SERIES LOOKS AT THE WEST - THE WAY IT WAS

                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SATURDAY, March 20, 1993                   TAG: 9303200394
SECTION: SPECTATOR                    PAGE: S-1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: LOS ANGELES                                LENGTH: Medium
SERIES LOOKS AT THE WEST - THE WAY IT WAS
A new documentary series looks at the trailblazers, the settlers, the Indians, the soldiers, the cowboys, the gunfighters, the dreamers and all those others who contributed to both the myth and reality of the often-romanticized American West.
But "The Wild West" presents them in an extraordinarily personal way: The people who lived in the West in the 35 years following the Civil War tell their own stories, in their own, often moving, words.
The 10-hour syndicated series is narrated by Jack Lemmon and features the voices of Brian Keith, Barry Corbin, Graham Greene, Conchata Ferrell, James Coburn, Richard Crenna, George American Horse and many others.
It is being syndicated by the Prime Time Entertainment Network in two-hour segments over five consecutive nights beginning Monday at 10 p.m. on WJPR (Channels 21/27).
"We wanted to tell about the West through the common elements of human experience, such as hopes, dreams, love, marriage, work and death," producer John Copeland said.
"At the end of the Civil War, it was estimated it would take 150 years to fill up the land west of the Mississippi. It took one generation - or about 35 years. We wanted to tell it in the words of the people, and we wanted it to be true to what happened. We didn't want the idealized West, the myth."
The subject is close to Copeland's heart: His great-grandfather, Elijah Simpson Hornaday, was a first sergeant in the 7th Cavalry with George Custer before Little Big Horn, and won the Medal of Honor with the 6th Cavalry at Sappa Creek, Kan., in 1874.
Historian Robert Utley contributed to the segments on soldiers, Indians and gunfighters. His biography of Sitting Bull will be a May selection of the Book of the Month Club and the main selection of the History Book Club. He has worked at the Custer Battlefield National Monument in Montana and is a former National Park historian.
"I think one thing they've done in particular is to recognize that people are interested in people," Utley said. "They present broad themes of history in terms of individual human experiences that people can relate to. That's the best way to present history."
Copeland and executive producer Douglas Netter began putting the series together after the enormous success of the Ken Burns' Civil War series on PBS in 1990. They'd previously produced "Wild Times," "The Sacketts" and "Buffalo Soldiers," a pilot based on the black troopers of the 10th Cavalry.
"I think television has now recognized a market for this kind of history that did not exist before the Civil War series," Utley said. "It just all exploded in the last year or two. There are more in the works.
"I think the 1990s are going to be the years of the West and the year of the Indians. `Dances With Wolves' had a lot to do with arousing an interest in Indians that did not exist before."
The series is lavishly illustrated with pictures gathered from more than 250 museums and collections. Eight historians and teams of researchers worked on it, and a companion book will be published by Time-Life Books.
"The myth of the West was created during this period," Copeland said during a break in a film-editing session. "It was created primarily by the dime novels, and writer Ned Buntline, and by Buffalo Bill Cody. His Wild West Show and its spinoffs were the most popular entertainment in the world for 30 years."
The series does not take a chronological approach to the West; instead, each hour examines a different aspect.
Utley appears on camera in several segments, including the one on gunfighters, since he wrote a biography of Billy the Kid.
"The way you have to look at Billy the Kid was that he was a kid," he said. "He wasn't a psychopath. He was a bright kid, but he went wrong. The thing that fascinated me was that the Billy the Kid the public knows is almost entirely a creation of legend. I was challenged to see if I could peel away all those layers of myth and see if there was a real person underneath - and there was."
Copeland said the series also looks at the major contributions made to the West by blacks, Hispanics and foreign-born immigrants.
"At least one out of every five cowboys on the open range was black or Hispanic," he said. "They're found in every area of the West. Women also served a very important role. It was not an exclusive white male domain.
"You see the John Ford Westerns with the cavalry riding to the rescue. Very often in the real West, when the cavalry rode to the rescue, it was a black troop. The all-black 9th Cavalry and 10th Cavalry led the fight against the Comanches and Apaches. Supposedly, the Comanches were the ones who called them the buffalo soldiers."
In the 1870s, he noted, a quarter of the people in the West had been born in a foreign country.

by Archana Subramaniam by CNB