Looking relaxed and content in front of his typewriter in 2012 when his segment was filmed, Sam also describes how he believes that aloneness is a necessity to produce good writing. The 103-minute film also features typewriter enthusiasts Tom Hanks and David McCullough. It is available now for pre-order on iTunes.

From Dr. Shane Owns, Shrink Tank:

"The director, Philip Kaufman (The Right Stuff), discovered Sam Shepard at a poetry reading and Shepard rejected the part several times. 'I felt like it was ridiculous to play a living person. I knew Chuck [Yeager] and I didn’t feel like I was him at all,' he said. By all accounts, Shepard captured Yeager’s quiet bravery and reserved confidence, even in the face of invincible demons. Jerry Bruckheimer called his performance 'the very essence of cool.' And it is."

From Nelson Pressley, Independent.co.uk:

"Shepard always regarded Hollywood stardom warily, but he became a major crossover celebrity, showing up on lists of America’s Sexiest Men. 'Sam was so hot in Resurrection, his then-wife Jones later said of his 1980 film with Ellen Burstyn, 'that I wrote him a filthy fan letter.'"

From Stephen L. Betts, Rolling Stone:

"Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Sam Shepard often brought the kind of prosaic dialogue to his plays that wouldn't necessarily be out of place as lyrics to country songs, rife with minute details and charged with emotional weight. As an Oscar-nominated actor in feature films and television productions, the characters he portrayed were often the laid-back, laconic type... Remembered for his brief role as 'Spud,' husband to Dolly Parton's character Truvy Jones in the 1989 film Steel Magnolias, Shepard once told a British reporter, 'More than any other art form I know of in America, country music speaks of the true relationship between the American male and the American female… Terrible and impossible."

From actress/singer Dolly Parton:

"I was so sorry to hear of Sam's passing. What a nice man and what a great actor. I was honored to have him play my husband in Steel Magnolias. Rest in peace, my friend."

There's a lovely scene between Dolly and Sam at this link.

* * * * *

I've been active in my family's genealogy over the past forty years and in the last few years Ancestry.com has been a terrific resource. They link to a web site called findagrave.com and under Sam's name, some fans have made comments. I'm struck by how many acknowledge him as an actor, not a playwright. Almost all of them.

One of my all-time favorite actors.
I always enjoyed your movies.
Sam, you were so talented and handsome!
Hollywood lost a great actor today!
I got to be in his film "Baby Boom". He was a wonderful guy.
Your films we shall cherish.
 Loved your portrayal of Chuck Yeager in "The Right Stuff".
Wonderful actor.
A Fine actor.
You were great in all of the movies. My favorite was "Baby Boom".
I thought you were a very talented actor.
Thank you for the performances and the memories.
I remember you as the vet in the movie "Baby Boom".
I loved you as an actor, not so much as a playwright.
I enjoyed your acting through the years!
Loved you in "The Right Stuff", "Baby Boom", and more.
One of my favorite actors.
One of my favorite actors. I also loved your writing.
Loved all your movies!
You were such a great actor. A real man's man.

Note that Baby Boom is mentioned quite often. Funny and oh, so romantic! Sam was actually in four films with Diane Keaton. The other three were The Only Thrill, Crimes of the Heart and Darling Companion. Here are some new photos from Darling Companion showing Sam as Sheriff Morris - a man like Sam who also enjoyed fishing.

It's been 2 1/2  weeks since the death of Sam Shepard and there has been no word from the family as to the status of his body? Has he been cremated with his ashes scattered over the Western plains? Was there a private funeral? Is there already a burial site? Or  will there be a public memorial? Every culture has some kind of ceremonial farewell, especially to a great man.

The first written work by Shepard that I read decades ago was "Motel Chronicles". I had read all of J.D. Salinger's books (and later read the memoirs by Margaret Salinger and Joyce Maynard) and for some reason, Sam's style echoed Salinger's stream of consciousness writing, at least for me. Maybe I connected with Sam because he was just nine days older than me and I was also a loner. Maybe I connected because I had the same angst toward my father. In the end, I think I jumped on board because he was a movie star. But I have to add, "when they made him, they threw away the mold." Here's a snippet from the book:

"The Rialto Theatre was dark and musky in the middle of the day and I entered the world of the movie so completely that the theatre became part of its landscape. The trip to get popcorn up the black aisle with the sound track booming and the kids squealing in their seats was all part of the plot. I was in the cave of King Solomon at the candy counter. The "Ju-Ju-Bees" were jewels. The ushers were jungle trees. Cheetahs roamed through the bathroom. I breathed African dust for days afterwards in a town of solid white folk."

One more snippet:

The cover of "Motel Chronicles" features a photograph by Bruce Weber. I always wanted to purchase Weber's book on Sam when it was listed on Ebay but it was always a bit too pricey for me.

One of my favorite photographers is the legendary Annie Leibovitz and she presently has an exhibition sponsored by the LUMA Foundation in Arles, France. The showing, which runs from May 28 - September 24, 2017, features "The Early Years", which consists of over 8,000 photographs taken between 1968 and 1983. There may be more than one of Sam but we know the photo below is included. I had never seen it before.

From Loretta Greco, Magic Theatre:

"Sam refused to play the wise sage. He remained beautifully broken, from his first plays in 1964 to his last book of fiction in 2017—still combing the open road for visages of his lost father, the bygone West of his youth, and America’s forgotten promises. I last saw Sam in Healdsburg at the end of March, just before he headed home to his Kentucky farm. We discussed Diebenkorn’s work and pondered the origin of the Beatles’ 'Blackbird.' Before the afternoon was over, he dictated a dedication for Magic’s 50th anniversary for Ed Harris to present. Sam asked to hear it out loud. His sister, Roxanne, read it back patiently several times. Sam listened intently, making small, careful revisions."

The first thing that intrigues me is the discussion of the Beatles' song "Blackbird". I had never heard of it until I noted that it was sung at Swedish actor Michael Nyqvist's funeral last month. At that time I looked up the history of the 1968 lyrics and discovered it was written about the civil rights struggle. At the Academy Awards ceremony in 2016, Dave Grohl performed this song to accompany the "in memoriam" segment so it seems quite appropriate for memorials, perhaps one for Sam. Very beautiful lyrics.

Blackbird singing in the dead of night
Take these broken wings and learn to fly
All your life
You were only waiting for this moment to arise

Blackbird singing in the dead of night
Take these sunken eyes and learn to see
All your life
You were only waiting for this moment to be free

Blackbird fly
Blackbird fly
Into the light of the dark black night...
 

The second thing I picked up in Greco's statement was the fact that Sam was in Healdsburg, CA in March. That's where his son Jesse and his family live. Perhaps that was one of his last stops before he retired to Kentucky. Here is a terrific photo of Sam and Jesse, probably taken 10 to 15 years ago.

In many of these tributes for Sam, much has been said about his Oscar nomination for The Right Stuff, but I'd like to point out that he received other nominations as well. His performance in the A&E original movie, Dash & Lilly, (1999) earned him both a Globe and Emmy nomination for Best Performance by an Actor. Directed by Kathy Bates, the drama told the story of the tumultuous and passionate love affair between  Dashiell Hammett and Lillian Hellman, played by Judy Davis. Sam was also recognized for his work in the ABC TV film Ruffian (2007) with a SAG nomination for Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor. He starred as horse trainer Frank Whiteley. That Sam Shepard understood the sport is no doubt among the reasons why he was able to get Whiteley down perfectly.

* * * * *

From actor Peter Coyote:

"We both lived in Mill Valley together, and while we were never close, we shared a lot of interests, practiced roping together a few times, and I was good friends with his wife Olan (who he was married to during his peak creative years) and his son Jesse, whose writing I encouraged with the gift of a portable typewriter I'd used pre-computer. Despite not being more than casual pals, Sam cast me as Austin, one of the two leads in the world premiere of True West, and a Hollywood agent in the audience signed and represented me for the next 8 or 9 years... I imagine he's chatting with my sister [Elizabeth West] who preceded him by a few days. They'll both be back as the rain."

I came to know Coyote over 20 years ago when he was looking for feedback on his first book, Sleeping Where I Fall. He is the dearest man. We began an online friendship and eventually we met up in Boston. He liked the idea of an official web site so I created one for him and thus began Coymoon Creations, a combination of "Coyote" and his Polanski film, Bitter Moon. That first True West production took place on July 10, 1980 at San Francisco's Magic Theatre with Peter starring as Austin and Jim Haynie as Lee.

From Owen Gleiberman, Variety:

"In 1978 Shepard was tapped to co-star in a major motion picture: Terrence Malick’s second feature, Days of Heaven, in which he was cast in the role of a wealthy, dying farmer in the Texas Panhandle in 1916 who is lured into the scheme of a pair of traveling rogues (Richard Gere and Brooke Adams). The movie was like a magic-hour version of a Biblical parable, and Shepard’s performance was wry, taciturn, sorrowful, and sexy in a gentlemanly way. As an actor, he was more than skillful enough to get by, but in Days of Heaven he had something more than skill. He had an aura."

"A lot of it was his look. Tall, rock-steady, almost pre-verbal, with his hair swept back and two slightly uneven front teeth that suggested the authenticity of a much older era, he could have been a preacher or a country lawyer from an age that was decades before media. He looked like a startlingly handsome man out of a 19th-century photograph."

I like what Mr. Gleiberman is pointing out  but I have to correct him. Shepard's hair was not "swept back". It had a rather shaggy, unmanageable look as seen in these photos.

Terrence Malick's film was such a masterpiece from the cinematography right down to the soundtrack. My husband and six children all love it as well. This movie scene of Linda Manz during the locust infestation could be mistaken for a Vermeer painting.

* * * * *

Strumming...  First, a young playwright in NYC; second, a scene from Netflix's "Bloodline" series; third, with his wife O-Lan; and fourth, with his 'buddy' Patti Smith.

"When news arrived Monday [7/31] of the passing of Sam Shepard, the line Hamlet says of his late father — "I shall not look upon his like again" — came to mind."

[A perfect quote to define the man! And it just so happens that Sam played Hamlet's father in the 2000 film with Ethan Hawke]

"While many will be familiar with Shepard's star turn as Chuck Yeager in The Right Stuff, the 1983 film in which he personified the strong silent type, the best example of his underrated range as an actor came in Voyager (1992).
There, he carries the film, and plays not only a man of quiet desperation, but also the heartbroken victim of his own foibles, who has lost everything. It clearly demonstrates that onscreen, just as in his writing, Shepard was unafraid to tap into his own pain and insecurities and lay them bare in the name of art."

I'm in total agreement with Mr. Winters about Sam's performance in VOYAGER. It is possibly my favorite Shepard film. Peter Travers of Rolling Stone magazine wrote, "As Walter Faber, a rational fifty-year-old engineer who gets blindsided by emotion when he meets a young woman, Shepard gives his finest screen performance."

Here are some rare black & white production photos from the film:

This past week Voyager director Volker Schlöndorff gave the following tribute:

"Sam was not comfortable acting: 'I feel like a whore,' he said after six weeks of shooting and wanted to stop the movie. It's true that he did it for the money and he was very well paid. But he was very choosy as to the parts he condescended to whore for. And it's also true that he was very good at being an actor and he was even better at rewriting scenes so that he had a minimum of dialogue, giving all the lines to his partners. I was very fond of his performance and I think the movie is memorable because of his presence. After a farewell scene with Julie Delpy, I found him almost sobbing backstage, he turned to me and said: 'I just realized I could tolerate another loss in my life.'"

And some memories from author Joe Lansdale (Cold in July):

"I can't claim to have been a dear friend of Sam's, or to know him real well. My only contact with him was on the set of Cold In July, a film made from one of my novels...  I felt his role in that film was magnificent, and so did a lot of folks, because it was. Sam and I talked about music and books mostly..."

Personally, COLD IN JULY was a special treat for me because it was filmed in my neck of the woods in the Mid-Hudson Valley. One of the locations was a local diner I frequent and I get a warm feeling every time I return. It's this Sam was here thing.

From Janelle Okwodu of Vogue magazine:

"In fashion circles, he will be remembered as a symbol of all-American style at its most powerful - the personification of the uncomplicated elegance of ’70s and ’80s menswear. Keeping things relaxed even as his star rose, Shepard liked his clothes straightforward: denim, cowboy boots, and plaid shirts for casual days, natty blazers and tailored suits for formal moments. That consistently effortless wardrobe complemented both his onscreen persona and his reputation for being a straight-shooter..."

"Tall, unquestionably handsome, and self-possessed, he made even the most basic outfits look appealing... In jeans and work boots, Shepard did what many of fashion’s peacocks could not - leave a lasting impression."

[Wow... I always thought his fashion statement was b-o-r-i-n-g. Always the blue jeans and dark jerseys.]

From actor Stephen Rea:

"I wrote an introduction to one of his plays in which I said that the three great writers of the English-speaking theatre at the end of the 20th century were Beckett, Pinter and Sam. He said to me at the time: 'You shouldn’t include me in that company', but he more than belonged there. His writing is heroic, he himself was heroic and he was heroic in the stoical way he faced his death. He was very candid. I saw him shoot people down once or twice but, my God, he was the kindest man; utterly truthful, witty and generous to a fault. There was no one like him."

[I always enjoy Stephen Rea on the big screen but none more than his role as the joyless husband Henry in Neil Jordan's The End of the Affair, based on Graham Greene's novel. Top performances from all three leads. That includes Ralph Fiennes and Julianne Moore. If you haven't seen it, you're missing a gem.]

From The Arts Desk:

Nicholas Wright, then artistic director of the Theatre Upstairs, recalls "a laconic, dry, very laid back, very masculine Gary Cooperish kind of style, certainly very direct, capable of being quite rude."

"My impression," says the actress Dinah Stabb, "was that he was always keenly interested in events going on outside the room. Although he was part of the world of the Royal Court, he never seemed to be of it. It's no surprise that he went on to be a film star, because he seemed like a film star when you met him. People always wanted to be part of him, to be where he was."

Jimmy Fay, who directed Shepard's plays - True West twice (once for the Lyric in Belfast, and once for the Abbey), Ages of the Moon and Curse of the Starving Class, also in the Abbey in 2011, described him as "generous, razor sharp, experimental, strange, iconic, Elvis-like", while also being "utterly engaging, interested in people, an outdoors man, a great poet who always had to write".

From Graham Hillard, National Review:

True West still rings true and stands as the greatest American drama since Long Day’s Journey into Night. Sam Shepard has died, and American theater has lost one of its last remaining giants... Who, now that Shepard is gone, will seize his mantle? Tony Kushner, perhaps? Or Lin-Manuel Miranda? Had he not ensured a lifetime of poor reviews by making explicit a conservatism that had once been merely latent, my money would have been on David Mamet, an obvious genius and a dialogist of unparalleled skill.

Yet none of them can claim Shepard’s fire. The man had something. He gnawed that bone until it broke.

From David Krakauer, President of the Sante Fe Institute:

"Sam was a restless, brilliant, and gracious polymath who became an important member of our community, an unlikely and passionate interlocutor at the Santa Fe Institute, and a friend with whom we would discuss novels, poetry, folk music, and the challenges of our too often thwarted efforts at creativity. He was one of the most seductive people I have met and we shall all miss him very much."

"Sam’s office was in the Institute library where we could hear him typing out essays and plays on his Olympia SM9. When Cormac McCarthy and Sam worked in adjoining rooms of the library, the Institute resounded like a nineteenth-century steel mill — deafening hammering of dueling Olivettis and Olympias."

In the 2016 documentary "California Typewriter", several artists and writers, who remain devoted to the old-fashioned method of word processing, are interviewed. Sam discusses how he approached playwriting and how he values the physicality of a typewriter. You can watch a clip of his interview at this link.

* * * * *

Troy Lennon, History editor at The Daily Telegraph, wrote about Sam's appeal to cinephiles:

"A versatile performer, he brought an intelligence, integrity and authenticity to his roles on stage, on screen and behind the scenes as a writer and occasional director. He often acted the part of farmers or ranchers on screen but also lived that role in his private life, running horses and cattle on his own ranch. Even when he played or wrote about characters like pilots, lawmen or urban dwellers, many were imbued with that same rugged rural spirit."

In 1984 when director Phillip Kaufman was looking for someone to play the pivotal role of Chuck Yeager, he found his leading man in an unlikely place. He said, "Sam had a cowboy quality to him. He was Gary Cooper". His confident cowboy swagger earned him an Oscar nomination and made him as close to a mainstream star as he ever wanted to be. Sam said, "I didn’t want to be a movie star. I didn’t want to have that thing of being an icon. It scared the shit out of me."

Some journalists have remained confused as to how many wives Sam had. He had only one; that was O-Lan Jones and they were married for 14 years. Here is their wedding photo taken on November 9, 1969 at St. Mark's Bowery in NYC. Together they had a son, Jesse Mojo.

O-Lan is an actress, writer and composer and has been involved in experimental theatre, music, and opera since the age of sixteen. She's been working on a memoir called "Fire Road" for several years. You can read what she writes about Sam at this American Theater link. Through the years, I enjoyed recognizing her in these small screen roles. As a Peter Coyote fan, I first caught her co-starring with him in "Die Laughing" and the quirky film "Out", where she probably had her biggest role. She often played a waitress and it was easy to pick her out because of the space between her teeth. She even wrestled a role in one of Sam's most successful films - "The Right Stuff".

Excerpt from "Fire Road":

We [Sam & O-Lan] would steal away and drive around in his car at night, a beige Volvo station wagon. No destination, the smell of metal dust in the empty car. I watched his hands change gears in the rolling light from the streets. That car didn’t seem like him; it was something you’d find in a suburban driveway. It was placid and boxy, but he was jagged, vibrant, the air rippled around him. He’d walk into any dark place and not because he wasn’t scared—it was okay to be scared, it would all be gone some day anyway. Our empty places hummed together. His from fighting his way out of the suburbs, mine from the time I lived in the jungles of Yucatan, where everything I knew had been torn away down to the bare blank bottomless hollow.

He’d say, "What’s the worst thing that can happen—we die?"

* * * * *

Here's the aging but still handsome Shepard in a photo shoot taken in New York 15 years ago:

Robert Faires of the Austin Chronicle wrote an article yesterday reminding folks that Central Texas will be  keeping Shepard's flame alive in years to come with major archives of his work at Texas State University and the University of Texas.

The Wittliff Collections at Texas State in San Marcos is home to 27 boxes of Shepard materials, covering his career during the Eighties and Nineties, as well as an additional eight boxes that focus on Shepard's four-decade friendship with Johnny Dark, the father of Shepard's wife, O-Lan Jones. The Harry Ransom Center at UT houses 30 boxes of its own, stretching from 1965 to 2011, but chiefly focuses on the periods of 1983-87 and 2001-09.

In 2013 Texas State in San Marcos featured an exhibition for nine months called "The Writer's Road: Selections from the Sam Shepard Papers".

* * * * *

While so many mourners are praising Sam's talent as a playwright, Justin Chang of the LA Times refreshingly honors Sam as an actor. I couldn't have said it better. Here are a few paragraphs:

On the page, Sam Shepard was seldom at a loss for words, but on the screen, he was a master of resonant understatement. The men he played over more than four decades on the screen have encompassed multitudes — lovers, loners, drifters, professionals, authority figures, rebels and one very famous test pilot — but they tend to be lumped together with words such as "laconic" and "taciturn," perfectly accurate descriptors that can nonetheless seem inadequate to the task of capturing his peculiar expressiveness.

You could say that a face as beautifully sculpted as Shepard’s rendered speech more or less superfluous: the flinty stare that was made for quiet brooding, the tight, dyspeptic frown, the prominent brow that became ever more majestically crosshatched with age. But his lanky physicality and craggily handsome features only partly accounted for what made him, until his death, on July 27 at age 73, such an extraordinary screen presence — one that never got old for being so reliably expressive...

Simply by showing up and inhabiting the frame for a few minutes, Shepard could inject a picture with some essential quality that it needed — gravitas, world-weary intelligence, the weight of lived experience. In recent years, the gifted independent American classicist Jeff Nichols has made particularly exceptional and varied use of this ability, casting Shepard first as a cryptic but dependable father figure in Mud (2012) and then as a disturbingly charismatic cult leader in last year’s Midnight Special.