Roughly two months ago a very early draft of Eric Roth‘s screenplay for Killers of the Flower Moon (dated 2.20.17, or eight weeks before David Grann’s source book was published) turned up on a Reddit screenwriting forum.

Roth’s 153-page screenplay, which arrived in my inbox around 6 am this morning, was posted late last year by “Sheshat the Scribe.”

Anyway I finally read it this morning and holy moley…if Martin Scorcese had manned up and shot this version of the tale Killers would have been a much more engrossing kettle of fish.

No exaggeration — Roth’s early-bird script is approximately 17 or 18 times better than the film Marty finally made. Because Killers suddenly has a central character you can easily roll with (i.e., FBI guy Tom White, who Leonardo DiCaprio was originally intending to portray) as well as an actual point of view.

White isn’t just the resolute, soft-spoken, voice-of-the-prairie hero of the piece but a decent, honorable lawman with occasional moments of doubt and uncertainty, but finally a dude who stays the course, toughs it out and brings at least a semblance of partial justice to a sprawling and horrific murder saga.

In Marty’s film version White (played by Jesse Plemons) is reduced to a supporting character who appears at the two-hour mark.

Here’s how I put it to a screenwriter pally a couple of hours ago: “My God, what a truly compelling and fascinating film Killers of thge Flower Moon could have been. Hats off to Roth for some wonderful writing, sublime tension, terrific structure. It really lives and breathes!

“And what a great, soft-spoken, drillbit character Tom White is! His laconic, man-of-the-prairie dialogue is so spare and true and eloquent.

“If only John Sturges had directed this screenplay in his prime! Or Oliver Stone in the ’80s or Michael Mann, Chris Nolan, Paul Thomas Anderson…Sam Peckinpah even.

“If only Marty and Leo hadn’t lost their nerve…if only they hadn’t been so scared of provoking the wokesters and suffering their ferocious wrath, i.e., “We’re done with white heroes! Only racists-at-heart would tell such a tale! And fuck David Grann!”

“My head was completely turned around by reading this, and Roth wasn’t even afraid of including racist cracker dialogue from time to time. (Brave.) And Mollie Burkhart actually conveys a certain gratitude (i.e., a slight smile) to White at the very end. I don’t know if Lily Gladstone even read this version of the script, but if so she almost certainly would’ve hated it.

“I wish I had read this six or seven years ago. It would have clarified a lot of things. Roth and Scorsese went with a woke version of Grann’s tale, of course, but in the early stages Roth truly did himself proud.”

If you weren’t much of a fan of Killers of the Flower Moon or even if you were, please read this early Roth draft — it’s a revelation.

A friend suggested a list of the Ten Best American Crime Flicks of the ‘70s.

By which he meant films that spend more time on criminals than people trying to catch them, or no time with the catchers at all.

No cop movies, he said, which eliminates Dirty Harry, The French Connection, The Seven-Ups, etc. Also no period caper or con movies (The Sting, The Great Train Robbery), no historical gangster flicks (The Godfather I and II). Strictly contemporary crime pictures in which the protagonists are engaged in criminal activity. Hence Friedkin’s Sorcerer (desperate struggle over rough terrain) and Don Siegel’s Escape From Alcatraz don’t qualify. And no Juggernaut because it’s told almost entirely (98%) from the point of view of the catchers.

Three of his picks I immediately scratched off — Richard Brooks‘ $ (aka Dollars), Michael Cimino‘s Thunderbolt and Lightfoot (fuck Cimino) and Walter Hill‘s The Driver (too loud, brutalist, mechanical). Which left seven.

I then added seven more for a total of 14 films, all released between 1.1.70 and 1.1.80.

Three of my top ten opened in ’77 and ’78, but the other seven were released between ’71 and ’73. In order of preference…

1. The Day of the Jackal (’73)
2. The Friends of Eddie Coyle (’73)
3. Get Carter (’71)
4. Badlands (’73)
5. The Outfit (’73)
6. The American Friend (’77)
7. Who’ll Stop the Rain? (’78)
8. Charley Varrick (’73)
9. The Hot Rock (’72)
10. Straight Time (’78)

Slightly second tier but at the same time smart and engaging:

11. The Taking of Pelham 123 (’74)
12. The Getaway (’72)
13. The Silent Partner (’78)
14. Going in Style (’79)

I’m going to stick my neck out by saying I’m probably the only tristate area guy with a Red River belt buckle and a “Kennedy for President” sticker on my car’s rear bumper.

The non-binary Jane Schoenbrun began life as a bio-male, or so I gather.

I’ve never been able to give myself over to Sam Peckinpah’s Major Dundee, a 1965 Civil War–era western, and I’ve frankly stopped trying.

Was the 156-minute version ever seen by anyone except R.G. Armstrong? The 136-minute version is longer but is it necessarily, positively better? I’ve only seen the shortest version (126 minutes) with the Mitch Miller sing–alongers on the soundtrack.

I know two things — during the ‘60s, ‘70s and early ‘80s Peckinpah allowed his career to be stained and diminished by raging alcoholism, and that with the exception of three films (Ride The High Country, The Wild Bunch and Straw Dogs) everything he was involved in was to varying degrees colored by rage and snarls and waste.

Over the years his persistent asshole-ishness overwhelmed his creative visions, and people just got sick of him.

I own a Bluray of Bring Me The Head of Alfredo Garcia (‘74) and I’ve watched it exactly once. There’s a reason for that. The nihilistic finale leaves you with nothing. Maybe I should give it another go.

I’ve seen Cross of Iron (1977) once, and while I have a favorable recollection of James Coburn and Maximilian Schell’s lead performances, I mostly recall Gene Shalit calling it “a movie of bad.”

All this aside, I sure do envy Joe Dante for having seen the 152-minute version of The Wild Bunch (7 minutes longer than the official, definitive 145-minute Bluray) during the 1969 Bahamas press junket.

Dante recalls as follows:

Frances McDormand‘s Fern was strong but mule-stubborn and at the end of the day self-destructive, and this stunted psychology led to an idiotic ending.

Her old white van was indisputably on its last legs, and 60ish David Straitharn, lonely but harmless, clearly would’ve settled for simple, no-big-deal companionship.

I’m sorry but there’s this notion out there that choosing a healthy or constructive path in life requires (a) not being a stubborn egoistic purist and (b) understanding that opting for common-sense security isn’t necessarily a death sentence or a prison term.

The curious ending of Nomadland refuses to acknowledge this. It basically says “better to die destitute and alone on a two-lane blacktop while shitting in a bucket in the middle of the night than to accept kindness and sensible adult friendship.”

This Marlon Brando drawing was composed nearly 51 years ago by New York Review of Books illustrator David Levine. It appeared alongside a 5.17.73 Norman Mailer review of Last Tango in Paris, titled “A Transit to Narcissus.”

In paragraph #6, Mailer writes that early in the Bernardo Bertolucci film “Brando abruptly cashes the check Stanley Kowalski wrote for us twenty-five years ago — he fucks the heroine standing up. It solves the old snicker of how do you do it in a telephone booth? — he rips her panties open.

“In our new line of New Yorker–approved superlatives, it can be said that the cry of the fabric is the most thrilling sound to be heard in World Culture since the four opening notes of Beethoven’s Fifth.”

Tango premiered at the 1972 New York Film Festival (10.14.72), but opened commercially on 2.1.73 at Manhattan’s Trans Lux East (Third Avenue between 57th Street and 58th Street). Tickets went for a then-unheard-of price of $5.00.