A note on Cowboys and Aliens

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Cowboys & Aliens has been in development as long as I’ve been working in Hollywood.  When I was working on Antz at Dreamworks, Cowboys & Aliens was already in development there.

It’s an immediately “gettable” concept — a sci-fi/western mashup with exciting and unpredictable possibilities.  A perfect three-word pitch: “Cowboys and aliens.”  And everyone in the room goes “Oh, wow.  I get it.  Cool, let’s buy that.”

My son Sam (10) and I have been going to movies all summer — Thor, Green Lantern, X-Men: First Class, Pirates, Captain America — and, in front of each one of those movies, we saw the preview for Cowboys & Aliens.  Me, I was familiar with the project, I’m a big fan of Favreau’s, I loved Zathura and the Iron Man movies, I was looking forward to seeing it.  But Sam, for some reason, was reticent.  “That title is kind of, I don’t know, weird,” he’d say.  The next time we saw the preview, he’d say again, “It looks good, but the title is, I don’t know, kind of silly or something.”

Finally, the third or fourth time we saw the preview I finally turned to him, put on my best “pitch” voice, and said “James Bond (pause) and Indiana Jones (pause) fight aliens (pause) in the Old West.”  After that, he sparked up a lot more about seeing it — that sounded like a cool movie.  (He’s never seen a James Bond movie, but he understands it’s something “guys do,” and Harrison Ford is the first actor he ever learned the name of from his work with George Lucas.)

Then, just last night, Sam and I were chatting at bedtime and I mentioned that I would take him to see Cowboys & Aliens soon.  And again, he said “That title, I don’t know, it’s still too, I don’t know…”

I thought for a moment, “Hey, he’s never seen a Western, maybe he’s just unfamiliar with the genre.”  But he reminded me that he has, in fact, seen two Westerns — Rango and Back to the Future III.  (That made me smile, believe me.)

And then it hit me.  Myself, I was born in 1961, which was about five years too late to have seen a Western when they were in their heyday.  I myself had never played Cowboys and Indians — the earliest game I could remember playing with friends was Time Tunnel, based on the hit TV show of the same name.  I was a perfect cultural symptom, like Andy in Toy Story, caught between worship of cowboys and worship of spacemen.  And that was 50 years ago.

I said to Sam “Well, the title is a play on words.  When I was a kid” — and then I realized not even then — “or, back before I was born, kids used to play Cowboys and Indians, that was, like, the most popular thing kids would do fifty, sixty years ago.”  And I realized that, to him, “fifty, sixty years ago” might as well be “during the Napoleonic Era.”

Then his face lit up.  “Oh, now I get it,” he said, “Now it’s a good title.  I didn’t know it was referring to something.”  Myself, it had never occurred to me that it “referred” to anything, I didn’t think “Cowboys and Indians” was a “reference” any more than The King of Queens is a “reference.”

In any case, I read in the trades yesterday that Cowboys and Aliens is getting serious box-office competition from The Smurfs, which leads me to think that Sam’s case might not be that rare, that the target audience for this movie is actually too young to be familiar with the phrase “Cowboys and Indians,” (I mean, my son has Indian friends, that is, people who hail from India, he’s barely heard of Native Americans referred to as “Indians”) and that they, too, see the posters and think “That title, I don’t know, that’s, I don’t know, weird or something.”