Lawrence Kasdan · 1994 · overland
Lawrence Kasdan's 1994 biography, three hours of it, following Wyatt Earp from a Missouri farm to the Kansas cattle towns, the Dakota gold camps, Tombstone and the vendetta that followed - and then a long quiet afterwards that most westerns leave out, ending on a ship going north.
- 1Lamar
A farm boy who wants to go to the war and is stopped at the gate by his father, then a young husband in Missouri whose wife dies of typhoid - and a man who comes out of it drinking, stealing horses and jailed.
- 2Dodge City
Kansas makes him: buffalo hunting, then a badge at Wichita and then Dodge, where he learns that a reputation stops more trouble than a gun does, and where he meets a consumptive dentist from Georgia.
- 3Deadwood
The Dakota gold camp in winter, hauling firewood for money, in the stretch of the film where Earp is neither lawman nor outlaw but simply a man trying to get ahead and mostly failing.
- 4Tombstone
The brothers come to Arizona to get rich on mining claims and end up policing a town they have made enemies of - thirty seconds behind the O.K. Corral, and then Morgan shot at a billiard table and the vendetta ride.
- 5Glenwood Springs
Years later Wyatt visits Doc Holliday in a Colorado sanatorium, both of them older than they expected to get, and the friendship the whole film has been quietly building is settled in one room.
- 6California
He drifts to the coast with Josie - saloons, prospecting, a boxing match he referees and is accused of fixing - a life after the legend that the legend has made difficult to live.
- 7Nome
The two of them go north to the Alaskan gold rush and run a saloon at Nome, which is as close as Wyatt Earp ever gets to the fortune he spent forty years chasing.
- 8California
They come back and grow old in Los Angeles, where he consults on western pictures for men making films about a version of himself - and Josie is with him at the end, which is the point the film closes on.