For Kevin Costner, the price of success always came at a great cost. He was a man out of time – or more accurately, of a bygone era – who still felt like he spiritually belonged to the days of the Old West. His glory days essentially consisted of being a cowboy, a gunslinger, or a hero of the American West.
Costner, in that sense, was not solely an extension of John Wayne or Clint Eastwood. He was an entirely new breed of Western actor who had to adapt to the emerging generation of sci-fi thrillers and action adventures to fund his passion for the outdated genre. In the end, his dream won out when Dances With Wolves gave him proof that Westerns were far from done with reigning over the Hollywood box office scene.
Kevin Costner Lost His Magic Touch in 1990
When Dances With Wolves came out, Hollywood nearly lost its mind after witnessing a Western so in touch with the human soul. The message of the film made fans want to reevaluate their lives after returning home from the theaters. Kevin Costner conceived a miracle when he slipped on the director’s hat for the first time and cleaned out the Academy Awards in a single blow.
However, amid all the chaos that was brought on by the success of Dances With Wolves, one often tends to forget the story behind how the movie actually came to be made. As for Costner, he blames/credits his “pain in the ass friend” – Michael Blake with the conception of the film’s original screenplay.
Bemoaning how Hollywood doesn’t know how to write good scripts anymore, Blake worked on a new story idea while crashing on Costner’s couch in the late 1980s. During this time, the latter’s opinion became very important to him while penning the script. Despite threatening him for constantly complaining – “If you f**king hate scripts so much, quit writing them” – Costner was pulled into an unwanted situation with the writer:
Every night he’d say, ‘Can I read to you what I wrote?’ and I’d go ‘No.’ ‘Did you read my script?’ ‘No.’ ‘Did you read my story?’ ‘No.’ So finally, I picked it up and I read it. And it was Dances With Wolves. And I read it all through the night, and I called him up, and I said ‘Michael, I’m gonna make this into a movie…’ We made the movie. And Michael won the Academy Award.
Advertisement
In a nutshell, Dances With Wolves was the product of chance and accident. Blake’s lightning-in-a-bottle idea combined with the Costner’s reluctant partnership and his random decision to give the script a chance after Blake decided to leave – every arbitrary detail came together to make the film happen. Such a happy accident is not bound to happen again with Horizon, especially with Michael Blake absent from the production as a scriptwriter.
Kevin Costner Seems Destined to Fail With Horizon
The relevance of Horizon: An American Saga as a Western is inconsequential. But that is not to say that the film is without its merits. Hollywood, now more than ever, needs to look back to an era that was unafraid to create and nurture original ideas and stories – a practice that is becoming increasingly redundant. If not anything else, the four-part Horizon chronicle deserves its place in the industry simply for its sheer bold and high-risk ingenuity.
Kevin Costner plays a big part in modeling that ingenuity into a four-part saga straight from his imagination. Unfortunately, all the creative originality will amount to nothing for Costner if his project fails to entertain or excite the fans enough to make them voluntarily walk into the theaters for a second, a third, and a fourth time. Horizon has the potential to revive Hollywood’s lost art form, but if done wrong, Costner risks ruining Westerns forever as a genre.
In relevance to the current times, however, Horizon is anything but insignificant. Hollywood doesn’t seem to be in need of a Western, neither do the moviegoers. Quentin Tarantino’s films are the closest that fans will ever go in search of the Old West. But even those are filled with high drama, epic scores, and bloody battles. Tarantino’s pseudo-gratuitous violence keeps his Westerns entertaining while Costner’s pure and undiluted vision for his film will make the audiences walk out of theaters faster than his gunslinger can draw the pistol in a duel.