Andrew C. Isenberg's "Wyatt Earp," the movie

Now showing at My Book, The Movie: Wyatt Earp: A Vigilante Life by Andrew C. Isenberg.

The entry begins:

In almost all Wyatt Earp films, Earp is portrayed as a tight-lipped, duty-bound lawman. Both Kurt Russell and Kevin Costner played him that way in the early 1990s. Their portrayals recall the ways Henry Fonda and Burt Lancaster played the role in the 1940s and 1950s.

This is exactly how Earp wanted himself portrayed. In the last decades of his life, he frequented Hollywood studios, where he befriended early silent-film Western stars. Earp very much wanted one of those actors, his friend William S. Hart, to play him on screen. Hart, the biggest Western film star of the 1910s and early 1920s, specialized in taciturn characters who were always on the side of justice.

In Wyatt Earp: A Vigilante Life, I offer a very different interpretation of Earp. He was often on the run and always reinventing himself. He spent most of his life not as a lawman but as a gambler and a con man. He sold rocks painted yellow as gold bricks to unsuspecting buyers. He was involved in fixing a heavyweight championship prizefight in 1896. As late as 1911, at age 63, he was arrested by the Los Angeles Police bunco squad for running a crooked card game. Toward the end of his life, frustrated by the negative publicity his career as a gambler had earned him, he went to Hollywood. He...[read on]

Learn more about Wyatt Earp at the Hill and Wang website.

The Page 99 Test: Wyatt Earp: A Vigilante Life.

My Book, The Movie: Wyatt Earp: A Vigilante Life.

--Marshal Zeringue