Westerns used to be the surefire money makers in Hollywood. Directors like John Ford, Sam Peckinpah and Sergio Leone elevated the genre to fine art. But comic book heroes nudged the cowboys off the big screen, and the Hollywood Western rode off into the sunset.
Still there is hope on that distant horizon as TV is resurrecting the classic Western. With shows like “Yellowstone,” “Hell on Wheels,” “Godless” and now, “That Dirty Black Bag,” the Western is galloping back into the mainstream.
Nurtured in the style of Sergio Leone’s spare and bloody spaghetti Westerns, “That Dirty Black Bag” premieres Thursday on AMC+. It tells the tale of an upright sheriff (Dominic Cooper) burdened by a twisted past and a scurrilous bounty hunter (Douglas Booth) known for decapitating his enemies and toting them around in — you guessed it — a dirty black bag. With laconic Leone logic he explains: “Heads weigh less than bodies.”
The eight-part series was filmed in Morocco, Italy and Spain – where Leone crafted most of his stylistic movies.
One major site was Almeria, Spain. Booth recalls, “We shot in ‘Fort Bravo,’ a lot of the Leone movies were shot there. And when we were doing our horse training, we could ride from one classic film set to another. You would be in a Western town, and the next minute, you'd be outside a little church in Mexico. So that was quite fun.
“You'd watch the movie the night before and then doing the horse training the next day, you'd be riding around the (original) sets. That was very cool.”
One of the sites was the location of Leone’s first spaghetti Western, “A Fistful of Dollars,” which starred Clint Eastwood, recalls Booth. “It made quite a nice coffee break going out and looking through all those classic sets. But the feeling of the space – it’s so visually stunning, and it goes on and on forever — these dry, rolling hills that you've built completely like you're in the Wild West. It doesn’t feel like you're in Europe at all. So, you can see why, historically, people over many years, have come there to make these iconic films.”
Not only was the cast and crew besieged by debilitating heat in Morocco, they had to cope with the COVID-19 outbreak and the ever-capricious weather. “We had a problem after we were filming for several weeks for the first time in many, many years they had a very wet season,” recalls Cooper, 43.
“And within literally over the space of a night, we had rainfall. And our landscapes that were dry and arid suddenly became lush and green. And, again, our wonderful (director of photography) was struggling to find — we were really working day-to-day finding new locations very quickly to make sure that it continued to look dry and arid because it was ever-changing,” he says.
“And I think that that sensation of being able to get even more impressive, wonderful, stunning backdrops — which after a moment of watching — you have to keep reminding yourself, ‘Oh, my God. Look at the background. Look where we are.’ It really is very cinematic and beautiful!”
The filmmakers didn’t plan to duplicate what Leone had done, says Cooper. “We wanted to replicate and play our childhood dreams out, but we also wanted to be part of something that was new, fresh and had a reason to be being made,” he says.
“And I think that all those reasons were given to us by the producing team and the directing team, and it had a very, very distinct style. It was, yes, an homage to the spaghetti Western, but ... it was clearly its own thing. And we all agreed that when we read it ... You read a lot of material. And this, you couldn't help but want to know what was happening next.”
Booth, 29, who was born in London, didn’t grow up playing cowboys and Indians the way many American kids do. “I used to be obsessed with ‘Lord of the Rings’ so I used to get a big stick in the garden and do Gandalf's ‘You shall not pass’ on my lawn — to no one. So, I was obsessed. I did audition for it once and didn’t get a part.”
Cooper, also a Brit, says he fantasized about being an entrepreneur. “I used to sit behind a desk and pretend I was a businessman and put a suit on and hope that one day I'd have a desk and a telephone. I had a telephone that wasn't attached to anything, a pretend computer, and a toy Ferrari that I used to push around in the hope that one day I would be a successful businessman. That's what I did as a kid.”
But that dream soon faded, sighs Cooper. “I was bad at it. I couldn’t use the fax machine. I didn’t understand it. And then computers came along, and I didn’t understand those. It's what went right. I saw the light. I saw the light. A desk job wasn't for me.”
Jackson shines in miniseries
While most folk may recognize Samuel L. Jackson as the guy who wants to know what’s in your wallet, he’s made more than 100 movies. And while he’s terrific in most of them, it’s his performance in “The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey” that sets a new standard. In the miniseries, premiering Friday on Apple TV+, Jackson plays an old man suffering from dementia and loneliness who has the chance of recovering his memories briefly.
Jackson says he understands the devastation of dementia. “I’m from a family where I felt like I was surrounded by Alzheimer’s,” he says.
“My grandfather, my uncle, my aunt, my mom, there are people on my father’s side who have Alzheimer’s. And I watched them change, deteriorate and become different people over the years.”
He says he hopes the series, based on Walter Mosley’s novel, will help people understand the condition better. “Being able to tell their story or listening to them and understanding that things in their past are more their present than what’s going on in their everyday life, and understanding how to convey that to people. And giving an audience an opportunity to know that they aren’t the only people who watch their loved ones deteriorate that way ...”
Few may know that the confident Jackson suffered from a severe case of stuttering when he was a kid. “I always stuttered. When I was young, psychologically something was going on in my life. I stuttered really bad and by the fourth grade, I was a whole kind of stutterer and kids would laugh at me, so I just stopped talking for a year in school,” he says.
“I still do (stutter) when I try to talk too fast or get excited. When I read out loud, I stuttered really bad. During that year I made the best grades in the class so everybody would leave me alone. I set the curve.”
He says he eventually learned how to cope with it. “How to breathe, how to take my time, and I got better. I still have moments. There were days when it was just P’s or days when it just M’s or T’s ... a lot of days; still words that start with W. I get tense if the first thing I have to say is ‘What.’”
Schumer excavated her funny bone at 5
Amy Schumer will be bringing her humor back to television on March 18 when she introduces her new comedy, “Life & Beth” on Hulu.
Schumer, who claims she’s an introvert, says she first got interested in performing when she was only 5 years old. “I was playing Gretl in ‘The Sound of Music’ at this Catholic high school. And every time I would come on stage, the audience would laugh. And it made me feel hurt and embarrassed,” she recalls.
“And I remember the director explaining to me, ‘No, it’s funny. It’s GOOD when you make people laugh. It means they love you and you made them happy.’ I just said that to my son the other day. We were playing Red Light, Green Light, you know that game where you stop and go. And he, on his own, just said, ‘Yellow light!’ And we laughed and he got embarrassed. And I was trying to explain it to him so he could learn a couple years earlier than I did. I didn't mean to become a comic. That just kind of happened by following the river. But I always knew I wanted to be a performer.”
Coster-Waldau plays Danish hero
Nikolaj Coster-Waldau is starring as the real explorer, Ejnar Mikkelsen, in the thriller, “Against the Ice,” now streaming on Netflix. Coster-Waldau co-wrote the story based on Mikkelsen’s book who a native Dane like Coster-Waldau. It tells the grueling story of Mikkelsen’s exploration of Greenland in the early 1900s and what happened when he returned to his ship only to find it abandoned.
Though he is Danish, Coster-Waldau’s was determined to make his acting way into the English-speaking world. But it wasn’t easy. “I had one year – 1999 – which was a very bad year,” he says. “I’d just done two movies back home, but I wanted to live in London to see if I could go that route. It’s expensive and I’d done one little English film and I was kind of just struggling. There’s a lot of competition in England as there is here and I spent a lot of time trying to perfect my English and living off the money I’d earned the year before.
“My sister lived in England and had been there for years, so I made this rule with her that we weren’t allowed to talk to each other in Danish, so I only spoke English with her and would watch television and just basically repeat everything.
“I went over there, and I had a little thing on a television show in England, but it was nothing steady, nothing really good. So, then I went back home and did two plays in Copenhagen and after that I picked up a job in an English film called ‘Enigma’ which Michael Apted directed. After that, ‘Black Hawk Down’ and then it picked up.”
Since then, Coster-Waldau has successfully toiled both abroad and in the U.S. He’s best known here as Jaime Lannister from “Game of Thrones.”
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