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If you are interested in the life and times of Louis L'Amour and his family there are two good films out this year that touch on the environment that surrounded us. Neither is "the truth" by any means, Hollywood movies don't tell the "truth" but they can pass along a sense of a situation or the time and place. The two films are Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood by Quentin Tarantino and Ford vs Ferrari by James Mangold.
OUAT...IH is a comedy/"what if" drama that deals with an aging Western star and his loyal stunt man and looks at the period when counter cultural values began invading Westerns. This was a pretty dark period for Western movies but it is the era that MADE Louis L'Amour a household name. Dad straddled both sides of the traditional/counter culture divide and played both to his advantage. Unlike many others who used a counter culture vision to tear down the sense of what a western was Dad used genre stretching novels like The Californios to broaden his appeal.
If you know the story of the "Manson Family" you can see the warped aspects of various western elements all through it. OUAT...IH documents a long collision course between some of the Mansons and ... well, not a pair of real cowboys, but something good enough for Hollywood, an old western star, a stuntman, an Italian actress and a very good dog. Unlike most films where so-called 'square culture' goes up against counter culture, the cowboys win.
It is also a truly loving postcard to the LA of Louis L'Amour in 1969. It's as close a recreation of the Hollywood we lived in at the time as you're going to see in the movies, even though it's typical Tarantino and all played a bit tongue in cheek. We were slightly on the outside of the film and TV world but I can still remember having dinner with Sam Wannamaker (who directed Catlow), one of the "real people" amusingly depicted in this film. Exaggerated and amusing? Yes ... but also weirdly accurate.
Also nicely accurate is the nice but also, appropriate to the era, modest home that the character, Rick Dalton, lives in in Beverly Hills. This, not the crazed mega mansions you see these days, was how a lot of reasonably well off people in Hollywood lived in those days. As the film points out, the were just a handful of studios and only 3 networks. Everyone in the business had to be prepared for protracted periods without work.
For more on the Louis's transition from traditional westerns to his own secret sauce of material that appealed to counter culture check out the introduction to Louis L'Amour's Lost Treasures Volume Two.
FvF takes a look at my mother's side of the family. My uncle, her brother, was a race car driver coming along in the wake of guys like Carrol Shelby and Ken Miles. In fact Miles was a bit of a mentor to him and he drove cars for Shelby on several occasions. Some of the "missing time" in the film between the two Le Mans races was filled (if I remember correctly) with the three of them working on different parts of developing and racing the Shelby Daytona.
We spent a fair amount of time at dusty sun blasted tracks like Willow Springs, Laguna Seca, and Riverside International Raceway when my uncle was doing the sort racing that you see Ken Miles doing in the beginning of FvF.
As I said, neither of these films is "what it was like." That's a high bar to set for anything fictional. But they do reflect what it looked like and a sense of what some of the people were like in those days. If anything, WEST Hollywood, the neighborhood we lived in, was more over run with hippies than anything shown in OUAT...IH. It was great to see Kurt Russel in that film. He and Jody Foster, Keith Carradine, Micheal Douglas and only a few others have bridged the gap from then 'til now and are still working.
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