In the late 1930s and the early 1940s, a number of people who would play significant roles in shaping popular assumptions about the American West all worked at Republic Films: the actors John Wayne, Roy Rogers, and Gene Autry; the director John Ford; and the screenwriter Grant H. Nelson.
In 1951, the screenwriter took on an additional role as the father of Patty Nelson, who would later adopt the role of the Western American historian who led in the condemnation of the distortion of Western history perpetrated by the genre called “Westerns.”
Small world.
When it comes to the creation of lasting images and representations of the American West, all roads once led to the studios of Republic Films, and then diverged from them. In the mid-twentieth century, those studios pumped out an astonishing number of films, many of them Westerns. And John Wayne appeared in eight films in a Republic series called The Three Mesquiteers.
There is no fudging the fact that many of Republic’s films were pretty bad, if not downright terrible.
My father, Grant H. Nelson, was a perpetrator of some of those crimes against cinematic art.
Were he still with us, my father would take no injury from my characterization of the quality of the movies where he appeared in the credits. Later in life, when he told stories about creating tedious and formulaic plots for “B” movies, there was not a hint of nostalgia.
As a child, I did not have the sense to conduct interviews for the oral history of Western films. If my father had encountered Wayne, Rogers, Autry, or Ford on the Republic lot, I did not think to pester him to tell me those tales. To convey a sense of the tenor of the stories my father did tell, I will recount his complaint about a burden carried by him and his fellow writers. The powers-that-be at Republic Films, my father said, insisted that the phrase, “You stupid bungler!” had to be used in every film, and sometimes more than once. Since it was more or less a Republic signature to have bad guys constantly at work laying out dastardly schemes, there was no shortage of opportunities for one character to say to another, “You stupid bungler!”
At the risk of confusing the fictional world of Republic’s films with the realities of our times, I will just say that the phrase, “You stupid bungler!” has not lost its usefulness in 2021.
My father left Republic Films, but its influence never left him: he never recaptured an enthusiasm for watching movies. If my mother, my sisters, and I declared the intention to head to the Fox Theater in downtown Banning, my father would—within seconds—declare a contrary intention to stay home and wash the dishes. He would then shoulder that task with good will, spared from having to buy a ticket in order to sit in dread of the moment when an actor would exclaim, with scripted intensity, “You stupid bungler!”
And when we got home from the movies, the kitchen would be spick-and-span, making this a satisfactory trade-off for all.
But why was I born and raised in Banning, California? Why did my father leave Republic Films, denying me the chance to have an anecdote-rich Hollywood childhood? Sure, he did not like his job. But in the folklore of parental self-sacrifice, many fathers have worked at jobs that they did not like in order to enhance their children’s well-being. Wouldn’t a father want his child to be sent out into life with colorful stories of the movie stars who she met while visiting her dad at work?
Stay tuned for the tale of the relocation of the Hollywood Family Nelson. (That was supposed to be a clever play on “Swiss Family Robinson,” but it’s taking its time to show its cleverness). The story of why I was denied a Hollywood childhood will appear in Episode Seven of the serial that is about to begin.
A Suspenseful Real-Life Serial
At Republic Films, my father spent much of his time laboring in the benighted format called the “serial.” Broken up into weekly episodes, serials tracked a set of characters, often saturated with predictability and stereotype. Each episode ended in a cliffhanger. The good guys would be caught in a terrible pickle, with no hope in sight. In the next week’s episode, the good guys would be rescued from that pickle. And then, within minutes, they’d land right back in another mess, where they were held in suspense until the plot picked them up again a week later. Blessedly, at the end of the serial, the good guys would permanently escape from peril, while the villains would get their just deserts, unleashing a torrent of exclaiming, “You stupid bungler!” The reason for a serial to exist was to keep people showing up at the theater, not to make a lasting contribution to the art and craft of cinema.
But this delivers me to a distinctive opportunity to contribute to the art and craft of blogpost-writing. In a twist of postmodern elegance, the structure of Republic Films serials is perfectly suited to the story I am telling right now!
Recorded in public documents, my life appears as a serial broken up into episodes in which I get mixed up—in every sense—with the judgment and interpretation of Hollywood’s Westerns. Plus, I am perfectly set up to manipulate the structure of these episodes so that they all end with a cliffhanger, forcing anxious readers to keep going to find out if things will turn out OK.
And they will.
But before we get to the happy ending, there is a series of nerve-wracking episodes in which I—the far-from-flawless heroine of this serial—find myself in such perilous situations that you may think this is the last you will see of me.
But I will keep coming back, as reliable as a Republic Films serial installment.
Episode One
The Acorn Does Not Fall Far From The Tree:
A Family Resemblance In Cinematic Attitudes
It seems impossible that human evolution would have had sufficient time to produce a genetic predisposition that causes a person to choose to watch movies, to choose not to watch movies, or to find it OK to watch movies and equally OK to sit around and talk, and maybe even to wash dishes instead.
While this is no doubt a matter of conditioning rather than intrinsic character, I bear a distinct resemblance to my father, though his aversion to movies was much stronger than my own. In fact, once I caught on to the fact that normal people like to watch movies so that they can sit around talking about them afterward, I felt a much greater willingness to watch the darned things, recognizing this as the price of admission (so to speak) to the conversations afterward.
Over my lifetime, I have been the one to initiate a plan to go see a movie maybe forty times. This statistic, the quantitatively oriented will have quickly calculated, registers as considerably less than once a year.
I have actually seen quite a few movies, but I have seen far fewer than nearly everyone I know. This is partly a result of my breathtaking gift for over-commitment, and of my maintenance of a very indistinct border, with no walls or fences, between work and pleasure. In other words, I have lived most of my life in a chronic, congenial rush, which has made it hard to pull together the forethought, planning, and orchestration that, in the pre-pandemic times, made it possible to go to see a movie.
This is the core problem: I would just rather sit in a living room or around a dining table and talk, instead of going to the trouble to sit in the dark and watch something that we can then talk about afterward.
Over the years, with others taking the initiative to recruit me, I actually watched quite a few movies.
But I didn’t pay attention to them.
This form of cognitive conduct—watching movies, but not paying attention to them—may seem contradictory and even impossible.
I assure you, it’s not.
With this conduct, I am my father’s daughter, though he took this practice to a much higher level of practice: writing movies, but not paying attention to them.
At Republic Films, the product was mostly serials and B movies. With my father’s stories of the writing of the formulaic and predictable scripts of serials and B movies, I slipped into the assumption that Westerns, by definition, told simple and predictable stories. Indeed, the genre—in which my father worked—told stories that were so flimsy that they could make a house of cards look as if it were built to last for the ages.
In other words, as a young person, I had developed an opinion of Westerns that paid no attention to movies that were made with craft, artistry, and a determination to look deep into human character. Rather than asking myself if I knew the full range of Westerns, I was content with what I thought I knew, and I was ready to tell the world what they should think about these movies.
And thus Episode One in this serial ends with a cliffhanger.
Cliffhanger #1: Will our ill-prepared heroine notice that she knows next-to-nothing about the full range of the cinematic form of expression called the Western? Will she wake up and say to her earlier self, “You stupid bungler!?”
Episode Two
A Poorly Choreographed Showdown
After my book, The Legacy of Conquest came out, I spent a couple of decades roaming up and down Main Street, shouting out fighting words and trying to provoke the genre known as the Western into taking me on.
Did I think I was taking up my father’s cause and following in his footsteps?
The idea never occurred to me—at least not consciously. Instead, as a historian of the American West with an overwrought sense of responsibility, I felt it was my mission to debunk classic Westerns.
In hindsight, my performance of this mission might have generated more impressive results if I had watched more of the classic Westerns with true lasting power, and paid attention to them.
And now we come upon an accident of timing that worked in my favor, if not in the favor of a more searching public conversation about cinema. When I entered the world of public discussion of Western American topics, we were entering an era when journalists—and many members of the general public—thought that people who had studied Western American history would be equally knowledgeable about Western movies.
Oops.
With my mind still governed by a preoccupation with second-rate B movies, I was stuck with the conviction that classic Westerns followed formulaic plots in which tough men prevailed over bad guys, and then rode off in triumph.
In other words, I set out to debunk stories of triumph that directors like John Ford and George Stevens had never been inclined to tell.
And now the cliffhangers at the end of the episodes are starting to repeat!
Cliffhanger #2: Will our overconfident heroine realize that she should scale down her certainty in thinking that she is ready to tell the world a definitive thing or two about Westerns? Will she notice that she is skating around on very thin ice?
Not yet.
A 2021 Interlude Between Episodes
Over the last year, spending time in my own company has been quite pleasant.
Spending time in the company of my former self has been somewhat less agreeable.
What has been particularly unsettling is the experience that is underway right at this moment; the out-of-body experience of encountering my former self in high gear, when she was using my name to make statements that I would never make today.
We are about to make a visit to my past that will demonstrate the truth of a statement I have often made in the last quarter-century: I used to be contentious and controversial, but then I became congenial and collaborative.
You are about to join me in this uneasy episode of time travel, observing as I conduct myself in a manner that I think will strike you as uncharacteristic and unfamiliar. We are going to watch as a person named Patricia Nelson Limerick expresses herself with little interest in seeking alliances or seeking out common ground. Instead, she pitches into the dismantling and discrediting of Westerns as if they had done her a personal injury.
And, really, if turnabout is fair play, no one could have blamed them if they’d tried.
Here is my retrospective diagnosis in 2021.
Years ago, I fell into the habit of seeing the relationship between Western movies and Western history as a showdown between myth and reality. Arranging Western movies and Western history as opposites and antagonists, I saw reality as struggling to hold its ground as myth advanced on it, aggressively and relentlessly.
Reality = Good, but always losing.
Myth = Bad, and always winning.
Very sophisticated analysis, huh?
I knew I was mad at someone or something for distorting and simplifying the history of the American West. But I hadn’t made much progress in thinking through who or what to hold responsible for this malfeasance.
So I went after the Westerns.
Episode Three
A Constant Return To A Well-Placed Soapbox,
My Home Away From Home
My harangue about the injury done to history by Westerns went on and on, without variation in content. What varied was the venues and locales in which I was permitted to hold forth: they ranged from People magazine to the Today show, from The New York Times to forums and panel discussions beyond counting.
Here’s one example.
Dances with Wolves came out in November of 1990. Only a few months later, a photographer from People was taking multiple photographs of me as I sat on a rock, fully arrayed in Western wear, with the Flatirons behind me making an impeccable case for my Western authenticity. And yes, as every reader is now noting, I was deploying the landscapes and the clothes made iconic by Westerns in order to add force and credibility to my attack on Westerns.
“Calling Dances with Wolves ‘Fantasy,’” the headline in People declared, “a Historian Sounds a Charge against the Mythic Past of the American West.”
Even as I disparaged Kevin Costner’s work, I still had a firm grip on his coattails. You can see this in Vicki Bane’s prelude to her interview with me, where she made the connection between Western films and Western history unmistakable:
In the same year that Dances with Wolves has brought new popular attention to the realities of the early American West, scholars are locked in a fierce debate over many of the same issues that movie mythmakers ranging from John Wayne to Kevin Costner have put on the big screen.
At the center of the academic fracas is Patricia Nelson Limerick, an assistant professor of history at the University of Colorado and a confessed hater of cowboy movies (“because cowboys didn’t clean up their messes in the bar after the fight scene”) since she was a tidy little girl growing up in her native California.
Vicki Bane proved to be an adept interviewer.
First, she let me draw the lines of opposition as sharply as I wanted:
Question: Have traditional Hollywood Westerns contributed to distorted perceptions?
Limerick: You bet!
But she wouldn’t let me stop there.
Question: OK, but did you like the movie, Dances with Wolves?
Limerick: Yes, and if you must know, I did use a lot of Kleenex.
In no time at all, I raced back to my usual haranguing. But it is striking to see that Vicki Bane got me to make a concession that I would let go dormant for the next quarter-century, but that would stay on public record, waiting for me to take it seriously:
Limerick: Of course, as we came into the theater, no one asked us to sign anything that said, “We believe this movie to be historically correct.”
Cliffhanger #3: Did Vicki Bane mobilize the power of People magazine to get me to start to say to myself, “I may not have those Westerns entirely figured out”?
Rosanna Arquette & Elizabeth Bacon Custer
Episode Four
Lights, Camera, Conversation:
Hanging Out With Rosanna Arquette
(Or, Rather, With Elizabeth Custer)
So my father did not make it possible for me to hang out with movie stars in Hollywood. Well, then, I would just have to track them down on my own.
I am in Montana, and I am talking to movie stars: David Strathairn (very famous right now for his role in the movie Nomadland) and Rosanna Arquette. Mr. Strathairn is playing Captain Frederick Benteen in the Seventh Cavalry, and Ms. Arquette is playing Elizabeth Custer in the made-for-TV mini-series, Son of the Morning Star, inspired by Evan Connell’s weird and entrancing book.
These movie stars are perfectly willing to sit and talk with me because I am also playing a part in this on-location drama. I am playing a New York Times reporter who is writing a story about this mini-series. Because Harrison Ford’s wife Melissa Mathis is the screenwriter for this film (she was also the screenwriter for ET), I am in an unexpected phase of life where I have Harrison Ford’s home phone number. (This was a privilege, I am proud to say, that I did not abuse.)
In real life, I am a Professor of History at CU. But I am genuinely on assignment, and the publicist for the film keeps introducing me as “Patricia Nelson Limerick from The New York Times.” This causes most of the people to whom I am introduced to say to me, “How long have you been with The New York Times?”
My answer?
“About twelve hours,” though that number keeps climbing over a couple of days of filming.
This is my maiden run at spending time where a movie is being made. Quite a number of first-time experiences occur.
I get to sit with other non-combatants and watch the Battle of the Little Bighorn get fought. (We are not at the actual site, but the terrain bears some resemblance to the landforms of the battlefield.) This is the main lesson I learn from watching the battle get filmed: the horses do not have a clue that this is all-pretend. The horses are what we used to call “method actors”: when they hear loud gunfire; when they are engulfed in clouds of smoke; when their riders suddenly dismount because they have been killed, the horses don’t “perform” panic. They live it. Panic drives some of the horses to plunge toward the hillside where we spectators are seated. Members of the film crew have to rush forward to haze the horses back to keep them from trampling us.
At a certain point, trying to be a good reporter, I am struck by the fact that there is a first aid station at the Battle of the Little Bighorn. While this meets all the specifications for “too little, too late,” it also seems to present an interesting line of journalistic inquiry. I walk over and ask the first aid staff what mishaps and afflictions they are treating. It turns out that they are doing a land office business in extracting cactus spines. A rider who falls off a horse has no choice but to land on the ground, and there are plenty of small cactuses in this stretch of Montana. Here, as with the horses, chronology diminishes in relevance. If you fall off a horse and land on a cactus in the twentieth century, what you feel next will not vary much from what you would have felt if you had hit the cactus in the nineteenth century.
The panic of the horses and the sharp spines of the cactus are transcending time. And I feel that I am transcending time when I watch the filming of the scene where Custer’s discontented officers, Captain Frederick Benteen and Major Marcus Reno, pair off and mutter to each other about their dislike for their commanding officer. Since I have known for decades that Benteen and Reno hated Custer, I watch the two actors and feel as if I am seeing people I have known for quite a while conduct themselves exactly as I knew they would.
The upshot: A Western American historian on a movie lot gets tossed around in time like a sock in a clothes dryer. When I sit down to talk with the fully-costumed Rosanna Arquette, I realize I am talking to an actress, but I feel as though I am talking to Libby Custer. I feel as if I should seize the opportunity to ask her, “How on earth did you put up with that man?” But I know that it is not really a question that Rosanna Arquette can answer on Libby Custer’s behalf.
On location in Montana, evidence was starting to accumulate that separating myth from reality presents more complications than I had realized in my first four decades on earth. Movies and reality, myth and truth, apparently hadn’t gotten my memo about how they were supposed to stay situated as opposites and antagonists.
Cliff-hanger #4: Would I take this encounter with the hybrid state of cinema and reality to heart, and re-examine my assumptions?
I didn’t yield an inch.
Episode Five
Yet Another Very Visible Run At Debunking,
But With A Crack Appearing In The Hardened Concrete Of My Opinions
In November of 2007, in a special issue of The New York Times Sunday Magazine, writer Deborah Solomon interviewed me for a profile entitled “Cowgirl Blues.” The occasion for the special issue of the Magazine was a recent resurgence of Westerns, and she and I spent a good share of our time traveling over a familiar trail.
Solomon: As one of the so-called new historians of the West, you’ve helped dismantle the image of the West conjured by Hollywood, which has traditionally glamorized the frontier as a place of bravery and heroism.
Limerick: Western history does have bravery and heroism in it, but it’s all mixed up with selfishness and brutality. No one is going to make a film about the 500,000 abandoned mines in the West — and that may be too small a number — a symbol of the legacy of environmental damage. No one is going to make a movie about cholera afflicting people on the Overland Trail, or the smallpox epidemics among Indians.
By this point, Solomon had sensed—accurately!—that I could be counted on to plunge into what we would now call areas of “gender sensitivity.”
And if you had been puzzled by what I mean when I say, “I used to be contentious and controversial, and then I became congenial and collaborative,” this next exchange will get you oriented.
Solomon: Right. Westerns are useful . . . because they bolster myths about American virility and strength. Do you think Westerns make men feel more competent?
Limerick: Whenever American men of power experience anxiety, they want to go see a Western, and they want to see a Western where the man peacocks and parades around and everyone says, “Isn’t he something?”
And then my interviewer surprised herself by provoking an unexpected variation in my familiar recitation of critique and lamentation.
Solomon: It sounds as if you’re not a big fan of Westerns.
Limerick: It took me a very long time to admit to myself that the main reason I don’t watch many Western movies, of the John Wayne kind of Western movies, is that I dissolve with desire to have John Wayne take control of my life. I want John Wayne to come to my office and answer the phone and say, “The little lady isn’t making any more speaking engagements, buddy.”
Who saw that coming?
Solomon’s response remains striking: “I’m not sure if you want John Wayne as your protector or your secretary.”
I’m not sure, either.
Cliffhanger #5: Will the unleashing of that unusual tribute to John Wayne register only as a temporary slip? Or will it reveal that a change in my thinking about Westerns might be under way?
Episode Six
At Long Last, The Shift From Watching To Paying Attention:
Professors Ride To The Rescue
For decades, I had spoken comfortably about Westerns without a twinge of concern about my deficiencies of knowledge and understanding.
That custom might have gone forever.
But, at last, we reach the episode in this serial where the tide turns, and the moment of resolution finally arrives: two very smart CU film scholars perform an intervention and Introduce me to The Truth about Hollywood. They bring my errors to my attention, and yet neither of them reviews the record of my public statements and yields to the temptation to exclaim, “You stupid bungler!”
Here’s the utterly excellent dimension of this story: universities are treasure chests of expertise. When a professor has embraced ill-informed habits of mind, every day at a university presents a fork in the road: you can hunker in your silo and continue to say what you have always been saying, or you can see who else is around and find out what you can learn from them.
Universities are great places for students to learn things they did not know. But they seem to be even greater places for professors to realize how little they know and to ask for help in the cause of knowing more.
And here’s a humorous twist in adult education: one of the best ways for a professor to learn from her faculty colleagues is to have them invite her—in the guise of a visiting expert—to make a guest appearance in their classes.
That’s what saved me.
Professor Howie Movshovitz at the University of Colorado, Denver, took up the custom of inviting me to speak at his Film Studies class, and, on the “turnabout is fair play” principle, I took to inviting him to speak at the Center’s American West class. At Howie’s class, we watched and discussed The Searchers, and at my class we watched and discussed Shane. Also stepping up with a major contribution to the cause of making me smarter was CU Boulder Film Studies Professor Dan Boord, who invited me to visit his class, where we watched and discussed the movie Stagecoach.
A quick reminder of the challenge Howie and Dan were taking on: I was the public intellectual who went around saying that Westerns were triumphal, celebratory stories of westward expansion; I was the commentator who spent years declaring that Hollywood’s Westerns enshrined—and even deified—tough white men who triumphed over the bad guys and rode off into the sunset with civilization thriving in their wake.
Here are very brief statements of what I learned when Howie and Dan that made me shift from “watching” Westerns to “paying attention” to Westerns. (Sorry, Howie and Dan, the brevity of these statements completely fails to capture the complexity of what you have taught me.)
In Stagecoach, representatives of a society ordered by a hierarchy (banker, Army wife, doctor, whiskey salesman, prostitute, gunfighter) get into a stagecoach and get jiggled around and jumbled together. As their original hierarchy proves to be no match at all to their actual strengths and weaknesses, the characters in this movie are the furthest thing from a united phalanx of noble and virtuous pioneers planting civilization in the West. Civilization, such as it is, is honeycombed with tension and trouble, and the Ringo Kid (the character played by John Wayne) has every reason to put distance between him and this malfunctioning society.
In Shane, the cowboys at centerstage compose a very unpleasant social unit of kinship and affiliation. The heroic man who rides in on horseback soon dismounts and proves to be entirely adaptable to the job of a pedestrian farmhand. Shane reluctantly returns to the world of manly violence, not because this is his preferred habitat for asserting his gender identity, but because he is called to protect people of whom he has grown fond (in terms of the wife and mother in that family, probably too fond). When he rides out of town after defeating the bad guys, there is no hint of a triumphant departure. But there are plenty of hints of a lonely man who cannot stay in the community he has rescued.
And then, good heavens, there’s The Searchers, in which John Wayne plays the diabolical Ethan, who personifies toxic racial hatred and monomaniacally pursues his niece in order to kill her.
Let’s say you encounter an anxious, frazzled friend who thinks that watching a John Wayne movie will provide a pleasant escape from our troubled times, providing a soft-focus romanticization of westward expansion with a virtuous horseman bringing order to a disordered world.
Tell that person to do everything possible to steer clear of The Searchers.
I suppose that the fact that Ethan does not murder his own niece could, by a stretch, be called “a happy ending.” But anyone who turns to this movie as a refuge from the troubles of 2021 will soon be in need of serious counseling.
And these are the Westerns I used to condemn for their simplicity and triumphalism?
On the contrary, I could now argue that the view they provide of Western American history may actually offer too sharp, harsh, and searching a critique of the nation’s past!
And yet, paradoxically, the portrayal of Indian people in classic Westerns is disturbing, which we are obligated to return to in a future “Not my First Rodeo” post.
But my gratitude to Howie and Dan for waking me up is never going to diminish.
Really, better late than never.
Episode Seven (A Retrospective)
A Showdown In A Corner Office:
How Paternal Integrity Denied Me My Hollywood Childhood
When my father worked in Hollywood, he had an acquaintance with a notable entrepreneurial gift, who came up with a clever way to make money. This acquaintance created a book called The Truth about Hollywood, and he put out advertisements with order forms, laying out the terms of payment for the book and for postage. He got quite a few orders, and copies of the book went into the mail.
But it is unlikely that receiving the book produced much consumer satisfaction.
The book was quite short, but it was authentically The Truth about Hollywood: an inventory of the number of restaurants and hotels, the miles of paved roads and sidewalks, the average cost of homes, the location of public schools, the rates of sales tax and property tax, the extent of the sewage system, the structure of city government.
Of all the many statements claiming to present “The Truth about Hollywood,” this particular compilation about truth was probably the truest.
And this brings us to the answer to the question, “Why didn’t I get to have a Hollywood childhood?” Why was I born and raised in Banning, California, and why did I hang around the California Date Shop, rather than the studios at Republic Films?
We will entitle the answer to this question, A Moment of Truth in Hollywood.
Here’s what I was told.
The man who had hired my father as a writer was an ambitious fellow. As he rose through the ranks of the studio hierarchy, he saw a useful role that my father, presumably loyal and grateful for having been hired, could play.
So here’s what my father’s patron proposed. As he moved up to Vice President and beyond, he would need to know what all the other ambitious people were up to on the lot. My father would continue as a writer, but he would also keep his ear to the ground and alert his boss to plots and counterplots. Performing this service would earn proportionate appreciation and reward.
In other words, my father reached a point of decision in a situation that echoed the structure of the serials, where people conspired and schemed and, from time to time, found occasions to refer to each other as “stupid bunglers.”
And so my father left Republic Films, and my impending identity as a Hollywood native was withdrawn from the realm of possibility.
But here is the appraisal I have reached: in leaving Republic, my father delivered a peak performance as a brave Westerner standing up to a malefactor.
I am not sure how my father would have felt about that appraisal, but it seems very likely that it would have made him laugh.
And then there’s the fact that John Wayne and my father had surprisingly similar attitudes toward the time they spent at Republic Films.
In his biography of John Wayne, Scott Eyman sums up Wayne’s tour of duty in that “B picture swamp.” “For Wayne, those were grim years,” Eyman writes, “in terms of thwarted ambition. Month after month, year after year, Wayne was imprisoned in cheap westerns.”
It is very unlikely that my father and John Wayne ever had a chance to talk during their time at Republic Films. Nonetheless, it is certainly one of the weirder ironies—uniting the cinematic West and the historical West—that their conversation, if they ever had one, could have concluded with the B movie star and the serial screenwriter saying to each other, “I know how you feel, pardner.”
“The Truth about Hollywood,” indeed.
No cliffhanger this time.
Republic Films for Which Grant H. Nelson was a Screenwriter.
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