Back in about, ooh 1980 something ish, probably 83, although it could possibly've been earlier, I was sitting in some offices on The Charing Cross Road, which is a fairly rare distinction, because most offices in that locale were just off Charing Cross Road. It didn't go well and I was flung out on the street within about twenty minutes of entering the building, which time would include, negotiating reception, trying to chat up the girl there and the wait in the ante room. I think my time there might've even been shorter, if it weren't for the agent taking the extra care to point out, in meticulous detail, exactly how useless I was. The interview was concluded in the ante room, I didn't even get past the coffee rings and wire frame chairs. As a parting shot the agent proffered some advice, you see as a youngster, I'd indulged my own predilection for science fiction and fantasy and built a portfolio which featured those genres, not exactly heavily, but with some prominence. 'Science fiction is a fad,' he said with sagacious assurance, the implication being that next year no one will be interested.
Well that was 1980 something and we're in the 2000 and teens and the fad of science fiction and fantasy seems to be lingering a little, I wonder why that should be? My answer to that question, is simple, it's because it's not a fad the idiom encompassed by science fiction and fantasy has always been here, it's been the chief focus of fictional literature and drama since their inception. The clue is in the concept of fiction, it's made up, events that never occurred, conjured from the conceit of imagination, so why would you fetter that imagination within the restrictions of the prosaic world you live in? You wouldn't and nobody of any notability ever did, for example: historical drama, well the past is a foreign land, and if it's far enough away to be remote from living memory, then it's a land conceived only through rumour, speculation and lies.
One of those foreign lands would be the one embodied by the western genre but that genre is as old as the past that it now references. People were reading of the fictionalised exploits of notable western figures almost concurrently. The mythology and fantasy that grew up was encouraged by notions of the wild west a place remote from reality and its strictures, populated by beasts, savages, ventured by the brave and the lawless. The institutions that optimise this mythologisation are things like, Buffalo Bill's Wild West; the show that toured the world with attractions like Annie Oakley, Sitting Bull and Bill himself, the man who could bring down a glass ball flying through the air with a single bullet, while astride a cantering horse. I dunno about you but that seems like science fiction to me, give Bill a light sabre and you've got a Jedi.
The western genre suffered a decline in late 60's the preoccupations of adventure seeking juveniles shifted to rocket ships and ray guns to exercise their imaginations. There was a brief interruption in the decline, the spaghetti westerns and those influenced by the vigour of that sub-genre and it's rebellion against the conventions that had grown to stifle expression within the broader genre. It is that creative stagnation that is the cause of the decline the western genre and it can be empitomised with three films by the same director, Howard Hawks.
Part two, tomorrow or when it's finished.
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