Home Forums Miscellaneous Topics Movie, Book, and Music Review A B Guthrie, Jr

My friend "Bud" Guthrie won the Pulitzer prize (1948, IIRC) for his western novel The Big Sky then went-on to add three sequels (The Way West, These Thousand Hills and Arfive) while writing a passel of other books, a number of Saturday Evening Post short stories, and the screenplay for Shane.

If you like realistic western characters and portrayals, you could do a lot worse than to get acquainted with the works of A B Guthrie, Jr � a native Montanan and a consummate craftsman.

Another old Montana friend of that era, writing in the same genre, deserves a thread of her own here � so I'll start another one.

Yep, one terrific author. I've read his works since I was a kid. In my opinion, "The Big Sky" is THE definitive novel about the mountain men of the fur trapping era.

I wish I could have met him.

L.W.

You would've liked Bud. He was a pro without pretensions.

A couple of Guthrie trivia:

� We could never get our schedules to jibe so that Bud could speak to the folks in my workshop. Finally, he gave-up and said that if I'd pass along just one thing from him, he'd consider that a good thing. "Tell 'em," he said, "that I worked all day on one line before I got it right, and I felt that I'd done a good day's work." I asked him, of course, what that line was.

He had to put a solemn, almost philosophical thought in a cowboys' mouth without it sounding either too philosophical or too "cowboy." The character was on his way to settle an issue with some enemies, and he was refusing his friends' offers of going along to help. As best I remember it, the line was:

"A man with a purpose don't need a party."


� Somewhere along the way, Bud developed a permanent distaste for Christianity as he perceived it.

He assumed a mind set very much like the Stanislavski "method" actor's when he wrote anything about any character. He introduced one character (Brother Weatherby, IIRC) to The Way West, originally as a foil for his ridicule of Christianity. In the story, during a violent thunderstorm one night on the plains, Brother W lay down and slept as calmly and contentedly as a baby. Bud wrote that scene "as" Brother W and said later that Brother W's simple faith and trust had moved him.

Here's another bit of Guthrie trivia that I never got to share with Bud. He would've gotten a huge kick out of it, as he did about the story that led to my writing � at his insistence � my short story "El Tigre, Jr" (now on the Campfire home page, left-screen menu).

� The overly strait-laced librarian at a high school where I one once taught (several decades ago) was a very narrow censor. When the library got a copy of Bud's autobiographical The Blue Hen's Chick, she went through it with a black felt-tip marker and crossed-out the "bad" words. She got so carried-away that she even blacked-out this italicized word in Bud's reference to a prospector and his jackass.

Even so, the book was so risqu� in her way of thinking that she didn't shelve it. When she learned that I was a friend of Bud's, she gave it to me. I cherished it and was going to give it to Bud � but he died, and it got away from me some-other-how.

K.H. _ "A man with a purpose don't need a party."

Yep. Good line.

I've had characters in my scripts "take over" their characters and go their own way. Funny when it happens. A good writer knows when to rein 'em in.

Speaking of Stanislavski, a friend of mine was on the set on "The Marathon Man," starring Laurence Olivier and Dustin Hoffman. Hoffman was a product of The Actors Studio, in NYC, which taught the Stanislavki Method of acting.

Hoffman had not shown up for shooting the previous day, and this day, showed up late, bedraggled, eyes red, a mess. He explained that he had stayed up for 48 hours, without any food, getting as tired as he could, so he could "get into his character" for the scene they were to shoot that day.

Olivier, a consumate actor who always knew his lines and always showed up on set on time, looked at him and said, "Dear boy, have you tried acting?" <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/cool.gif" alt="" />

L.W.

I've heard that story in years long past, and wasn't sure who the actors were. But it's very � propos in regard to plain, old-fashioned craftsmanship, so I've long cherished it a lot better than I've remembered its details.

Thanks!

Bibliographers list just four titles for Bud�s series of old-west novels � The Big Sky, The Way West, These Thousand Hills, and Arfive. That�s how it was, for a while � how Bud originally intended it to be when he decided to move-on to other fiction genres.

But he�d created some memorable characters � notably mountain man Dick Summers and beautiful Indian Teal Eye � whom he�d dropped by the time when he wrote These Thousand Hills and Arfive. Their admirers wanted to know what had become of them.

So Bud wrote a fill-in novel, Fair Land, Fair Land, to plug the time gap between The Way West and These Thousand Hills. (I overlooked this one too, in my original post.) His full old-west series, then, comprises not just four but five novels, best read and enjoyed in the order of the historic times that they cover �

The Big Sky
The Way West
Fair Land, Fair Land
These Thousand Hills
Arfive

I wish that one of the TV companies would make a series out of all five of Bud's old-west novels, however many screen hours it'd comprise. If they'd stay even half-way faithful to his characters and stories, they'd really have a ring-tailed hummer of a series!

Only if they'd let Selleck, Duval and some of the other actors who've done the Western genre star in the production. I saw the movie they made out of "The Big Sky" in the 50's and I wasn't impressed with the accuracy, having read the book so many times that it fell apart on me. By accuracy, I mean both with the period weapons as well as story line.

I saw the movie (1952ish) long before I read the book, knew Bud, or bought my bride's wedding pearls from Steve Geray ("Frenchy," the skipper of the keel boat in the movie � wasn't his surname Jourdonnais?). I was a Navy photographer when I saw the movie, and Russell Harlan's cinematography captivated me � as it did later in Red River and To Kill a Mockingbird and had done much earlier in Ramrod.

Since I saw the movie first and read the book much later, they've always been separate stories for me, each enjoyable in its own right.

The Big Sky movie was where I first noticed Hank Worden ("Poor Devil"), who immediately became one of my favorite character actors. (He was "Old Mose" in The Searchers.)

I wonder why the script-writer (Dudley Nichols, IIRC) had to change the mountain man's name from "Dick Summers" to "Zeb Calloway."

K.H. - "I wonder why the script-writer (Dudley Nichols, IIRC) had to change the mountain man's name from "Dick Summers" to "Zeb Calloway."


Ken, the long odds are that "Dick Summers," was a very common name of living people at the time of the making and release of the flick.

There is a very old company in Hollywood that the studios use to research names used in scripts, and if a name of a character is the same as the name of a living person in the U.S., the name is changed in the script. Same with a business.

Reason is that people who have the same names as those in scripts/movies, have sued the studios, claiming they were "defamed," or their "privacy" invaded. With the long time "deep pockets" syndrome with juries, studios long ago started researching every script name ... or having the research company do it.

Of course, if the studio pays some $$$ for a waiver to that person or business, they might go ahead and use the name if it is absolutely necessary, but that happens very seldom.

Some names are "public domain," but that's a different ballgame.

FWIW.

L.W.