Hollywood is clearly not a hurry-up world. Projects linger for a year or two … or for decades.
Now we finally have “Dark Winds,” a mini-series starring Zahn McClarnon (shown here), on AMC (9 p.m. Sundays) and on AMC+. “It’s been 35 years in the making,” producer-director Chris Eyre told the Television Critics Association.
And that’s with A-listers involved. George R.R. Martin, of “Game of Thrones” fame, is a producer … So is Robert Redford, of Robert Redford fame; he optioned the Tony Hillerman novels in 1988 … And so is Eyre, whose “Smoke Signals” drew raves and awards at the Sundance Film Festival (founded by Redford), setting a new standard for Native American filmmakers.
These people praise the 18 Hillerman novels that feature Navajo tribal policeman Joe Leaphorn and his new sergeant, Jim Chee. Getting them filmed is another matter.
Redford produced a 1991 movie with Fred Ward and Lou Diamond Phillips as Leaphorn and Chee, but it went straight to video. In 2002-4, he made three films (two directed by Eyre) for PBS, starring Wes Studi and Adam Beach. Now there’s the six-part “Dark Winds.”
The series opened June 12 with a spectacular, daytime robbery and helicopter escape. Then it sprawls across vast stretches of the Southwest, the turf of classic cowboy movies by John Ford and others.
“Monument Valley is so picturesque and beautiful and John Ford-driven,” Eyre said. “And then we shot some in New Mexico …. It’s just a mish-mash of Americana.”
Those past films were beautifully made, said writer-producer Graham Roland, but there was “a one-sided kind of portrayal of Native Americans…. Oftentimes, the Native American parts were not even Native American actors.”
Roland, who has Chickasaw roots, included brief references to those films in the “Dark Winds” opener. He created the series and had an all-Native writers’ room. Eyre, who is Cheyenne, directed, with Kiowa Gordon (Hualapai) as Chee; Zahn McClarnon (Lakota) stars as Leaphorn, a complex figure.
He’s “straddling that fence between his job and his culture,” McClarnon said. “In indigenous communities, a lot of time the tribal cops are kind of shunned or pushed away …. He has to appease everybody on the reservation and he also has to appease working with the FBI. I think Joe struggles with it quite a bit.”
This is the partly familiar turf for McClarnon, who has also been cops in “Longmire” and the current “Reservation Dogs.” It’s new to Gordon, who was Embry (a shape-shifter) in three “Twilight” movies, Flint (Alex’s older brother) in “Roswell, New Mexico” and Junior in “The Red Road.”
And everything feels new to Jessica Matten, who plays Sgt. Bemadette Mauelito. “We’re First Nations, up in Canada,” she said. “We’ve been able to tell stories on a very small network called the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network. But we’ve had a very difficult time pushing” beyond that.
An exception was “Burden of Truth,” a Canadian series that reached the U.S. via CW’s summer series. She played the mother of Luna, the main character’s half-sister.
Now Matte has worked for Eyre, whose work she’s admired. “For us Native kids growing up, (his) ‘Smoke Signals was a very big film. It … really put Natives in a very contemporary setting.”
She also has non-Native heroes – including Rainn Wilson, who has a small but flashy role.
Matten didn’t have any scenes with him, but drove two hours to the set, to meet him. “I pep-talked myself. I showed up … and I said, of course, the classic thing. I called (him) ‘the Beyonce of my life.’”
Wilson – who grants he’d never before been compared to Beyonce — plays an over-the-top car dealer. “I asked for the largest cowboy hat they could find and it dwarfed my already enormous head.”