"Seeing Reagan (in the 1953 film, Law and Order) taking their guns is priceless."
This is a 77 minute documentary dealing with the mythologizing of Wyatt Earp and the famous 1881 gunfight at/near OK corral in Tombstone, AZ. It's a fascinating topic to me, this disentangling of truth and legend about the ol' West, and I learned a few things, but overall the film was too unfocused and lacking in specific information, which was frustrating.
Perhaps the biggest difference between reality of that gunfight and most of what we've seen in Hollywood over the years, and the thing that's most relevant today, is that the lawmen approached the gang of Cowboys to disarm them per a gun control ordinance in the town. That's right, even in 1881 Arizona, the people in Tombstone realized that a common sense gun law was important to public safety.
The biggest disappointment in the documentary was that there was very little time spent comparing what actually happened, as best as it's understood, with how it has been portrayed in Hollywood over the years. We get lots of clips from movies (and even an episode from the original Star Trek), but little analysis. We see things like the maps Wyatt Earp drew in the 1920's, 4+ decades after the fact, which were fascinating, but there is very little commentary on what they mean. In one sequence, director Mike Plante provides animation going back and forth over the mostly incomprehensible scrawls, without saying a single word.
There is also way too much time spent interviewing people involved in reenactments in Tombstone, and getting to know how they personally became involved in doing that for a living. I mean, who gives a flying f* that the actors at the reenactment clock in to work using a face recognition machine? Or that the guy who had played Wyatt Earp for years now works in the IT department of a car dealership? Or that the guy playing Tom McLaury originally thought he might have a career in the WWE? Good lord. Perhaps the point of all this was to illustrate how none of them are historians, and that what they do is entertainment for tourists, adding to the myth and selling tacky souvenirs along the way, but this should have been handled differently.
Plante shows us bits of Wyatt Earp's later life, having spent time in various mining towns, then San Francisco in the 1890's, and Hollywood in the 1920's. I was unaware that there were newspaper accounts questioning what he had done, like the 1896 article "Bad Man Wyatt Earp," subtitled "Spicy Review of His Crimson Career at Tombstone," and that Earp realized the power of early cinema "to write history" after seeing a boxing match filmed. How he worked to try to shape his legend is alluded to, but never really outlined. The role Stuart N. Lake's 1931 highly imaginative book Wyatt Earp: Frontier Marshall played is not mentioned, nor is the fact that Virgil Earp, Wyatt's brother, was the actual leader of the lawmen that fateful day.
It's unfortunate, as clearly a lot of effort went in to rounding up the ways the gunfight has been represented over time and in going to various places of interest. It needed to be more focused and fleshed out in its analysis, and as it is, served more as a jumping off point into further research.
