Word: westernness
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Costner, Mel Gibson, Jodie Foster and Kurt Russell are among the stars who will don Western duds for upcoming movies. Two films based on the Wyatt Earp legend are in the works; so are movie versions of the popular TV series Bonanza and Maverick. In prime time the western is making a slow but notable return, with shows such as Fox's The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr. Ken Burns (The Civil War) is overseeing a 10-hour documentary series on the Old West, due in 1996. Lonesome Dove, meanwhile, has spawned one TV sequel, Return to Lonesome Dove (airing...
What accounts for the western's resurgence? Industry watchers point to a general revival of interest in Western clothing and memorabilia, the boom in country music and the appeal of a rural life-style at a time when urban problems seem more oppressive than ever. The old-fashioned moral values of the frontier also seem especially inviting today. "In westerns," says CBS Entertainment chief Jeff Sagansky, "the bad guys are bad not because they were abused kids or temporarily insane. They are bad, and they meet their end. There's a catharsis the audience is allowed to feel that they...
...western's long hiatus has also given the format new room to roam. Patricia Limerick, a professor at the University of Colorado and a leading revisionist historian, sees the end of the cold war as liberating. "We don't have to create an image and an ideology of ourselves as heroic expanders of the frontier and innocents who fight evil," she says. "All of that cold war fervor that drove the old westerns has lifted, so you can do more complex and interesting westerns." At a time when gritty urban realism and literal-minded docudramas hold sway, westerns...
...rarely receives more than 30% of peacekeeping assessments from member states within six months of fielding an operation. When the Yugoslav mission expanded to cover all of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the U.N. was under such financial pressure that it could not pay for the quick deployment of troops from Western Europe. The contingents had to cover their own expenses...
...most eloquent spokesman for embracing the East is Czech President Vaclav Havel. He argued last month that "we have always belonged to the Western sphere of European civilization and share the values upon which NATO was founded and which it exists to defend...