Brothers grim | 13 December 2018

Sam Shepard was perhaps the gloomiest playwright ever to spill his guts into a typewriter. The popularity of his work must owe itself to some deep grudge nursed by America’s elite against the redneck states. True West is a standard Shepard ordeal: a pair of damaged, inadequate, bitter, loveless white males are cudgelling each other to pieces in a dingy Californian hellhole. For good measure he adds a dollop of bad plotting and improbable detail.

We meet two thick angry brothers, Austin and Lee, living together in the house of their absent mom. Austin is busy writing a screenplay and Lee wants to borrow Austin’s car to go on a burglary spree. Austin hands over the keys because he needs a bit of privacy for a meeting with a film producer in the kitchen. Come off it. No producer would hold a script meeting at an unknown scribbler’s mother’s house. The producer arrives but the conversation is interrupted by Lee, now bearing a TV looted from a neighbouring home, who starts to schmooze the producer with an idea for a cowboy movie. The producer likes Lee’s idea so much that he tells Austin to scrap his current project and to start writing Lee’s screenplay instead. Is that possible? Just about.

But Austin, instead of accepting this commission, turns it down even though completing the screenplay for Lee would give him control of the entire project. More nonsense emerges as the story edges forward. The producer talks about huge sums of money being offered for Lee’s movie, which exists only as a synopsis and which has no named actor or director attached to it. That’s bunkum. The best these rookies could hope for is an 18-month option worth a hundred bucks.