By Erin Free
FilmInk salutes the work of creatives who have never truly received the credit that they deserve. In this installment: author, journalist and screenwriter Edwin “Bud” Shrake, who penned Kid Blue, Tom Horn, Nightwing, JW Coop and Songwriter.
Like several others to have featured in the Unsung Auteurs column, Edwin “Bud” Shrake is not hugely well-known in the larger scheme of things, but in one certain (very large) corner of the world, he occupies near legendary status. While cineastes and film buffs might not know his name, in his home state of Texas, Bud Shrake is a major literary and journalistic figure. The Austin American-Statesman called him a “lion of letters”; he’s a member of The Texas Film Hall Of Fame; and he received The Lon Tinkle Lifetime Achievement Award from The Texas Institute Of Letters and The Texas Book Festival Bookend Award. As a writer and producer for film, Shrake has a distinct style and very particular set of thematic interests, especially around the concept of the fading of The Old West.
Edwin A. “Bud” Shrake Jr. was born in Fort Worth, Texas in 1931, and attended Paschal High School where he wrote for the school newspaper The Paschal Pantherette. This led to a long and storied career in journalism, where he wrote extensively on sport, gaining a reputation as a truly literate and artful sportswriter via various columns, books, and lengthy features in Sports Illustrated. While writing about sports through the 1960s and 1970s, Shrake also penned acclaimed novels (1962’s Blood Reckoning, 1968’s Blessed McGill, 1972’s Strange Peaches), and eventually fell in with a group of fellow Texas writers under the daringly prophetic collective title of Mad Dog Productions.
A group of wild Texans that included fellow journalist Dan Jenkins, along with authors Larry L. King (The Best Little Whorehouse In Texas) and Peter Gent (North Dallas Forty), and a few others, Mad Dog Productions (which Shrake eventually boozily incorporated as a company) was a whiskey-ravaged, ragged, raucously creative crew that engaged in ballsy public stunts and much profane banter. “Bud was an easy writer, a fast writer, a creative writer,” Dan Jenkins once said of Shrake and Mad Dog Productions. “We were into smoking and drinking and hanging out, like most writers in the old days. I think journalism was a stopover for Bud, but he was awfully good at it.”
While writing about sports, penning novels, and fucking around with sports and entertainment industry iconoclasts like Don Meredith, George Plimpton, Hunter S. Thompson and Frank Sinatra, Edwin “Bud” Shrake also turned out a small but fascinating collection of screenplays. Shrake’s move from novels and journalism into screenwriting was prompted by the classic 1969 western Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid. “I enjoyed the movie, but I thought if this is supposed to be a great picture, I’ve got to try this,” Shrake told The Austin Chronicle in 1985. “So I did. I went home and immediately started writing the screenplay to Kid Blue.”
Before finishing his script for what would eventually become the 1973 film Kid Blue, however, Shrake was co-opted (along with his friend Gary Cartwright) by actor, producer and director Cliff Robertson to work on the script for his 1971 film J.W Coop. According to Shrake, Robertson stiffed the pair out of a writing credit, so they took the Hollywood star to The Writer’s Guild, got their recognition, and then sued Robertson when he refused to pay them. According to Shrake, Robertson lied so convincingly on the stand during the resultant court case that he and Cartwright opted to settle. “The way he got his revenge was on the titles on the screen,” Shrake told The Austin Chronicle. “It says ‘Starring Cliff Robertson, Directed by Cliff Robertson, Produced by Cliff Robertson,’ and when it comes down to Cartwright’s name and mine as the writers, they printed our names in yellow against a field of sunflowers.”
Despite Shrake’s unpleasant experience with Cliff Robertson, the writer’s fingerprints are all over the gorgeously elegiac J.W Coop. Sure, Robertson might be an arsehole (at least in Shrake’s telling), but his efforts as a director (he only made one other film with 1980’s The Pilot) here are quietly impressive. The authenticity and soulfulness of the film can likely be partially attributed to Shrake and Cartwright though; the story of a rodeo pro struggling to reintegrate into society after a ten-year stretch in prison, J.W Coop is folksy and real, but also biting, just like the other works of the two members of Mad Dog Productions.
After the Robertson-inflicted dust had settled, Shrake got back behind his typewriter and finished his screenplay for Kid Blue, his first solo screenwriting credit. Directed by fellow Texan and Unsung Auteur James Frawley, this 1973 western is a curiously gentle and quirky delight. Dennis Hopper (with whom Shrake would become good friends) stars as the eponymous train robber, who is desperate to go straight and start a new life. He tries to do it in the oddball Texas town of Dime Box, where things take a strange turn when he meets up with married couple Reese and Molly Ford (Warren Oates, Lee Purcell) while also being pursued by his ex-girlfriend, Janet (Janice Rule).
Unlike J.W Coop, Kid Blue has Bud Shrake running wildly through its hard-pulsing veins. The wonderfully against-the-grain western is weird, funny and both adulatory and critical of The Old West. Shrake and his slightly crazed colleagues from Mad Dog Productions were also all over the making of the film. “Kid Blue was an experience that changed my life,” Shrake said of the film. “We arrived in Durango and walked straight into a bizarre meeting at Dennis Hopper’s rented mansion where we found people on acid with pistols. And soon the chief narc of the district landed in a helicopter with armed soldiers and let us know our lives would swiftly get dangerous unless our producer, Marvin Schwartz, paid him $25,000 in protection money.”
Kid Blue was, however, completed, and though it failed at the box office and disappeared for many years, it now has a small cult of followers who appreciate its poetic rhythms and quirky approach to the western genre. Shrake didn’t write for the screen again until 1979 with the killer bat horror flick Nightwing, directed by Arthur Hiller and adapted from Martin Cruz Smith’s novel. It’s a strong, flavourful horror film, and its impressive regional flourishes can likely be credited in part at least to Bud Shrake.
Shrake then worked with like-minded novelist and screenwriter Thomas McGuane (1975’s Rancho Deluxe, 1976’s The Missouri Breaks) on the bleak, quietly savage 1980 western Tom Horn, starring a superb Steve McQueen. With a number of directors fired from the project (including Unsung Auteurs James William Guercio and Elliot Silverstein), this true-life story of the eponymous hired killer is again rich with Shrake’s themes of moral responsibility and the slow dying of The Old West, and feels more like his work than credited director William Wiard, who was merely brought in to finish the project.
In 1984, Bud Shrake teamed up with his longtime friend and fellow Texan Willie Nelson (along with fellow Outlaw Country legend Kris Kristofferson) for Alan Rudolph’s 1984 drama Songwriter, which the duo devised themselves. A salty, honest and punchily written story about a famous country singer at war with the music industry, Songwriter is not discussed much these days (even in the context of Rudolph’s impressive career), but it’s another sharp, gently acidic work from Shrake. The writer stuck with Nelson and Kristofferson for two enjoyable telemovies with 1990’s Pair Of Aces and its sequel, 1991’s Another Pair Of Aces: Three Of A Kind.
These would be Bud Shrake’s last film projects, though he continued to write novels (including the movie-related Hollywood Mad Dogs) and memoirs right up until his passing in 2009 from lung cancer at the age of 77. Though he gave up drinking, drugs and smoking in the mid-1980s, Bud Shrake had already done too much of all three to escape their unfortunate, death-dealing consequences, and his reputation as a wildman stands. Duly celebrated in Texas, Edwin “Bud” Shrake’s impressive, literary work as a screenwriter should see his name far better recognised everywhere else.
If you liked this story, check out our features on other unsung auteurs Joan Tewkesbury, Jamaa Fanaka, Jack Starrett, Joseph Sargent, Jeffrey Schwarz, George Sidney, Philip Dunne, Zak Hilditch, Luke Sparke, Cyrus Nowrasteh, Morgan Matthews, Tom Laughlin, Diane Keaton, Ed Hunt, Nancy Savoca, Robert Vincent O’Neil, Marvin J. Chomsky, Sam Firstenberg, Jack Sholder, Richard Gray, Giuseppe Andrews, Gus Trikonis, Greydon Clark, Frances Doel, Gordon Douglas, Billy Fine, Craig R. Baxley, Harvey Bernhard, Bert I. Gordon, James Fargo, Jeremy Kagan, Robby Benson, Robert Hiltzik, John Carl Buechler, Rick Carter, Paul Dehn, Bob Kelljan, Kevin Connor, Ralph Nelson, William A. Graham, Judith Rascoe, Michael Pressman, Peter Carter, Leo V. Gordon, Dalene Young, Gary Nelson, Fred Walton, James Frawley, Pete Docter, Max Baer Jr., James Clavell, Ronald F. Maxwell, Frank D. Gilroy, John Hough, Dick Richards, William Girdler, Rayland Jensen, Richard T. Heffron, Christopher Jones, Earl Owensby, James Bridges, Jeff Kanew, Robert Butler, Leigh Chapman, Joe Camp, John Patrick Shanley, William Peter Blatty, Peter Clifton, Peter R. Hunt, Shaun Grant, James B. Harris, Gerald Wilson, Patricia Birch, Buzz Kulik, Kris Kristofferson, Rick Rosenthal, Kirsten Smith & Karen McCullah, Jerrold Freeman, William Dear, Anthony Harvey, Douglas Hickox, Karen Arthur, Larry Peerce, Tony Goldwyn, Brian G. Hutton, Shelley Duvall, Robert Towne, David Giler, William D. Wittliff, Tom DeSimone, Ulu Grosbard, Denis Sanders, Daryl Duke, Jack McCoy, James William Guercio, James Goldstone, Daniel Nettheim, Goran Stolevski, Jared & Jerusha Hess, William Richert, Michael Jenkins, Robert M. Young, Robert Thom, Graeme Clifford, Frank Howson, Oliver Hermanus, Jennings Lang, Matthew Saville, Sophie Hyde, John Curran, Jesse Peretz, Anthony Hayes, Stuart Blumberg, Stewart Copeland, Harriet Frank Jr & Irving Ravetch, Angelo Pizzo, John & Joyce Corrington, Robert Dillon, Irene Kamp, Albert Maltz, Nancy Dowd, Barry Michael Cooper, Gladys Hill, Walon Green, Eleanor Bergstein, William W. Norton, Helen Childress, Bill Lancaster, Lucinda Coxon, Ernest Tidyman, Shauna Cross, Troy Kennedy Martin, Kelly Marcel, Alan Sharp, Leslie Dixon, Jeremy Podeswa, Ferd & Beverly Sebastian, Anthony Page, Julie Gavras, Ted Post, Sarah Jacobson, Anton Corbijn, Gillian Robespierre, Brandon Cronenberg, Laszlo Nemes, Ayelat Menahemi, Ivan Tors, Amanda King & Fabio Cavadini, Cathy Henkel, Colin Higgins, Paul McGuigan, Rose Bosch, Dan Gilroy, Tanya Wexler, Clio Barnard, Robert Aldrich, Maya Forbes, Steven Kastrissios, Talya Lavie, Michael Rowe, Rebecca Cremona, Stephen Hopkins, Tony Bill, Sarah Gavron, Martin Davidson, Fran Rubel Kuzui, Elliot Silverstein, Liz Garbus, Victor Fleming, Barbara Peeters, Robert Benton, Lynn Shelton, Tom Gries, Randa Haines, Leslie H. Martinson, Nancy Kelly, Paul Newman, Brett Haley, Lynne Ramsay, Vernon Zimmerman, Lisa Cholodenko, Robert Greenwald, Phyllida Lloyd, Milton Katselas, Karyn Kusama, Seijun Suzuki, Albert Pyun, Cherie Nowlan, Steve Binder, Jack Cardiff, Anne Fletcher ,Bobcat Goldthwait, Donna Deitch, Frank Pierson, Ann Turner, Jerry Schatzberg, Antonia Bird, Jack Smight, Marielle Heller, James Glickenhaus, Euzhan Palcy, Bill L. Norton, Larysa Kondracki, Mel Stuart, Nanette Burstein, George Armitage, Mary Lambert, James Foley, Lewis John Carlino, Debra Granik, Taylor Sheridan, Laurie Collyer, Jay Roach, Barbara Kopple, John D. Hancock, Sara Colangelo, Michael Lindsay-Hogg, Joyce Chopra, Mike Newell, Gina Prince-Bythewood, John Lee Hancock, Allison Anders, Daniel Petrie Sr., Katt Shea, Frank Perry, Amy Holden Jones, Stuart Rosenberg, Penelope Spheeris, Charles B. Pierce, Tamra Davis, Norman Taurog, Jennifer Lee, Paul Wendkos, Marisa Silver, John Mackenzie, Ida Lupino, John V. Soto, Martha Coolidge, Peter Hyams, Tim Hunter, Stephanie Rothman, Betty Thomas, John Flynn, Lizzie Borden, Lionel Jeffries, Lexi Alexander, Alkinos Tsilimidos, Stewart Raffill, Lamont Johnson, Maggie Greenwald and Tamara Jenkins.
