Steve McQueen and troubled productions seemed to be synonymous. Look at any one of his classic films—The Magnificent Seven, The Great Escape, The Sand Pebbles, Bullitt and Papillon—each riddled with turmoil. Those productions, however, paled in comparison to his last Western, the highly underrated Tom Horn. The project took three years to go from concept to celluloid, had its budget slashed from $10 million to $3 million, went through four directors and two producers, and experienced the painful death of McQueen’s dog Junior, who was most likely gobbled up by wolves. To tell the story, McQueen alternated between two shooting scripts—a sweeping epic by Tom McGuane, which was twice the size of a normal screenplay, and a scaled-down version by Bud Shrake—to see his vision through. Weeks before principal photography, McQueen and Barbara Minty, his then-girlfriend who later became his third wife, visited Horn’s grave at the Old Pioneer Cemetery in Boulder, Colorado, to see if he could “pick up on Horn’s vibration.” The actor later told friends that he felt Horn’s presence and was asked by the legendary frontiersman to tell his story.
Posted on: Fri, 24 Oct 2014 14:30:43 +0000