Hollywood has been playing cowboys and Indians for decades, tossing its sympathies back and forth across the Great Plains.
After years of John Wayne Wild West romanticism, “Little Big Man” (1970) was the first major film to cast American Indians as the heroes of the story and the American military as the bad guys (although director John Ford took a stab at it in “Cheyenne Autumn”). Others followed, notably
“A Man Called Horse” and “Dances With Wolves.”
Television’s “Lonesome Dove” (1989) revealed cowpokes, warts and all.
Time now for a major cable effort to redress film history, honoring the record on both sides. “Into the West,” a 12-hour epic on TNT beginning Friday, is billed as “Roots” for American Indians.
It is not really that, although viewers will learn a bit about Indian philosophy and religion, including the story of how the Great Spirit or Wankan Tanka brought the buffalo up from the Earth to look after the people.
This is a culture-clash adventure story across several generations of two families.
The expansive miniseries is a double chronicle, contrasting a Virginia wheelwright’s clan and a Lakota tribe of Plains Indians. The first, most obvious difference: The Indians speak in Lakota dialect with subtitles.
The clash plays out on a grand scale. With a $50 million budget, this is TNT’s most ambitious and expensive work to date, and certainly its most tirelessly promoted. Steven Spielberg served as executive producer, helping select the key writer and offering notes on each script. Each installment boasts a different director.
“Into the West” will be telecast in two-hour chunks for six weeks, debuting at 6 p.m. Friday on TNT.
Judging by the first six hours, the stunning spectacle is an engrossing, well-cast adventure story that observes historical moments, Forrest Gump-style, within the fictional family sagas.
Spanning the period between the opening of the Western fur trade and the closing of the frontier, 1825-1890, the story rolls through familiar elements: gold strikes in California, building the transcontinental railroad, the Civil War, the introduction of liquor and disease to the native people, the Indian wars and the tragedy at Wounded Knee.
The history is related through the lives of a vast number of well-crafted characters. It never feels forced. The visuals are amazing, with buffalo stampeding over a cliff, wagons upended in a river, and a skin-piercing Indian sun ceremony that borders on an R rating.
At the heart of the tale is the marriage of a Virginian, Jacob Wheeler, and a Lakota, Thunder Heart Woman, an affecting cross-cultural, interracial alliance. (Three actors play Thunder Heart Woman over the course of the film, but the most memorable is Tonantzin Carmelo as the midlife version.)
At every turn, fallout is observed in multiple directions: what the arrival of the telegraph meant to the Pony Express riders, what the scars on the earth from the white man’s wagon wheels meant to the American Indians.
Those wheels form half of a central metaphor encircling the proceedings. The wheel-making white folk use an iron-clad circle to get from one place to the next; the Indians see the wheel as a continuum, their classic circle being the medicine wheel, stones marking a ceremonial ritual site.
William Mastrosimone (“Extremities”) wrote the overall story for the series and scripted three of its installments. His aim was to convey “what was the ordinary Indian doing on a daily basis,” in a way that previous Westerns have missed. He said his unconscious mind helped him get there.
On the eve of his pitch session, when he was out of ideas and about to abandon the project, Mastrosimone had a dream.
“I saw two wheels suspended in the air before me, a wagon wheel and medicine wheel,” he recalled. “I woke up three hours later and I knew it was important, but I didn’t understand the meaning.”
Research helped him appreciate that “the two wheels are antipodes. The Indian wheel is their almanac, their Bible, their calendar, so many things.” The four quadrant lines within the wheel represent the values of courage, fortitude, generosity and wisdom; each individual is born with one value, and it is his task in life to seek the other three. “It is about balance and stewardship of the Earth,” he said.
By contrast, the white man’s wagon wheel is “the product of science, mathematics, metallurgy, it is the wheel of progress, what got us from coast to coast. It is dynamic, representing the belief that tomorrow is better than today.”
Following Spielberg’s directive to tell parallel stories about the two cultures, Mastrosimone translated the wagon wheel into a family of wheelwrights.
“I didn’t want a parallel family of shamans; I thought that was too pat,” he said. Instead he created the story of an Indian boy who becomes apprentice to a shaman who builds the medicine wheel. That boy is charged with the lifetime task of trying to find a way to overturn the prophecy, made in 1560, that the buffalo would vanish and the native people would be forced to live in square houses.
By the final two hours, as the Indians struggle in defeat, they turn their focus to the medicine wheel’s value of fortitude, also known as “the grandmother’s road.”
It has remained a long road since.
The epic succeeds in showing the precise mechanism by which Plains Indian culture was eclipsed. When the buffalo went, a large swath of the culture went too. The film demonstrates the natives’ use of the buffalo in cooking, clothing, shelter, in the pragmatics of daily life and as a totem in religion – suggesting how the language, history and daily rituals all were affected by the buffalo’s disappearance.
Spielberg gave feedback, Mastrosimone said, in “big-stroke notes and minute little notes,” even though he was involved in shooting “War of the Worlds.”
According to Mastrosimone, “Spielberg said, ‘I want people to be watching this in schools 100 years from now.”‘
A command to write for posterity could have meant creative death to a dramatist. But Mastrosimone took it simply as a charge to tell the truth.
Supplementary materials online may help viewers keep track of the lineage. The huge cast includes Matthew Settle (“Band of Brothers”), Skeet Ulrich (“As Good as It Gets”), Michael Spears (“Dances With Wolves”), Josh Brolin (“Melinda and Melinda”), Simon R. Baker (“I, Robot”), George Leach (“DreamKeeper”), Keri Russell (“Felicity”) and Zahn McClarnon (“Crazy Horse”). A number of American Indian elders served as consultants, and numerous Indian actors are in the cast.
Mastrosimone offers a nod to Alexis de Tocqueville, the 19th century Frenchman who famously studied and wrote about our young nation, when describing what he hopes viewers will take from the project.
Most important, he says, is “the effect freedom has on human nature.” In addition to leading to the honorable tradition of American ingenuity (the steam engine!), freedom opened up some dark facets of the American psyche, including a certain restlessness, rootlessness and a disdain for tradition.
School kids in 2105 may not be watching, but this summer’s TV audiences will get the message.
TV critic Joanne Ostrow can be reached at 303-820-1830 or jostrow@denverpost.com.
