Today the American Film Institute Movie Club celebrated THE RIGHT STUFF, ranked #19 on AFI's 100 Years of the greatest American films of all time. Sam's role as Chuck Yeager earned him an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor. Great performance!

You can check out the AFI web site and watch a brief video of Ed Harris and Ron Howard discussing the film.

Last fall Minnesota native Jessica Lange published her third collection of black and white photographs called "Highway 61" which were also exhibited at Howard Greenberg's NYC gallery. Highway 61 originates in the city of Wyoming, Minnesota running 1400 miles along the Mississippi River all the way down to New Orleans. She dedicated both the book and exhibit to Sam and when Rolling Stone asked her about the dedication last October, she replied, "Yeah. (Long pause) I miss him every single day of my life, and I thought, 'Well, this would be a good dedication because there was a man who loved the road and spent a good portion of his life driving different highways.' So, yeah." (Smiles)

What some critics pointed out in their movie reviews was that Sam was definitely miscast and I agree with them wholeheartedly. One critic wrote, "The husband is basically a weak man, unable to hold up to pressure. Shepard doesn't look like he has a weak bone in his body. It's a little like casting John Wayne as a coward." Texas Monthly wrote, "As Jewell's husband Gil, Shepard flashes a wolfish grin at the beginning and is sneakily appealing, but as the farm slips away, Gil turns into a bitter, moist weakling. Sam Shepard wasn't born to play weaklings - his bones were built for heroism". And from the Daily Titan -  "Shepard, the playwright-actor, who has been hailed as a modern Gary Cooper, is hopelessly miscast as the suddenly spineless Gil Ivy." Certainly his conversion from devoted husband to petulant and abusive drunk is too extreme and results in a confused audience in defining his character.

Although the film failed at the box office, it was generally admired by critics. Ms. Lange was nominated for both an Oscar and Golden Globe "Best Actress" award for her performance. She also joined Sissy Spacek and Jane Fonda in testifying before the United States Congress about the traumatic conditions of America’s heartland. The film  also caught the attention of then-president Ronald Reagan, who decried the supposed propaganda of the picture even though part of its provocation also stemmed from the prior policies of Jimmy Carter.

It was the second time for Sam to sit in the film director's chair in the spring of 1992 as he began production for his screenplay called SILENT TONGUE. For the film's location, he chose the desolate landscape on the plains of southeastern New Mexico - Llano Estacado, or Staked Plains. His story, a bizarre combination of western film revisionism and Greek tragedy, takes place in 1873. He described his chosen location - "This was probably the most terrifying piece of real estate west of the Mississippi. It was absolutely scary. It's a flat table of land with no vegetation at all except burned-out mesquite and cactus. It's wide open. In order to cross it, you were totally exposed to these raids that were pretty persistent up until the Texas Rangers came in."

Inspired by the 1954 western bestseller "The Searchers" by Alan LeMay and John Ford's 1956 screen adaptation, Sam wrote "Silent Tongue" in just 10 days, revised it half a dozen times, then handed it out replete with camera directions and location sites. The script was initially rejected due to its lack of commercial appeal. Sam opined - "Two years later an Indian film wins the Academy Award ("Dances With Wolves") and a ghost film ("Ghost") is number one at the box office. That was kind of an odd twist of fate." In no way does this screenplay come close to the overwhelmingly positive reception of those two cleverly-crafted films.

The photo above is from the Wittliff Collection showing Sam's scribbling and sketches.  Certainly, his first failed attempt as a film director/writer with "Far North" didn't help. However, he had his own take - "The biggest difference between that film and this one is I didn't shoot enough footage with 'Far North.' I just didn't have enough material for that one. When I sat down to cut it, I was forced to get stock footage, which was an awful predicament. I'm shooting a lot more on this one and printing a lot, a lot more angles and coverage."

He also told the press, "Directing feels great; I'm really happy to be doing this. It's rough going, we're working our butts off, we're doing 40 set-ups a day, but it's still better than working in a bank or cleaning horse stalls."

The cast of "Silent Tongue" was obviously impressive starting with the theater and film talent of Irish actor Richard Harris and British actor Alan Bates. Then, add Dermot Mulroney and River Phoenix. Since Sam had just finished "Thunderheart", he also gave a major role to his co-star, Native American Sheila Tousey. It is important to note that this was River's last film to be released after he died from a tragic drug overdose on October 31, 1993.

This tale of revenge and mysticism is grounded in all the familiar Shepardian themes - dysfunctional families, painful father/son relationships, insanity, horses, alcoholism, and buried secrets that fester. Sam explained, "I think it has more to do with 'lostness' than anything else."

"Silent Tongue" takes its plot from the attempt of a distraught Irish-American youth, played by River Phoenix, to guard the corpse of his half-Kiowa wife. His vigil leads to a battle with her vengeful Indian ghost, and destroys what semblance of peace existed in both their families.

Financing for the film was a bit odd for a western. It was an entirely French-financed American production. Belbo Films, based in France, successfully orchestrated funding for the $8.5-million independent production from StudioCanal and Hachette Premiere. But, the French do adore Sam Shepard! When the film was released in France, it was called "Le gardien des esprits".

An early version of the film premiered on January 28, 1993 at the Sundance Film Festival. The photo below shows Sam at the Egyptian Theatre where he took questions after the screening. The film did not receive a warm reception.

He edited it considerably and it later went on to screen that year in November at both the London Film Festival and Native American Film Festival. It lacked a distributor until February 1994 when it was released in the US to mostly negative reviews. It was the last film that Sam ever directed.

At this time in 1992 while filming, Sam  still didn't have his Directors Guild card but he admitted, "I've always found it embarrassing to receive awards. I'm really genuinely not doing it for achievement anymore. It might have been the case when I was 19, but it's so different now than it was then."

At this time, motivated by writers, such as Vladimir Nabokov, Pablo Neruda, Samuel Beckett, Peter Handke and Jim Harrison, Sam was about to focus on storytelling - "I absolutely think that there's a level of storytelling just around the corner that you can tap into, that I'm really interested in now. I can't explain it very clearly but it's different from anything I've ever done before. I used to think it was about images and visions. Now I'm convinced it's about storytelling, storytelling for the purpose of the human deal and not dragging people down, for supporting the fact of persisting and going on."

In 1977 the Magic Theatre had moved from its Berkeley storefront into a new home in a Fort Mason warehouse. The new theater would be inaugurated with Sam’s latest work. On a $15,000 grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, he spent six weeks with eight actors and eight musicians developing an improvisational jazz opera called INACOMA. It was like nothing Sam wrote before or afterward, the exploration of the twilight psyche of Karen Ann Quinlan, a young woman who triggered an early "right to die" controversy after falling into a long coma.

Shepard was intrigued by this story - identity and destiny. "At first," he explained, "All I could visualize was a hospital bed, the coma victim and creature-characters. Then various scenes would start popping up, all out of context and wandering in and out of different realities. The scenes were joined by sounds of breathing, then music, then back to sounds. I kept abandoning the idea of even starting to write something because the subject became too vast and uncontrollable."

This photo shows Sam in February 1977 in rehearsal. The play opened on March 18, 1977 with six weeks of performances.

Theater critic Misha Berson was fresh out of college at that time working as the performing arts coordinator at Fort Mason and took every excuse to nose around the rehearsals. She reminisces, "Except for the song lyrics, I recall the piece as largely nonverbal and probably as close to performance art as anything Shepard ever authored. I discreetly watched from the unfinished bleacher seating as he developed the piece, intently focused on his intrepid cast (which included his gifted then-wife, O-Lan Shepard), conferring with them in a soft reedy voice tinged with twang."

"Reflecting the eclectic theatrical inventions bubbling up in San Francisco back then, 'Inacoma' emerged from movement and musical improvisations, yielding images of spinning orderlies in white jumpsuits and a Quinlan-like character who rose from her hospital bed to dance. What I gleaned from that now-obscure production was that Shepard was a true seeker and experimentalist, an artistic stretcher and prober, forever scouting for not just his literary voice but his voices."

Berson also adds, "Wearing leather jacket, blue jeans, and shades, his dark hair flopping over his forehead, Sam was so cool he could've been an extra from the iconic hipster film 'Easy Rider'. But in the late 1970s he was already famous in his own right, at least among theater folk, for his cowboy-beatnik charisma and his sui generis, rock-the-genre plays."

The play didn’t become one of Sam’s most important works. Chronicle theater critic Bernard Weiner interviewed Sam and described the show as beginning with a series of visual images in the author’s mind, and developing out of improvisational work with the actors and musicians.

"Many of my plays center around a character in a critical state of consciousness. I like to operate off that dynamic," Sam said. "The comatose state is especially fascinating because, from the outside, nobody really knows what’s going on inside the person in the coma."

The play featured veteran Magic Theatre actors James Dean, Ann Matthews, O-lan Shepard, John Nesci, Fred Ward, Sigrid Wurdchmidt and Jane Dornacker, most of whom had been in his San-Francisco-produced plays.

San Francisco was a welcome fit for the playwright's creativity. "After years of struggling to find an audience in New York, it's nice to find people here and in London finally catch on to what you’re doing," Sam said. "It’s been good here. There’s more freedom to experiment, to breathe."

As an aside, Christopher Arnott of the Hartford Courant noted this observation on Sam's death in 2017 - "One mark of how influential Shepard was beyond the traditional boundaries of American theater is the number of contemporary rock bands that have been named after his plays. These include Savage Love, True West, Inacoma and, yes, Cowboy Mouth and Buried Child... Sam Shepard's not dead. He rocks on."

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As a kid, Sam had gone by the name "Steve Rogers" to distinguish himself from his father. In 1963 at the age of 20, Sam decided to re-invent himself by changing his given name. He said, "I always thought Rogers was a corny name because of Roy Rogers and all the associations with that. But Samuel Shepard Rogers was kind of a long handle. So I just dropped the Rogers part of it... Now in a way I kind of regret it. But it was, you know, one of those reactions to your background. Years later, I found out that Steve Rogers was the original name of Captain America in the comics."

Some critics consider true "True West" to be the third in a trilogy including "Curse of the Starving Class" and "Buried Child", while others consider it part of a quintet which includes "Fool for Love" and "A Lie of the Mind". The play was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1983 and it hasn't left the theatrical landscape since it first premiered with Peter Coyote at San Francisco's Magic Theater in 1980. Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre's 1982 production with John Malkovich and Gary Sinise remains legendary and its popularity continues with Broadway's outing with Ethan Hawke and Paul Dano staged seventeen months ago at the Roundabout Theatre.

Set in 1980 in an out-of-the-way Southern California suburb, it remains a visceral look at played-out Wild West stereotypes, familial envy and revenge, and false value surfacing as Hollywood cliches. Today I've updated the TRUE WEST page with more information and photos. Though I had seen the stage performance with Sinise and Malkovich on videotape, I hadn't been aware of the that production's televised airings - first in 1984 on the PBS series - "American Playhouse" and then in 1998 on "Great Performances". There was also a filmed version of an Idaho production starring Bruce Willis in 2002 on Showtime.

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Here's the cover of a 1985 issue of the Western Writers series devoted to Sam's plays. The 50-page edition was written by Vivian Patraka and Mark Siegel and published by Boise State University.

Excerpt:
"Only the avant-garde had taken much notice of Shepard in his early years, and even those who did write about him seemed to promote him without much exegesis. However, by the early 1980s Shepard had been virtually canonized by the critical establishment as the most important and interesting to analyze of contemporary playwrights. Even when such critical powers of bourgeois culture, they found his work fascinating and challenging. Elizabeth Hardwick, Susan Sontag, and Ruby Cohen all championed Shepard against the few conservative figures, such as Walter Kerr and Tennessee Williams, who still found Shepard an anathema... Again and again, Shepard has been perceived by critics as both a truly American playwright and a writer of universal value and distinction, as both 'ruthlessly experimental and uncompromising' (John Lahr) and as a playwright who deals with and illuminates traditional American and dramatic concerns."

Galisteo publisher John Miller created the book "Sam Shepard; New Mexico" sharing Sam's writing with the photographs of Ed Ruscha. It was published this past winter. Mr. Miller writes,

Sam Shepard had a deep bond with Santa Fe, where he lived in the 1980s and again in 2010–2015. But Shepard had some nomad in him, and as he recorded in his Motel Chronicles in 1982, he spent as much time crisscrossing the deserts of New Mexico as he did living in any one city. As Shepard’s friend Johnny Dark said, “He lived in Santa Fe, but he also lived in hotels and on the road. . . . He might have been running away or he might have been running toward something.” Twenty years earlier, the artist Ed Ruscha, traveling from Oklahoma to Los Angeles, traversed New Mexico and created ghostly photographs of New Mexico gas stations. Together, Shepard’s writing and Ruscha’s images evoke a poetry of loneliness.

Included in the book are quotes from Bob Dylan, Taylor Sheridan and Josh Brolin.

You might ask what connection Josh Brolin has to Sam Shepard and in this moving farewell that Josh shared on Instagram back in July 2017, he answers that question.

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Taos-raised actor, writer, director, producer and poet Arron Shiver recently mused on life under lockdown in LA. One of his poems about Sam was published in the spring issue of the Taos Poetry Journal.

Shiver says, "I wrote that poem 'My Hero' to commemorate one of my theater heroes. If I look back at the bits of my own writing I'm proud of, and even some of the acting, to be honest, I can see a direct link to Sam, so it shook me when he passed. I pretty much had read all of his stuff, and it had a tremendous effect on me. formed me, in a lot of ways. So when he passed away back in 2017, I was in LA, and we all sat around drinking tequila and reading his lines out loud, and everything I remembered about my interactions with him came out. This poem was an offshoot of that. Stuff I remembered from that time. Funny stuff, mainly. Almost fights, a lot of drinking, some wonderful advice he gave me about acting. At that time he usually would rather talk about horses than acting. He had worked hard and he had worked a long time, and all he really wanted to do by the time I met him, as far as I could tell, was fish and ride horses."

The first verse reads -

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DID YOU KNOW that when Warren Beatty was ready to cast "Reds",  Sam was considered for the role of "Eugene O’Neill" before Jack Nicholson was offered the role. You may remember he played writer Dashiell Hammett in the A&E TV production "Dash & Lily" in 1999.

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