of Connelly's writing and the strength of Bosch's character.

Last week Connelly and Titus Welliver, who plays Bosch, flew into London for an overnight trip to promote the series. I managed to interview Welliver, but first caught up with Michael (disclosure: I've written an afterword to one of his books, twice interviewed him on stage in London, and even gone to baseball games with him) who was tired but visibly happy. Even the red-eye from LA was a blessing for him: 'I've been so busy with Bosch, I haven't been able to write, so it was good to have a few hours to work on the next book, which brings Bosch and Mickey Haller together.'

Connelly said he's waited twenty years for a chance like this, but what's fascinating is the way he made it happen. 'I've invested most of my adult writing life in this character,' says Connelly, 'and I didn't want him to be something that he's not.' He bought the rights to the character back from Paramount, for a 'seven-figure sum', and hooked up with Henrik Basten, a Swedish-born producer who was such a fan of the Bosch books he named his son Harry. With writer/producer Eric Overmyer, a veteran of quality shows like Homicide: Life On The Streets, St Elsewhere, The Wire, and Treme, they took the unusual step of writing both the pilot episode and the show 'bible', detailing the characters and plot line, before pitching the show to the networks and streaming services.

On that basis, Amazon asked for a lunch meeting, and wanted to take the project 'off the table'. 'Amazon sold more of my books than anyone in the world, and the bottom line is I write books,' Connelly says. 'I was thinking, these will be one-hour commercials for my books. And they weren't intimidated by their audience. It was such a change. With the networks, you make the pitch and they go behind closed doors and you never hear from them.'

Connelly says that if the show makes it through a second series, he will 'break even', but that doesn't account for ancillary sales (foreign or DVD) nor for the boost to his book sales. But you get the very real sense that it isn't about the money. Having had a disappointing ride in other non-Bosch television projects, Connelly simply wants the best for his character.

He insisted on only two elements of creative control in the control, approval of the 'showrunner', and that the show be shot entirely on location in Los Angeles, which is such an integral part of the stories. There are moments of real brilliance: as Harry follows a dog up into the woods where the bones which start the case are found, it turns from bright urban LA to Grimm Brothers forest. And in episode four, written by Connelly and George Pelecanos and directed by the great cameraman Ernest Dickerson, Bosch emerges into the LA River chasing a suspect  who's disappeared.

The plot is worked together from three of the novels, City Of Bones, The Concrete Blonde and Echo Park. The casting is fascinating: Jamie Hector and Lance Reddick from the Wire became Bosch's partner Jerry Edgar, and deputy chief Irvin Irving respectively. The strong supporting case includes Amy Acquino as Lieutenant 'Bullets' Billets, Steven Culp as the DA 'Rick' O'Shea, Scott Klace and Troy Evans as the detectives 'Crate and Barrel', and Mark Derwin as Capt Harvey '98' Pounds. They look like real people and, as Connelly says 'like my books, they talk like people talk in the middle of their lives, not in the middle of a script.' Jason Gedrick as the villain, Raynard Waits, brings a Michael Keaton-like unpredictability to what is often a by-the-numbers sort of role. Mimi Rogers is chilling as a lawyer who specialises in suing the police; one fine early cameo is provided by Scott Wilson, as a retired doctor whose dogs digs up the bones that get the main case going. 'That's where I felt like a real producer. I know Scott, we'd been going to Dodger games together for 20 years. If you bring people in who know and like the books, they get it.'

But the key piece of 'getting it' was the casting of Bosch, and although Connelly and his team were convinced Welliver was the right actor, it seemed as if they would never be able to get their schedules to jibe. After getting through the small talk, of having the same birthday and both being born in New Haven, Connecticut, I asked Welliver about the role, and the strange circumstances under which he finally landed it.

TW: There are so many moving parts in life—I was a single parent and doing Transformers, and I was had one of those situations coming in to New York for a meeting with them, and I'd lost my cell phone, and I was afraid they'd be thinking 'is he just jerking us off' because I read the script in 20 minutes and basically had said 'OK, where and when', but I was worried it had gone away.'

What was it that appealed to you?

TW: I wanted to work with literate people I respected. Bosch has tremendous depth, he's not just a cigar-chomping hard-boiled guy. I loved his vulnerability, his deeply lonely troubled world of solitude. The problem is he's an observer, so how do you make that physical, active? And this show allows you to be contemplative without spelling it out. The networks are terrified of silence, they don't trust the audience to get it. But it's a metaphor for the detective process, it's a grind. We see Harry sitting at his desk, going through files for something he may have missed. It's like literary judo, he flips it over.

And we've got quality TV here, where they're thinking outside the box, which you can do in this non-network universe. We did the shot of Bosch emerging into the LA River, with a drone, from overhead and panning out, to show he's alone, and then set him into the context of the city. The drone was terrifying, sort of THX1138. It has to stay a certain distance away from you, with its blades spinning, but I'd rather jump out of a plane!'

You've specialised in detectives, and in quiet characters who have all this stuff going on inside, particularly in Deadwood.

TW: Yes, Adams was a listener, a student of the human condition. He was in a state of constant observation, and so was I because working with Ian McShane was like a master class, except he's so generous. I did this scene, Adams is on the bed, and David Milch said 'he's waiting for his life to begin', and without having to say anything, we got that, quietly. He understood this, and there's nothing he didn't write that wasn't in there for a reason, but he always would give the audience the benefit of the doubt that they would get the little things you do.

It sounds like a straight progression to Bosch?

TW: Exactly. You know, I never wanted to do a show and two seasons in get bored and become a pain in the ass to everyone. I'll do Bosch as long as they'll have me.

NOTE: This essay will also appear at Crime Time (www.crimetime.co.uk)

THE REAL DEADWOOD: RICHARD MATHESON'S WILD BILL HICKOK

It's always sad when a writer's untimely death motivates you to find that unread book and, a day late as it were, finally read it. Such was the case for me recently with Richard Matheson, who was better known as an sf writer, or indeed a screenwriter, but who produced a number of westerns that share a clean prose, clear storyline, firm narrative drive, and deft characterisation. The Memoirs Of Wild Bill Hickok is no exception, but it's also a revisionist version of gunfighter myth, a sort of Little Big Man focussed in on just one man.

The excellent conceit of the novel is that it is indeed written by James Butler Hickok himself, and he is no gunfighter, much less a hero. In fact, he starts a sensitive soul, and grows into someone who's more coward than anything else; even his name is acquired through accident and misunderstanding. Fate seems to have a different path for Hickok that the one he might imagine, and in this case, fate deals him tough cards—not least his famous, fatal, aces and eights.

What makes the book most effective is that Hickok's own writing begins to follow the rough-edged frontier talk he has borrowed from the dime novels who've created his legend; the sensitive man proud of being well-read, winds up writing as if he really were the hero he's been written to be, and in that chasm, in that conflict between the man and myth, lies the story. It's fiction as life, and the scenes of Hickok on the stage have a true discomfort, even for the reader. And Bill finds his solace, as he did when he was a boy, in women, or failing that, as a man, in the bottle.

It seems a simple tale on the surface, but it's Matheson's version of Hickok's prose that gives this novel its edge, and makes it memorable. It reminds us of just how controlled, how spare, and how good Matheson was.

The Memoirs Of Wild Bill Hickok by Richard Matheson

Forge (Tom Doherty Associates) 1996, $6.99
ISBN 9780765362278

JUSTIFIED: ELMORE LEONARD ON THE SMALL SCREEN

At the end of the first episode of Justified, deputy US marshal Raylan Givens (Timothy Olyphant) has showed up at his ex-wife Winona's house in the middle of the night, scaring her current husband. As they stand on her porch, Givens, who has been transferred back to his home state of Kentucky after provoking and winning a showdown gunfight with Cartel killer in Miami, allows as how he has just come to realise he is angry. 'Angry?' she says. 'You're the angriest man I've ever known.'

That moment was a perfect definition of what Justified, based on the character Elmore Leonard used in two novels and one short story, was trying to do, and it's not strictly speaking, Leonard's own territory. Leonard's heroes like Givens, or Carlos Webster, are not as much angry as self-aware. It's an older-fashioned attitude, one you might have seen echoed in Cormac McCarthy's No Country For Old Men, a sort of 'man's gotta do' mentality. It may seem like a fine line, but you can see the difference between Leonard's Givens, whose miner father died of black lung, and the version created by Graham Yost, where Givens' father, as yet unseen after the first three episodes which I've seen on Britain's Channel Five, is both a con-man and a strong-arm thug. This puts Givens' own working as a boy in the coal mines into a different sort of context, most likely one in which his father was in jail. It also suggests issues of both disappointment and abuse beyond the strictness and straps of an older generation. But an angry Givens, with something to prove to the world, is a far different character from one who has to prove things only to himself, and that's where the nub of the difference lies.

The show's first episode was busy trying to define the character, get him back to Kentucky, and set up the rest of the cast. In the second and third programmes, much more of the Leonard feel came through, not as much in Givens as in the criminal characters. In fact, I thought Yost's script for the second show, 'Riverbrook' may have been as good an adaptation of Leonard as almost any, even though it wasn't an adaptation per se. There were moments of pure Elmore; the woman being held hostage complaining about wasting money on breast implants, and politely thanking the woman holding her hostage when she says how nice she thinks they are. The casual incompetence of the hostage-takers, and the kidnappers in the third programme, is exactly what makes later Leonard in particular flow so well, and the show captures it nicely.

There's also a nice contrast between Winona (Natalie Zea) and the appealingly trashy Ava (Joelle Carter, left, looking a bit like Bridget Fonda in Jackie Brown), who's shot-gunned her husband to death in the first episode, and somehow is released and back in the crime scene dining room quickly enough to be flirting with Raylan, a siren trying to lure him back into the Kentucky he tried hard to avoid. But there's a subtle reminder here, because even as we contrast Eva with Raylan's ex-wife Winona, we recall that Winona has, like Raylan, returned to Kentucky, from which she wanted to escape every bit as much as he did.

That contrast also appears to be setting up a parallel of sorts between Rayland and Boyd Crowder (Walton Goggins), his childhood friend who's the villain of the first episode 'Fire In The Hole', which was the title of Leonard's original story, but who is allowed here to survive, with the intent, it would seem, of making him Raylan's evil alter-ego. Those are the strong points of the structure. Otherwise, there is a certain generic quality to the set-up of the Lexington US Marshal's office, you've seen it in a million cop shows, and unless they can drum up some bureaucratic conflict for Raylan pretty quickly it is going to become stale.

But the show will succeed or fail on Timothy Olyphant's performance, and at times I wonder if he's just that little bit too attractive and little bit less steely than he needs to be. The show-down in a Miami restaurant which opened the first show was a bravura set-piece, and he carried it off with real flair, but it also reminded me not a little of Deadwood, where Olyphant faced the same kind of challenge; there he also played a pleasant, attractive man who might well be concealing an anger against life's circumstances, and who needs to display a vast reservoir of determination. He was at odds with Ian McShane's more demonstrative villain, but there is always the sense that he is just a little too nice, or too soft. Or maybe too small. Small in the sense of better suited for the small screen, without the gravitas that would make him naturally master of the role. The way Justified is building, he will have to be the strong silent presence at times, and he will have to be the steely gunfighter at others; he can do the latter, it is the former that is the question.

Oddly enough, I came to Justified and Luther at the same time, you can see my take on the latter here. Idris Elba would seem, on the face of it, a more commanding, larger presence than Olyphant, yet where the original set-up has led to more interesting stories and more development in Givens' character, in Luther the set-up has remained unchanged, same conflicts, same types of stories through its first four episodes. Luther too is an angry man, though his anger expresses itself through tantrums of frustration at being able to express it. Givens' anger, on the other hand, gets expressed through action. So though I had immediate reservations about both, I've already come around to Justified, and have much higher expectations for the rest of the series.