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25 most popular Western movies
Asking people what their favorite Western movies are produces an interesting list, at best. I did that in February on my Facebook author’s page, and soon learned that if I wanted a statistical sampling I’d have to ask the question more carefully. Some folks responded with their favorite books. Others didn’t distinguish between multiple versions of the same story. Nearly everyone assumed that someone else’s mention of a film meant they didn’t need to mention it again. By way of reporting, 3104 people saw the post. A much smaller sample, 65 people, voted. Some folks voted multiple times. Three actors were mentioned by name—Errol Flynn, John Wayne (most often) and Clint Eastwood. The result was an enthusiastic list of “gotta see” films. Tombstone, with nine people reporting, and True Grit with eight, were the most popular. Here are the multiple winners: Tombstone (9), True Grit (8), Jeremiah Johnson (4), Lonesome Dove (4), Open Range (4), Searchers (4), Shane (4), 3:10 to Yuma (3), Blazing Saddles (3), Good, Bad and the Ugly (3), Monte Walsh (3), My Name is Nobody (3), Once Upon a Time in the West (3), Silverado (3), The Outlaw Josey Wales (3), The Shootist (3), Unforgiven (3), Winchester ’73 (3), Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid (2), Cat Ballou (2), Conagher (2), Hang ‘Em High (2), High Plains Drifter (2), Magnificent Seven (2), Pale Rider (2), Quigley Down Under (2) and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence (2). Here are the single mentions: Big Jake, Broken Arrow, Broken Trail, Dances With Wolves, Dodge City, Duck You Sucker, Fistful of Dollars, Fort Apache, Heaven’s Gate, High Country, High Noon, Hombre, Judge Leroy Bean, McClintock, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, Paint Your Wagon, Red River, Red Sun, Return to Lonesome Dove, Rio Bravo, Rio Grande, Shanghai Noon, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, Sons of Katie Elder, Stagecoach, Support Your Local Sheriff, The Cowboys, They Died With Their Boots On, Verz Cruz, Virginia City, War Wagon, Wild Bill, Wild Wild West, Wyatt Earp and Young Guns. Read more…
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About the Author
Gregg Edwards Townsley is a reflective, free-thinking ex-pastor, martial artist, writer and Western Fast Draw enthusiast living in St. Helens, Oregon. No stranger to the places his Western characters inhabit–Reno, Carson City, Virginia City and Lake Tahoe–he raised his children in northern Nevada, from 1984 through 1993, while serving as pastor and head of staff of the First Presbyterian Church in Carson City. Prior to living in Nevada, he made his home in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and Penns Grove, New Jersey, “a veritable fountain,” he says, of people and places he likes to visit in his Tommy Valentine, PI series of short stories. Townsley is a member of the Western Writers of America. His wife, Nancy, is also a writer and the managing editor of the Hillsboro Tribune and Forest Grove News Times. Read more…
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W. W. Ronin video
I’ve got to tell you, my friend Bill Fogle is a peach of a guy. I was his youth pastor many, many moons ago at a small church in Pennsylvania whose future had been bisected by a busy four-lane north and south highway. The highway is probably bigger by now, given that it feeds the Valley Forge National Historic Park. I’m sure the Port Kennedy Presbyterian Church is not. Geography has a way of limiting growth. As the community goes, generally so do the organizations and institutions in it. But Bill Fogle has hung in there, or his affection for me anyway. I hadn’t seen the boy in more than 40 years–I don’t want to count them, I’m sure it would be too painful. But there he was, a friend of a friend on Facebook–all bubbly and handsome, an accomplished writer, artist and videographer. I wrote him and he remembered me. The rest is, well, a delightful long-distance relationship that, I hope, will result in even more poignant memories than his sitting at my young ministerial feet assuming that I had something to say. I should note too that the above video is his work. Produced when there were just three books in the W. W. Ronin series of Westerns–there are five now, four you can buy and many more on the way–Bill volunteered to make it. It is a testimony of our friendship, I guess, and a window into the soul of a very beautiful man. It’s a good introduction, too, to what I’m trying to do with historical fiction in the W. W. Ronin series of Westerns, set in and about Nevada at the close of the 19th century. There are six of them now, available with my other books and short stories, HERE. Bill, please hear once more my deep and abiding appreciation. I love being your friend. And while we’re at it, here’s a LINK to Bill Fogle’s website. It’s beautiful, too. Read more…
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“Social proof”
I think the term is “social proof.” It’s the currency of on-line marketing nowadays. When my wife and I owned martial arts studios in Hillsboro and Sherwood, it was the difference between my saying something about our program and someone else saying the same thing. For instance, with a financial partner and another martial arts friend, Nancy and I set-up Oregon’s first transported after-school martial arts program. We had a couple of 15-passenger vans–a friend of mine recently called them “death traps”–a 3,000 square foot studio near a well known restaurant and highway, and lots of experience and talent in programming for children and youth. We ran 14 weeks of summer camp the first year, in addition to the usual martial arts classes for children, youth and adults. During the school year, we picked up kids from a dozen or more Washington County elementary and middle schools, keeping everyone busy and safe until parents finished up at work. A person has to have a little bit of skill to do that sort of thing. But telling you that wouldn’t persuade you to hand me $400-500 a month, would it? Not if I asked you to sign a contract, right? That’s where “social proof” comes in. A couple of letters, maybe a video or two of parents swearing that we hadn’t damaged their children, and a razzle-dazzle website of studio pictures that screams “you or your child can be the next Bruce Lee” puts it all together. Or helps to. I’m writing about social proof on an author site because you need to know that Two Bears Books isn’t selling you the usual pablum of insipid intellectual and entertainment fare many Westerns are made of. I’ve been to most of these places (see the real Bucket of Blood Saloon above). I’ve lived in some of the places I write about. I’ve shot the guns, thrown the punches and weathered the sometimes complex relationships my characters find themselves in. Have I told you that well-known Western author, Louis L’Amour, once wasted two-hours of my life? Not that I knew him of course, and I appreciate Louis L’Amour’s Westerns as much as the next guy. But in one of his books, L’Amour placed cold beer on the Comstock (the gold and silver strikes in Nevada) in a time and place cold beer wasn’t. And the editor of my first book caught me parroting that less-than-fact. I’m just saying, a reader has to be careful nowadays. Read more…
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Writing place-based fiction
Author Katie Schultz has some interesting thoughts about writing “place-based fiction” in an energetic blog called “The Writing Life.” I stumbled on them, and her, while wondering if there were other people who enjoyed setting their fictional stories in actual places. Clearly, of course, there are. Fitzgerald, Hemingway and Steinbeck should have come immediately to mind, Faulkner too as these writers were a staple in my middle and high school years. (I confess a fondness for pulpier novels nowadays, particularly Florida fiction writers Carl Hiaasen, Randy White and (gulp) Tim Dorsey, but that’s another post.) It’s just that I get so excited at times writing about people’s actual stories and places in the context of my make-believe ones that it never occurs to me that doing so is “burnt-over ground,” so to speak. Schultz, who is a mentor to writers far and wide, describes her process simply. She buys maps, borrows library books, then pins what she’s learned about a particular place on butcher paper before actually visiting. At least that’s my take of the February 2011 piece I found while Google-searching the words “place-based fiction.” Her approach initially sounded sort of old-school, given what’s available on-line. I’d have no more idea where to buy a map than a home-made candy bar nowadays, though I do have a personal librarian who is an absolute peach in getting me what I need for W. W. Ronin’s next adventure. The more I thought about it however, the more I realized I was doing nearly the same thing when writing W. W. Ronin Westerns. My historical fiction books–the Ronin series of Westerns–are set in northern Nevada. And each of them is the benefit of hundreds of dollars of books, many of them out of print, personal visits and interviews, too. The first three books put me on a four-wheeler in the mountains above Carson City in order to get a good look at what used to be the old Bigler Toll Road, from Carson City to Lake Tahoe. A couple of days later, I tipped a man $20 to take a twenty-minute peek at the supposedly haunted remains of an old social club in Virginia City. More so, I’m the only person I know who has ever been in the basement of Bowers Mansion. All in a day’s work, so to speak. I’m working on the sixth and seventh in the series now. The fifth is with my editor, who is crazy enough to actually read my books in the raw. She sleeps with me, too. I’m that lucky. Read more…