William Mastrosimone had a conference call to make. He was to pitch his concept for a pilot episode that would establish the story line and characters (""the bible"") for Into the West, Steven Spielberg's planned epic miniseries on the American West.
Mastrosimone's assignment: create two families -- one white, one American Indian -- and follow them through 65 years of history, from 1825-90. To land the pilot, he would have to be brilliant. But he was bone dry.
The New Jersey playwright and screenwriter (""Extremities,"" ""The Burning Season,"" ""Sinatra"") was given just two weeks to get it done. My instinct said I needed six months to do it right, he says. So I begged for a one-week extension and got it. I worked around the clock. I took catnaps. I had tables piled high with library books. I frantically got things off the Internet. The conference call was Friday. I thought I was going to quit, withdraw my name. I couldn't find a through-line.
The night before the call, a despairing Mastrosimone went to bed at 2 a.m. He had a dream. I woke up at 5 a.m., he recalls. I saw two wheels suspended in the air, a wagon wheel and an Indian medicine wheel. I knew the dream was important.
The writer rushed into his study and searched his papers. The clock was ticking, he says. The meeting was at 2 p.m. He plowed through his research papers. Time was flying by,"" he says. ""I wasn't able to get it. My soul saw it. Then I found a picture of the medicine wheel from the Internet. Then it hit me, what it was all about. Everything came from this moment.
When Mastrosimone took the conference call from the executives at TNT and DreamWorks Television, he improvised from his shabby notes. I knew I had the answer, but I didn't know if I could articulate it. I thought they'd laugh at me. They pulled it out of me. They saw the possibilities.
He told them: The wagon wheel was what got us from coast to coast. It's the wheel of progress. It can be many things, but it must be perfectly crafted, using the science of metallurgy and wood. The Lakota Indian medicine wheel is about spirituality, the life cycle, the seasons. It's their bible and farmer's almanac, tells them when the buffalo are coming, when to plant corn, gives them their virtues: courage, generosity, fortitude and wisdom.
The next step toward landing the Into the West gig was to meet executive producer Spielberg. It was September 2003. The executives sat on one side of a long DreamWorks conference room table with Spielberg at one end, the writer at the other. After 30 seconds I wasn't nervous at all, Mastrosimone recalls. As I pitched the story, he was sitting straight up with his pen in his hand. After he heard the part about the wheel, he put the pen down and sat back. It addressed his visual sense.
Spielberg approved his pitch. He told the writer, Just tell the truth.
During the next year and a half, Mastrosimone concocted two cross-cutting narratives, intertwining the story of young Virginia wheelmaker Jacob Wheeler (Matthew Settle), who leaves home in 1826 to head west, and a young South Dakota shaman of the Lakota tribe (Simon R. Baker), who sees a vision of the end of the buffalo.
Inevitably, by the end of Episode 1, the two story strands come together. East meets West when Wheeler returns Thunder Heart Woman (Tonantzin Carmelo) to her Lakota tribe. He then marries her. When Jacob joins the tribe, Mastrosimone says, he wonders where he is on the medicine wheel.
Tackling this miniseries required avoiding all the well-worn cliches of the Western. Although he was running away from traditional Hollywood Westerns, Mastrosimone admits that he did learn from Clint Eastwood's spaghetti Westerns and ""Unforgiven."" The hardest thing was to overcome all I had ever learned about the West, he says. A lot of our myths today are still based on Westerns. People in Europe call George Bush a cowboy,/font>.
Freed from the limits of a two-hour running time, Mastrosimone and the other writers on the series -- Cyrus Nowrasteh, Craig Storper and Kirk Ellis -- had the luxury of pursuing many themes and characters in great detail and depth over several generations in a total of 12 hours.
Mastrosimone created the story line for the series, as well as writing Episodes 1, 5 and 6.
All the writers responded to script notes from TNT, DreamWorks and Spielberg. He had a few notes on the first draft, Mastrosimone says. We met a second time after I rewrote the script. He has such wisdom when he hears stories. He's a touchstone. He knows what works and what doesn't.
Mastrosimone passed on other work to see his dream turned into drama. When he visited the set for the first time in October, I saw an Indian village, he says. It was like a documentary being made. The Indians have suffered from 500 years of stereotyping. I hope this makes them see themselves in a whole different way, as 'Roots' did for African-Americans. It's time for us to see the human toll. When there were no more buffalo, the Indians couldn't hunt, and they lost their religion. They didn't disappear in battle. They disappeared because their essence was taken away from them. Few people today know what the medicine wheel means.
By Episode 6, the Indians are using wagons and are no longer dragging their tepees, Mastrosimone says. The wagon wheel and the roulette wheel overtake the medicine wheel.
Source: /www.hollywoodreporter.com"">Hollywood Reporter." |
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