Dissed by Duvall?

I don't know if you watch AMC much, but they've been all about westerns this weekend, leading up to their two-night mini-series, Broken Trail. Looks chock full of western cred, with Robert Duvall starring and Walter Hill directing.

And while watching Open Range last night (a movie I managed to avoid, despite showing in Iowa City for virtually my entire first semester there), I was reminded that every western apparently has to include Duvall, Tom Selleck, or Sam Elliott as actors, or Hill as director. Well, Kevin Costner managed to get Duvall, which is probably why Open Range was pretty good.

(I was expecting some kind of loving tribute to riding, grazing, cow-poking, and brewing coffee in iron pots over fires, but it was actually kind of dark and violent. Maybe too formulaic, though. And the attempt at romance between Costner and Annette Bening is really forced.)

The whole thing increased my admiration for Deadwood. How did this thing ever get on the air, without Robert Duvall or Sam Elliott in the cast? (Walter Hill did direct the pilot episode, however, so I suppose some conventions can't be escaped.) And I thought I might post a blog about that today. You know, prime the pump for tonight's episode.

Then I read this with my morning coffee. Duvall is apparently not a fan of the show.

"None of the cowboys and ranchers I know think much of it at all," says Duvall, who summered in Montana as a child. Ranch hands there, he says, used a fraction of Deadwood's profanity. "I get the feeling that it's a provincial New Yorker's concept of what the West was like."

Ooooh, that could be enough to make David Milch go all Seth Bullock on Duvall. Or would it be more of an Al Swearengen ("You have no idea how much you're fucking boring me right now!") reaction?