Subject: Tell Your God to Ready for Blood: The ‘Deadwood’ Movie Moves Closer to Reality «
From: "Eric Schwerin" <[email-masked]>
To: "Hunter Biden" <[email-masked]>, "Matthew FitzSimmons" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 13 Aug 2015 22:55:14 -0400

Tell Your God to Ready for Blood: The ‘Deadwood’ Movie Moves Closer to
Reality «

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Tell Your God to Ready for Blood: The ‘Deadwood’ Movie Moves Closer to
Reality

David Milch’s brutal and brilliant Western series *Deadwood* came to an end
in 2006, after 36 episodes and a reported 2,980 onscreen utterances of the
F-word <http://www.thewvsr.com/deadwood.htm>. HBO announced at the time
that Milch — who’d already started work on his next project for the
network, the baffling and short-lived surf-noir parable *John From
Cincinnati <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_from_Cincinnati> *— would
eventually wrap up the show in a pair of two-hour made-for-TV movies, a
compromise they’d arrived at after Milch reportedly turned down its offer
of an abbreviated six-episode final season. “We couldn’t have done the work
the way we wanted,” Milch said
<http://www.tv.com/news/deadwood-creator-keeps-it-real-4676/> at the time.
“I didn’t want to limp home. … My father always said, ‘Never go anyplace
where you’re only tolerated.’” The movies never materialized, and in a 2012
interview about his third short-lived HBO series, the horse racing drama
*Luck*, Milch said he didn’t think they ever would. “We got really close
about a year ago,” Milch told
<http://www.vulture.com/2012/03/michael-mann-david-milch-interview-luck-horses-cancellation.html>
Vulture’s Matt Zoller Seitz. “Never say never, but it doesn’t look that
way.”

You can see why. Even by the standards of TV’s Difficult Men era, *Deadwood*
was difficult television — a portrait of the West as moral mudhole,
inhabited by pathologically ill-tempered characters whose speech patterns
could veer from florid hill-country Shakespearean to anachronistic modern
obscenity in the course of a sentence. It eschewed both the easy answers of
the traditional oater and the pulp existentialism of the revisionist
Western, and it wasn’t a standard premium-cable antihero showcase, either.
It set up reluctant sheriff Seth Bullock (a pre-*Justified* Timothy
Olyphant) and whoremonger Al Swearengen (Ian McShane) as classical nemeses,
then turned them into wary allies in Season 2. By the end, it felt like
both a gritty reboot of America’s origin story and a barbed civics lesson
in which the savagery of the frontier seemed practically genteel compared
to the cruelties of legitimate capitalism. That theme emerged in the show’s
final season, with the arrival in camp of mining kingpin George Hearst
(Gerald McRaney) and his assistant, Francis Wolcott, who also happened to
be a serial murderer of sex workers.

Wolcott was played by Garret Dillahunt. On Wednesday, about nine years
after the show’s last episode aired, Dillahunt tweeted this …

… thereby forcing HBO to admit
<http://www.hitfix.com/the-dartboard/is-the-deadwood-movie-finally-happening-one-star-hears-credible-rumors>
“there
have only been very preliminary conversations” about a *Deadwood* movie. So
far there’s no information about whether we’re talking made-for-TV film or
theatrical, or if stars like Olyphant (and key supporting players like Kim
Dickens and John Hawkes, who’ve gone on to bigger parts) are even
available; also, given the arcs of the two characters Dillahunt played on
*Deadwood*,1 it’s somewhat curious he’d be the first to know. In that HBO
statement, the words “only” and “very” are probably the key words, which is
why *Deadwood* hoopleheads across the Internet were expressing strictly
guarded optimism last night instead of charging out into the streets in
their boiler-suits shouting TELL YOUR GOD TO READY FOR BLOOD. (Full
disclosure: If and when this project gets a confirmed green light, this is
exactly what I will do.)

The idea that nine years of canceled-too-soon word of mouth about *Deadwood*
finally convinced HBO to come back for one last critically acclaimed but
only modestly successful score doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. But there
are few imponderables in television more imponderable than the ongoingness
of Milch’s creative partnership with HBO, which in the years since
*Deadwood* has yielded only the half-baked *John From Cincinnati* and a
bunch of tragic racehorse deaths
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luck_(TV_series)>. I don’t pretend to be an
expert on how the television business works, but this marriage makes less
sense to me with every passing year. In 2008, HBO rejected the pilot for
Milch’s 1970s cop drama *Last of the Ninth*; last March, the network turned
down another Milch pilot, *The Money*, about an aristocratic American
family and its media-mogul patriarch, played by Brendan Gleeson. One month
later, Milch’s Red Board Productions signed a new deal with the network
<http://www.thewrap.com/david-milch-extends-hbo-overall-deal/>, which
apparently doesn’t want anyone else to be in the
not-moving-forward-with-David-Milch’s-shows business. Maybe it’s decided
that bankrolling a *Deadwood* movie is the only way to keep Milch from
following through on his threat to make movies out of the entire 19-novel,
125-short-story William Faulkner corpus; I don’t know.

I’m burying the lede, though, which is GO WATCH FUCKIN’ *DEADWOOD *—
AVAILABLE ON GOOGLE PLAY, VUDU, AND AMAZON FUCKIN’ PRIME — IF YOU HAVEN’T
ALREADY. Even if you’re not into Westerns. Especially if you’re not into
Westerns. With or without a final chapter, it’s one of the most
distinctive and complex television shows ever broadcast. And as
demonstrated in the following YouTube clip, which is staggeringly unsafe
for work, unless you work in a seedy 1870s brothel, no show ever worked
harder to earn its TV-MA rating.

Eric D. Schwerin
[email-masked]

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