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Happy Weekend!
Apr. 13th, 2025 12:17 pmHello everyone, hope your weekend is going well!
Because Val Kilmer recently passed, I decided to watch Tombstone in full for the first time (I'd seen snippets on TV here and there forever). And I really love this movie because it's kinda helping light a creative fire I've been working on stoking all month.
First off, the women in it are negligible in their contribution despite being very interesting! Your sharpshooter hubbies all decide to move to a boomtown in the middle of the desert, and you and your sisters-in-law have to rely on each other for companionship? That's a whole book series right there you can make of it! And it makes me wanna write something about women in 1800s AZ out of SPITE. Good though this movie is, it's very 90s testosterone-fueled manly man movie stuff--but I found out that it wasn't intended to be THAT bad.
In a podcast interview uploaded on YouTube, one of the cast members said the writer/director had 4 weeks of footage that they shot before he was replaced with a different director... and none of the footage was used. Whole scenes about the development of the Earp women and Josephine Marcus were cut. I feel cheated. The girls show up in nice 1870s/1880s frocks and I was SO ready for them to bemoan trying to keep up with the standard of living they were used to in friggin' Arizona, which was basically different from any other part of the US even at that time. But no. Nothin'.
Second, the costumes were all PHENOMENAL. Apparently the whole cast was practically dying because a point was made of using the same kind of wool fabrics for the clothes. I also saw that a point was made for plenty of color because they DID dress up pretty in bright colors in the time, and I love it. Apparently they even used saddles from that era, or at least made in perfect replica. Everything felt very authentic and immersive in ways I just... don't feel in many period dramas anymore.
Third, oho. OHOHOHOHOHO. I have heard praises sung for Val's Doc Holliday my whole life but nobody. NOBODY. Told me he was the definition of disaster bisexual who literally will ride or die for his homies. "I'm your huckleberry"--I'M SURE YOU ARE, HON, YOU'RE A FRUIT ALRIGHT. Literally every single goddamn quip this man makes is him being a brat at dangerous men. It's so delightful.
I shouldn't have been laughing at how much focus was put on Wyatt Earp's budding affair with brunette Miss Marcus, when there was his homoerotic tension with another brunet filling up most of the movie, but. I was. (Now I'm convinced that whoever wrote Brokeback Mountain drew inspiration from both My Own Private Idaho as well as Tombstone.) I was talking with a film buff friend of mine about Doc Holliday online, and she said oh yeah, I legit can't tell if being violently closeted was Val's stylistic choice or just Val being Val because he's like that in Top Gun, too.
Fourth, I have. So much nostalgia for the craft and care people used to put into movies. There's still movies being made like this (Nosferatu 2024, for example), but watching how every cast member either was a HUGE book nerd or had a background in theater to really make their approach to acting so sophisticated, yet whimsical. And they talked so eloquently about how they wanted to be true to the character they were representing, but also show them in as deep and human a light as possible, show more sides to them than they usually got portrayed in film. How passionate every one of them was about art and what it makes you feel, artist and viewer alike. It just makes me sad about how art is being seen as a gimmick to get quick cash now, with no substance to it. (Here's a 28 minute behind-the-scenes video with most of interviews I'm referring to; poster has made it non-embeddable.
Anyway, since now I'm adding Val Kilmer as well as Bela Lugosi to my list of actors whose work I'm going to slowly traipse through this year. I'm off to watch The Doors and learn more about Jim Morrison.
Because Val Kilmer recently passed, I decided to watch Tombstone in full for the first time (I'd seen snippets on TV here and there forever). And I really love this movie because it's kinda helping light a creative fire I've been working on stoking all month.
First off, the women in it are negligible in their contribution despite being very interesting! Your sharpshooter hubbies all decide to move to a boomtown in the middle of the desert, and you and your sisters-in-law have to rely on each other for companionship? That's a whole book series right there you can make of it! And it makes me wanna write something about women in 1800s AZ out of SPITE. Good though this movie is, it's very 90s testosterone-fueled manly man movie stuff--but I found out that it wasn't intended to be THAT bad.
In a podcast interview uploaded on YouTube, one of the cast members said the writer/director had 4 weeks of footage that they shot before he was replaced with a different director... and none of the footage was used. Whole scenes about the development of the Earp women and Josephine Marcus were cut. I feel cheated. The girls show up in nice 1870s/1880s frocks and I was SO ready for them to bemoan trying to keep up with the standard of living they were used to in friggin' Arizona, which was basically different from any other part of the US even at that time. But no. Nothin'.
Second, the costumes were all PHENOMENAL. Apparently the whole cast was practically dying because a point was made of using the same kind of wool fabrics for the clothes. I also saw that a point was made for plenty of color because they DID dress up pretty in bright colors in the time, and I love it. Apparently they even used saddles from that era, or at least made in perfect replica. Everything felt very authentic and immersive in ways I just... don't feel in many period dramas anymore.
Third, oho. OHOHOHOHOHO. I have heard praises sung for Val's Doc Holliday my whole life but nobody. NOBODY. Told me he was the definition of disaster bisexual who literally will ride or die for his homies. "I'm your huckleberry"--I'M SURE YOU ARE, HON, YOU'RE A FRUIT ALRIGHT. Literally every single goddamn quip this man makes is him being a brat at dangerous men. It's so delightful.
I shouldn't have been laughing at how much focus was put on Wyatt Earp's budding affair with brunette Miss Marcus, when there was his homoerotic tension with another brunet filling up most of the movie, but. I was. (Now I'm convinced that whoever wrote Brokeback Mountain drew inspiration from both My Own Private Idaho as well as Tombstone.) I was talking with a film buff friend of mine about Doc Holliday online, and she said oh yeah, I legit can't tell if being violently closeted was Val's stylistic choice or just Val being Val because he's like that in Top Gun, too.
Fourth, I have. So much nostalgia for the craft and care people used to put into movies. There's still movies being made like this (Nosferatu 2024, for example), but watching how every cast member either was a HUGE book nerd or had a background in theater to really make their approach to acting so sophisticated, yet whimsical. And they talked so eloquently about how they wanted to be true to the character they were representing, but also show them in as deep and human a light as possible, show more sides to them than they usually got portrayed in film. How passionate every one of them was about art and what it makes you feel, artist and viewer alike. It just makes me sad about how art is being seen as a gimmick to get quick cash now, with no substance to it. (Here's a 28 minute behind-the-scenes video with most of interviews I'm referring to; poster has made it non-embeddable.
Anyway, since now I'm adding Val Kilmer as well as Bela Lugosi to my list of actors whose work I'm going to slowly traipse through this year. I'm off to watch The Doors and learn more about Jim Morrison.
