Lecture Series: “Wild West to Wild Hollywood: Evolution of the Movie Cowboy and Cowgirl”

Few periods in American history have been more romanticized than the era of the “Wild West.” The period began with the first European colonial settlements in North America during the early 17th century, but what can be regarded as the classic era of the Old West — with its cowboys, gunslingers, prospectors and outlaws — stretched from around the 1850s to the early 1900s. Western movies created a frontier myth in which rugged men rode out to conquer a barren landscape and fight “bad guys,” and the image became a popular and enduring part of American culture. In his program “Wild West to Wild Hollywood: Evolution of the Movie Cowboy and Cowgirl”, Joe Webster will trace the history of the western movie from the spectacles in the Roman Circus Maximus and Colosseum to Buffalo Bill’s “Wild West and Congress of Rough Riders”. He will progress to the silent “flickers”, from there to the midcentury “oaters”, and onto the films that changed how western movies were made. Many “horse operas” were fictionalized accounts of real events, but they created false images and historical inaccuracies of how the west really was. He will close his presentation by debunking many of those myths. TICKET LINK COMING SOON!