Northern Virginia | June/July-2006
Screenwriter, Broken Trail
[Update: in December, Alan Geof rion was nominated for Broken Trail by the Writers Guild of America for the best original screenplay of 2006. The award winner will be announced in February 2007.]
How does a Fauquier historian make his Hollywood dreams come true? For Alan Geoffrion, 52, it all started at lunch with his friend Robert Duvall.
When Geoffrion told Duvall of his lifetime passion for learning about “the other people who made up the story of the American West: Jewish, Asian, African American, Eastern European,” he was preaching to the choir. But Duvall didn’t know much about San Francisco’s violent history of “yellow slavery.” Half a century after the Gold Rush, Asian women and girls were still being sold into prostitution “in the warrens and alleys of San Francisco’s China Town, where it was almost impossible for local officials to rescue them.” When Geoffrion said his research had turned up a strong woman at the center of the rescue story, Duvall encouraged him to write it down.
Geoffrion had never before done any writing for publication. Was that a problem, he wondered?
Duvall didn’t seem to think so. “I put a draft together and showed it to Bobby. He asked Horton Foote to look it over and give me a call. I mean, like, Horton Foote is a national treasure. I was so nervous. The first thing I said to Horton was, ‘I have no formal training in screenwriting.’ He said, ‘Good!’ So Horton Foote vetted my first film script.”
When an agent at ICM started shopping it around, “we kept getting this feedback like, Hollywood doesn’t do westerns anymore, there’s no international market for them. This was before Brokeback.” But Duvall wanted to play Print Ritter, a rancher whose surprise inheritance puts him at odds with his nephew Tom Harte (played by Thomas Haden Church). When the two men decide to lay down their swords and go into the horse-wrangling business together, they cross paths with a Dark Hat running a prostitution ring using Chinese captives. Ultimately the character-driven story intrigued the American Movie Channel.
“Well we got out to Alberta for production,” says Geoffrion, “and we found five or six other crews already in production on big-budget films. So much for Hollywood not doing westerns!”Beginner’s luck? “Big time,” smiles Geoffrion, whose big rugged frame and bushy moustache make him look like a cowboy extra from Broken Trail. “I’ve got a career path a mile wide and an inch deep, and this [screenwriting] thing was a trial by fire.” He says his interest lies in telling more stories of the strong women who built the American West. “It’s indoor work. No heavy lifting.”