>Generally, LL has fared almost as poorly
>as Stephen King in translation to film.
>In many cases, the nuts and bolts of
>their stories are there, but whatever it
>is that pulls their readers in is
>completely missing. With THE GREEN MILE
>and SHAWSHANK, folks began to get King
>right and LL has some good
>representation as well.

There is something about LL's work that just breaks the minds of filmmakers. Some of it has to do with much of it being Westerns but there seem to be other issues beyond that.

There have been so many myths made up about the Western genre, many of them by fans, that it has become a complete minefield when you have to think creatively about it. Successful Westerns find a path around the minefield rather than walking through it.

An example of one of the bigger mines in the field, one that kills off creative types who take the genre for granted goes like this ... MYTH: Westerns should contain a clear division between good guys and bad guys, the white hats and black hats, that's just what they are about. MORE INTELLIGENT APPROACH TO A SIMILAR ISSUE: Westerns are about the friction between levels of civilization. An excellent example is The Searchers. There is THE WILDERNESS, no civilization, no morality, just the hard logic of survival. There are THE INDIANS, seen variously in this story as savages and an alien (to the Anglos) civilization, with their own rules and their own morality that are well developed for their environment. The ANTI SOCIAL SETTLERS, the hard core near amoral outlaw types like Ethan Edwards (Wayne's character) that played such a role in the American West. The SOCIAL SETTLERS like the ranchers who are very much like all of us. The story is created, and MANY Westerns are created, by rubbing these elements up against one another. This is how you create a good Western because this is the sort of storytelling the western genre is FOR.

If you look close you can see a similar set of issues playing out in Conagher. Women are the sex that civilization is created for. Evie is forced to live at the bare edge of it. Civilization teases her, approaching then abandoning her as fate of her home as a stage station ebbs and flows. Eventually she is reduced to trying to connect to the world by tying notes to tumbleweeds. Conagher lives in a slightly more "civilized" environment in that he is employed on a ranch but he's still at the edge of things, rubbing up against outlaws and the like. This story was the quiet version of Hondo, with no Indians to connect the man and the woman, in Conagher they must find one another themselves. It succeeded as a movie because of its simplicity, there were few possible side tracks to lead it off into idiocy.

My feeling is that there are reasons why a story is a "Western." But any time you go TRYING to write a Western you're going to get yourself into trouble. Just put yourself into the time and place, develop a plot that works and deals with one of the "Western" themes (that civilization thing is probably the biggest one but there are others), take your characters SERIOUSLY not as symbols or the sort of people who "should" be in a western. When you take westerns for granted or think they are just about superficial attributes, you fail.

As good as Dad was at not doing this something about his work led others to do it poorly. It's a trap that is easy enough to avoid but you have to be smart enough to realize you might fall into it.