WHEN MOVIE PROJECTS succeed—by which I mean get made—it’s usually for one reason: someone connected with the project has found the money to make it. This can take a few weeks but more often takes several years. I once wrote a little script funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, an organization that supplies a bankroll but which also comes with a complicated list of stipulations. In normal filmmaking you won’t need to bother about such matters: you just have to find the money.
My NEH film was about the opposition to strip mining in Montana in the 80s. It took eighteen years to get it made, by which time I was long gone from the project, which was called Montana and starred Richard Crenna and Gena Rowlands.
I never saw it but understand it was pretty good. The fact that it did finally get made was because Ted Turner acquired a big ranch in Montana and was seeking tax write-offs. It began as a virtuous little film, which is possibly why I had trouble getting in sync with it. I have never, I suppose, been a particularly good citizen, especially not when citizenship interferes with the attempt to make art. Montana may have been the very first Turner movie—I’m not sure.
Just as films get made for complicated reasons they often don’t get made for reasons just as strange. There is, for example, a script of mine called Honkytonk Sue—it surely rests in some archive somewhere. Honkytonk Sue was initially a comic strip by the brilliant Arizona cartoonist Bob Boze Bell; he has even done a graphic novel version of Lonesome Dove.
Honkytonk Sue was a feminist cowgirl who goes around beating up cowboys in country and western bars.
I did this script with Leslie Marmon Silko. It seemed a natural for Goldie Hawn, and we even managed to slip in London Bridge (or one of them), a segment of which spans a bit of the Colorado River at Lake Havasu City.
Leslie Silko does not easily fit in to the Hollywood way of doing things but she liked the Havasupai people and gave this one a good try. Goldie’s manager at this time was a woman named Anthea Sylbert, from a family famous for its costume work in film. Anthea was a very smart woman who just happened to be somewhat at sea when it came to the interior of America.
In our climax Honkytonk Sue would occupy London Bridge and then beat the Army Corps of Engineers, who were about to flood the Havasupai, by challenging them to a massive game of bingo, in which Goldie plays about sixty competitors, among them a famous bingo fanatic from Las Vegas.
But Anthea, it turns out, had never heard of bingo. How can you be an adult in America without having heard of bingo?
That question remains unanswered, and Honkytonk Sue remains unmade.