Billy himself would have approved

 

The late Val Kilmer’s acting career delved into films of so many genres—from Top Secret to Top Gun, from The Doors to The Island of Dr. Moreau—that it’s hard to pick favorites. Unless you love Westerns, in which case your favorite is undoubtedly his portrayal of Doc Holliday in Tombstone. He’d go on to several more in the genre, including Thunderheart, The Missing, Comanche Moon, but his first Western, and his first dramatic film as a leading man, is often overlooked.

In 1989 Val Kilmer was the title character in the TNT film Gore Vidal’s Billy the Kid. It was Vidal’s third go at the story. His 1955 teleplay for Philco Television Playhouse, The Death of Billy the Kid, featured Paul Newman, on the verge of stardom, as Billy. Newman saw the value of the property, and promoted it as a  feature. It became one in 1958, as The Left-Handed Gun, adapted by Leslie Stevens, directed by Arthur Penn, starring Newman, with radio’s Paladin, John Dehner, as Pat Garrett.

In 1989, now with Kilmer on the verge of stardom, Vidal took his third pass. Duncan Regehr, who has always divided his time between acting and graphic art, had made a splash as Errol Flynn in My Wicked, Wicked Ways, and would soon become TV’s Zorro. He remembers going in to read for Pat Garrett. “They called up and said, ‘We’d like to match you up with a young actor named Val Kilmer.’
So Val and I sat down and read a bunch of scenes together. There was a good thing going between the two of us, we saw that right off, and they said, ‘This works.’”

 

This was the first film where Billy was played by someone who seemed like the teenager Billy was. Although Kilmer was 28, he had a wide-eyed, peach-fuzz quality, so when someone offers Billy a drink, and a friend scoffs that Billy doesn’t even shave yet, you believe it. You believe Billy’s idealism, so different from Paul Newman’s cynicism. Friendship is sacred; a man’s word is sacred, and he is, perhaps childishly, unwilling to tell authorities the lies they need to hear to justify setting him free. And you believe the friendship between Billy and Pat. “The whole Big Casino, Little Casino deal,” says Regehr, recalling their nicknames. “There was a camaraderie there, a big brother kind of thing. Pat was older, and Billy was very much a wild boy, but then Pat was no angel either.”

 

 

Holding the reins was William Graham, who’d directed Powers Boothe to his Emmy as Jim Jones, and several solid Westerns like Harry Tracy: Last of the Wild Bunch. “[Graham] was very patient,” Regehr remembers. “Very supportive. Val was pretty young; pretty insecure. He didn’t want to share, to work through a scene rather than just come up with stuff and hope that it works. You don’t have that luxury on a six-week shoot. So he was not easy to work with at all. But he was a young actor, he later became a really fine actor. He was brilliant in Tombstone. His Doc Holliday was just the best ever,
I thought.”

The streets Kilmer would later tread as Holliday are here. “The wonderful thing is being on location in Old Tucson,” says Regehr. “You could really get into the role and not have to leave it. You could live and breathe the character in that atmosphere. It’s very helpful. Whereas filming in Hollywood, at the end of the day, you go back into the mainstream; you don’t remain a cowboy.”

 

Wilford Brimley plays a well-meaning but ineffectual Governor Lew Wallace. “I got to be good friends with Wilford. He was never without an anecdote. I remember watching him sit this girl down and he hypnotized her, and cured her of smoking. The other guy that I really enjoyed, and worked with later in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, was Rene Auberjonois, who played the drunk. He was a great raconteur, and I always enjoyed listening to him, to his politics and his point of view on things.”

And there was the name above the title, Gore Vidal, who even played a small role as a preacher. “I always admired him very much as a raconteur and writer, so it was great to have him on the show; in his show, really. He gave me his book that he’d just finished writing at the time, and I gave him my [art] book that I’d just finished, called The Man with the Smoking Gun. It was pure coincidence that I would be doing a Western at the same time that I was creating these motifs.”

Gore Vidal’s Billy the Kid is available on YouTube, probably not legally, but that’s the way Billy would have wanted it, and maybe Pat as well.

YOUNG GUNS 3, PANCHO VILLA 1, LAWMEN

After a gap of 35 years, the waiting is nearly over: Young Guns 3–Dead or Alive will roll camera in New Mexico later this year! Emilio Estevez, Billy in the first two, and John Fusco, who wrote and executive produced the first two, have collaborated on Number 3’s script, which Estevez will direct. And not only will Estevez return as Billy, but since they were not killed on-camera, Lou Diamond Phillips will be back as Chavez, as will Christian Slater as Arkansas Dave Rudabaugh.

In the 1940s, a geezer named Brushy Bill Roberts materialized, claiming that he was Billy and that Pat Garrett only pretended to kill him. The decision for Young Guns 2 to endorse—at least for entertainment purposes—that narrative, makes it possible to tell stories about Billy until 1950. Estevez already has a plot in mind for Young Guns 4!

And in case you’re wondering if there will be any actually young young guns this time, just as Tunstall was a mentor to the Regulators in the first film, in Number 3, Billy takes an errant youth under his wing, Doroteo Arrango, better known as Pancho Villa, and is soon south of the border with a new crop of mostly Latino and indigenous Regulators, as Billy becomes enmeshed with the Mexican Revolution.

 

DVD REVIEW

WAS ONCE A HERO, 2025

DVD–$19.99 Twin Engines Global Distribution, Streaming AMAZON – $4.99 Rent, $9.99 Buy

In the 1890s, a traumatized sister (Julie Kashmanian) and brother (Noah Deavers) are traveling through the forest, trying to evade the men who killed their father, and who intend to finish the job. They meet a wandering old man, former Major Malcolm Hunter (Darby Hinton), who suffers the combined effects of age, injuries and the horrors of The Civil War—today we’d say PTSD. His doctor (Robert Carradine) finds Hunter’s memory rapidly deteriorating. The trio forms an odd alliance, as Hunter attempts to lead them to a vaguely remembered town where they’ll be safe. Hinton’s and Kashmanian’s performances propel this quirky, moving character study, shot in the lush green wilds of Maryland and Pennsylvania, written by Dan Searles and Paige Smith, and directed by Michael Tuthill

 

DYNAMIC DUO FORMS AN UNHOLY TRINITY: PIERCE BROSNAN AND SAMUEL L. JACKSON RETURN TO THE WEST

“Pierce Brosnan and Samuel L. Jackson were just amazing, and available because of the Guild strikes. We were fortunate enough to be an independent production so that we could shoot,” says Unholy Trinity director Richard Gray. “I don’t think we would’ve got them outside of the strike.” Of course, he did have the advantage that they both like Westerns: Jackson starred for Quentin Tarantino in both Django Unchained and The Hateful 8. Brosnan starred in Seraphim Falls, Gray Owl and the miniseries The Son.

Unholy Trinity concerns young Henry Broadway (Brandon Lessard), whose father (Tim Daly) calls out from the gallows that he was framed for murder by the sheriff of Trinity. Broadway goes there to kill the sheriff, finds his quarry already dead, replaced by Sheriff Gabriel Dove (Pierce Brosnan). And he learns that his father was no saint: during
the Civil War, he and former slave
St. Christopher (Samuel L. Jackson) stole a trove of Confederate gold, and Henry’s dad hid it somewhere in the town. Many are seeking the treasure, and the likable-but-lethal St. Christopher is particularly determined to have his share.

“Pierce had never been to Montana, and he just adored it, brought his whole family, and both his sons are in the movie. Sam brought his whole team. It’s a beautiful, beautiful place.” And there’s a good reason why the Western town won’t look overly familiar. “The town was built for this movie,” the Australia-born graduate of Melbourne’s Victorian College of The Arts explains. “We were going to go to New Mexico or Calgary, as you do to make a Western; it’s really just the two options these days. And my partner, Carter Boehm said, ‘Why don’t we build it in Montana?’ That sounded great to me.” If you have seen it before, then you’ve seen Gray’s 2022 Western, Murder at Yellowstone City, which features Gabriel Byrne, Thomas Jane and Richard Dreyfuss.

“There’re no new buildings, no mobile phones, no WiFi; there’s no nothing. Nothing but this 1880s town: 28 buildings plus a church on 500 acres with nothing around us. So it’s really easy to escape. I think it helps the actors, particularly in a period film. We do the rehearsals and the blocking on location. It helps me to just be super-present.”

Screenwriter Lee Zacharia is also from down under. “I worked at the local art house cinema, and he was a local film critic as well as being a writer. We shared a love for Deadwood, Unforgiven, for Once Upon a Time in the West: my favorite Western. When I told him I wanted to make a Western, he just went all in. It’s tough to create something original, entertaining, but with enough depth that we could attract actors like these. It’s a story of revenge; it’s a coming-of-age film as well. And in a pretty tight package, Lee was able to pull it together.”

It’s an unusually international Western, both in characters and in fact. “[Ireland-born] Pierce honed into an Irish heritage so we rewrote a great backstory for him, that he fled from the potato famine.” Q’Orianka Kilcher, well-remembered as Pocahontas in The New World, and whose character has a claim to the gold, is of indigenous Peruvian and German-Swiss parentage. Veronica Ferris, who plays the sheriff’s wife, is German, “and Gianni Capaldi, who plays Gideon, is Scottish-Italian.” Gray’s film celebrates the American melting pot. “That’s what I really wanted to embrace, straight after the Civil War. It was exciting to get actors from around the world, ’cause it’s a little bit tired when Westerns don’t have accents, when you consider how new everybody was to the country.”

Unholy Trinity, from Saban Films & Roadside Attractions, will open in theaters nationwide on June 13, 2025.