It was, like, Hopalong Cassidy and the Cisco Kid. It just didn't interest me particularly. I was innocent of the classical westerns of the '30s and '40s -- they had just sort of passed me by. I guess in a sort of paradoxical way . . . You know, the future is constantly redefining the past. In my case, the fact that I had not had that exposure, I think, turned out probably to be a good enough thing.

When I'm describing the show to someone, they'll sometimes say, "Oh, but I don't really like westerns," and I'll try to explain that it's something quite different than what they are imagining.

The idea of the western, I believe, as people conceive of it, is really an artifact of the Hays Production Code of the '20s and '30s and it has really nothing to do with the West, and much to do with the influence of middle-European Jews who had come out to Hollywood to present to America a sanitized heroic idea of what America was. The first term of the Hays Code is that obscenity in word or fact or action is an offense against God and man and will not be depicted. In the early '20s there were starting to be films that were kind of racy and these guys didn't want their hustle to be jeopardized. So they formed this production board which essentially announced that, let us run the show and we will give you an America disinfected and pure.

Working in network television I had something of a similar experience. You know, you can spend your time pissing and moaning about the strictures within which you're forced to work, or you can try and find ways to neutralize the distorting effect of those strictures, which is to develop personalities [or] characters whose own internal process winds up at the same place as the external strictures, but for internal reasons. So, what the great western storytellers did was develop stoic characters who lived by a code and then a kind of justifying dramatic structure which validated that. Every storyteller works within the conventions of his time, and there were some great westerns done. But by the time I was watching them, the pernicious effect of the code itself had created a kind of sanitized and mediocre version of it. So, when I came to do "Deadwood," I sort of came to it fresh.

So the code was developed by directors who wanted to offer America a vision of itself that was clean and pretty?

Yeah, because they lived in mortal fear of being found out. The dream factory was operated exclusively by immigrant Jews. Goldwyn, Mayer ... [and they wanted to] stay sort of behind the scenes, because there was developing a real vein of anti-Semitism and misgiving. The popular thinkers of the '20s were guys like [Charles] Lindbergh and Henry Ford and so on, who were saying, "The money-lenders are taking over the temple." So, what these guys did was come up with a four-square American kind of vision with an unwritten guarantee: Let us run the show, and you will get 150 features a year which glorify innocence and an absence of conflict and so on. When people started to see the stuff like D.W. Griffith, people got good and scared.

It sounds like a part of you is reacting against that tradition.

No, I'm not reacting against it. I was mystified when I began to do the research. It seemed so obvious to me that the West I was encountering in my research ... had nothing to do with the westerns, which I was experiencing secondhand, which weren't even good on their own terms. But then going back and seeing the classical westerns, those, too, had nothing to do with the West that I was studying, so I then tried to do some research to figure out how that had happened, how the western of the '30s, '40s and '50s had developed, and what I discovered was that it had everything to do with what Hollywood was about at that time, and nothing to do with what the West was about.

So the aspect of the West that you were interested in had to do with the lawlessness of that era?

The improvised quality. You know, the cop series I had done tried to engage the theme that in order to administer the law, you have to break the law. That is, that the idea of equality before the law is an operating fiction of democracy. Any cop will tell you. If a cop is forced to watch a cop show, and he hears the suspect given his Miranda warning, he just turns away, because no suspect is ever given his Miranda warning until after the cop has gotten the information he needs. If he's given his Miranda warning, the cop can't do his job, because then the cop has to turn him over to a lawyer. What cops are hired to do is to control people who will not abide by the social contract.

Recent Stories