Last of the Breed
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While I was working on the Graphic Novel of Law of the Desert Born I started thinking about what I might want to do next. After considering a number of different stories I decided on Last of the Breed and started working on a script. As things turned out we were not able to go ahead and do another Graphic Novel for Random House and the script was abandoned about half way through.
. . . Beau L'Amour
IT'S BEST TO READ THE "LAST OF THE BREED"
GRAPHIC NOVEL SCRIPT FIRST . . . CLICK HERE
BEAU'S COMMENTS ON HIS IDEAS FOR THE GRAPHIC NOVEL:
The Last of the Breed script was broken up into three "books," following a traditional Thesis, Antithesis, Synthesis, structure (I'm not a Structure Nut as many screenwriters are, but it seemed to be appropriate in this case). I was able to complete Book One and a good deal of Book Two before Random House decided they did not want to do another Graphic Novel and released us to pursue other options.
I’m pretty happy with the way Book One, the first 45 pages of this project, came together. I got that section honed down until it was pretty efficient. “Book Two,” from page 45 to page 126 still needs to be trimmed a good deal.
Although I love the idea that I experimented with where Joe and his Grandfather are Heyoka or Thunder Dreamers, the contrary ‘court jesters’ of Lakota culture, that whole idea probably takes up too many pages as does the competition between Kyra and Alekhin to find Joe.
I also fear I’d have to trim part where Joe gradually is required to give up modern technology as he is forced down in the helicopter, then runs out of gas in the car and then finds that train travel makes his movements predictable. I wouldn’t give up on those things completely since the theme of the piece is about the stripping away of the 20th century man, I’d just have to find a way to do them all quicker. In both movies and comic books you are constantly having to balance brevity with detail. 'Kill your Darlings,' as Hemingway would say.
Dad set his book in the 1980s. That was a calculated move to show the world he could succeed outside of the Western or Historical genre. My choice to take the story back to the 1959 – 1960 time period was based on several things.
It looks cool. I lived through the ‘80s and I’ll take fedoras over disco balls any day.
The Doomsday Clock may have been right up against midnight in the 1980s but, to me, the Cold War seemed more war-like in the late ’50s. It was a time in which Joe actually could have had a living Grandfather who fought at the Little Big Horn and the two of them could have lived through the incredible (and virtually unknown to modern white culture) transition in Native American life that occurred between the 1920s and 1940s. It was a time when reservations stopped being treated like prisons and reservation Indians got the right to vote. That last bit seemed appropriately ironic for a story that was set in the Soviet Union, a place that treated its citizens the way the United States had once treated North America’s original inhabitants.
Obviously, there are huge differences between a novel and any sort of visual storytelling, be it Film, Graphic Novel or whatever. The visual storyteller simply can not use the imagination of his audience to fill in the gaps as easily as a novelist can. And a visual storyteller is always restricted in the number of minutes or pages he can afford to produce. A briskly shot movie can cost $50,000 to $200,000 a day to shoot and a reasonable comic book page costs $200 to $500 when all of the elements are taken into consideration. The price makes a true success a chancy venture in either format.
Dad handled the story of Joe’s life and how he got to Russia in a handful of sentences scattered throughout the book. He relied on the reader's imagination to fill in the many gaps. In a visual medium that material would have to be shown, and shown in considerably greater detail.
Having to show Joe's back story in such a way was a liability in that it took up time and space, but it was also an asset in that it allowed me to focus a lot more on Joe’s character. I assume that one of the challenges the film makers who attempted to produce Last of the Breed faced when trying to create a usable script was that it was simply not good drama to have Joe alone in the wilderness for large amounts of time. I decided to solve that problem by using flashbacks to illuminate Joe’s life in the 1930s and ‘40s, showing how he got to be the man he is when he reaches the Soviet Union.
I not only wanted to show that Joe’s grandfather gave him his harsh training in escape and evasion. I also wanted to make Amos Makatozi into a more complex character than is often seen in white portrayals of native Americans; a man at odds with the world he has inherited; bitter yet wise. So far Amos is still not quite as much of an outlaw as I would have liked to make him. If the project is ever resurrected I'd like to see what I can do to make him a more difficult character.
Ultimately, and I haven't got this worked out yet, I wanted Joe to start off as a man who denies or avoids his native American heritage. This is an important step because the whole story of his escape from Siberia is intended to be about him recovering that heritage. If he doesn’t push it away in the beginning, he can’t learn to accept it in the end. He can’t learn to let it save his life.
I enjoyed playing with the casual racism of the 20th century and always wanted to work in a scene where as a very shy young Joe Makatozi is being inducted into the military toward the end of WWII. The officer in charge, reacting to his reluctance to speak, looks at his papers and says: “Makatozi, that Italian?” Joe replies: “Lakota.” The officer frowns, not understanding, and says: “Well … head over there. There’s some other Wops by the door. You stick with them, they speak better English.
When you break down a story for a screenplay or comics script the heart of the adaptation is being willing to take what the original story tells you seriously. I don't believe in being slavishly reliant on the source material, that inhibits the adapting writer and takes the spontaneity out of the work. But it is important to be very aware of exactly what you are working with and what the different aspects of the story as set down by the original author mean.
My father's novel Last of the Breed starts and ends with Colonel Zamatev. This means he is as important a character as Joe Mack. They share the story and are of nearly equal importance. Zamatev's story is a what is classically termed a "tragedy." This does not mean it is a story that is necessarily sad, it means that it is an inversion of a normal hero's story, some of this story is about the bad guy getting his comeuppance. Since Zamatev's sin is pride (or since it's a Communist situation; individual ambition) he has to be brought low, not killed but humiliated or placed in a situation where he loses everything that he has attempted to make for himself. This is implied yet not spelled out in the novel.
If Joe's character arc is to go from Jet Age pilot to connecting with his ancient ancestors in order to survive then Zamatev's is to try and advance himself using Joe as a tool but then fail so catastrophically that he can never recover.
Whenever I write anything I always try to find the places where the characters “do it to themselves,” where they screw up and create the very problems they will have to deal with throughout the story. Having Kyra and Zamatev’s brainwashing technique backfire and unlock the process that turns Joe into the Sioux warrior who can escape them is a good beginning. It would be well matched with the character development that Dad had originally planned when he considered using the short story "The Skull and the Arrow" as part of this story.
Those two points created a very clear structure for my approach to "Last of the Breed." The brainwashing or enhanced interrogation would begin the process of returning Joe to his Native American roots and the experience of recovering from utter hopelessness in the Cave of the Skull would complete it.
I chose to kill Natalia for two reasons. The first was simply that a comic book couldn't spend the time to follow her story to the moment when she eventually escapes ... the comic book would already be insanely long without that. The second was that I wanted to completely break Joe's character, have him utterly defeated when he takes refuge in the Cave of the Skull so that he can be "reborn" as a Sioux warrior. It also gave him a personal reason to hate Zamatev and Alekhin. The reality is that, regardless of how we experience it as readers, there is very little in the book that makes the stakes between Alekhin and Joe personal.
Killing her created a dramatic motivator for Joe later on. Writers are always manipulating the characters in fiction like evil gods. It’s a dirty job but someone has to do it.
One of the most fun things was to make the people of the refugee camp “true” or “consensual” socialists. It heightens the irony of the Soviet experience, which I wanted to portray as the horror show it was, without unduly demonizing the concept of socialism ... it's not a political concept that I espouse but, it is an appropriate element to play with in this story.
More work was definitely needed before continuing on with this script, and not just cuts. The fight between Joe and Alekhin, right after Alekhin kills Natalya isn’t dramatic enough and neither is her death. There is something missing in the set up of the bear skull in the cave … it needs to be more magical yet more menacing. The story that the bear skull tells saves Joe’s life, but he must be utterly destroyed prior to that moment, on death’s door physically and emotionally. Only then can it inspire him to keep trying …destiny isn't necessarily all good things and it's certainly not dramatic if it's comfortable.
There is also something else I really wanted to tackle but had a hard time figuring out how. Lakota traditions do not tell of their crossing the Bering Land Bridge. It is the white man’s science that makes that claim. So I had the vague notion of somehow addressing and honoring the Lakota people’s vision of where they came from without deviating from the wonderful model that Dad created of a modern Indian making his way to North American by following his people's path out of Asia.
Somehow I’d have liked to have created a sequence with Joe and his grandfather at Wind Cave in the Black Hills … the spot where the Lakota believe they appeared on this earth. In a flashback, Young Joe’s reemergence from Wind Cave after some sort of a spiritual experience with his grandfather could be coupled with his being reborn as a more complete Lakota in the Siberian Cave of the Skull. It’s still a vague connection but I think it would have been very cool to try.
All of Book Three has yet to be written. It would include Joe’s recovery and emergence from the cave. His heading overland toward the Bering Sea. Alekhin’s recovery from his fight with Joe and his restarting the search. I'd like to have the white streak in Alekhin's hair that ultimately makes his scalp so distinctive grow from a scar inflicted by Joe in their fight after Natalya's death.
Zamatev would have lost credibility with his superiors and would have to pull out all the stops to find Joe, calling in favors, bullying his way forward. I would have tried to create a situation where his entire reputation is at stake and he puts everything on the line, uses up every resource at his disposal. He doubles down to preserve his ambitions and ultimately loses it all.
The warning signs are there for anyone with the eyes to see. Joe is headed into the roughest country imaginable and when Alekhin sees that Joe is making stone arrowheads and spear tips he knows they are in trouble … they have turned Joe into something new and different. He is now setting traps for them, he is now using the terrain against the Russians rather than the other way around.
There are structures in Siberia made by the ancient natives which resemble the Medicine Wheel in Wyoming. I’d have love to have used one as a back drop for a scene, Joe camping at a site his ancestors camped thousands of years before. I'd like to have him walk past a river bank with Mammoth bones protruding from it. Using that sort of Ice Age imagery would be lots of fun. It would connect Joe to the ancient world before history and it would say in some way that all people are connected. In many stories I try to find a place where the narrative passes into a place that is less real and more imaginary, more unconscious or symbolic. Book Three of Last of the Breed would definitely be the place for that.
Before the end, Joe would need to be captured one more time and treated very roughly by Zamatev and Alekhin. I always imagined a flashback to Amos's death. He is dying from cancer, actually he would have become sick prior to the first time he sees Little Joe. Eventually, he lures the Law Enforcement agents who have been looking for him in and, in Lakota fashion, ties foot to a stake in the ground and fights them until they kill him. Young Joe should witness this and it should come back to him after he has been captured this last time … it’s what motivates him to his final desperate escape from Zamatev.
I would probably save the scene from the book where Joe destroys Zamatev’s force with the avalanche to use during Joe’s escape in this later section. That is probably also the spot to use Joe’s shooting down the helicopter with an arrow, again a scene from the book. It seems the appropriate moment for the symbol of an ancient weapon destroying a modern one. The triumph of the ancient warrior over our modern world.
You can tell that when you start unpacking this story, like many of Louis L’Amour’s supposedly “simple” ideas, there is an entire world of associations that can be extracted. Other readers probably have as many of these associations as I do. I suspect that this hidden depth is what a lot of Dad's fans connected with. Unconsciously, without even realizing it, their imaginations play with the edges of these concepts as they read, turning the simple story into something as fundamental or as complex as their personality desires.
One of the final elements left to deal with was the very ending. The fate of Joe, Alekhin and Zamatev. Over the years fans have written in, expressing the wish to witness Joe killing his adversaries. I understand the need for closure but this sort of blood thirsty attitude has always made me kind of uncomfortable. I feel that what Dad did with battle between Joe and Alekhin is more effective when left to the imagination of the audience.
Ultimately, I realized that, regardless of Joe’s final threat to come back and kill Zamatev, having that happen is not the appropriately karmic end for the Colonel. When Dad finished Last of the Breed he never intended to write a sequel. Instead of having Joe say that he will return and take Zamatev’s scalp (an act so much more superhuman than Joe’s escape from the USSR that it boggles the mind) the note with the scalp probably should have read: “… do not tempt me to take another.”
Zamatev deserves a fate that has a relationship with what he tried to accomplish in the story. He wants to capture Joe and to extract information from him in order to gain status. I may be idealizing and exaggerating but status, if he is a good Communist, should be meaningless. A “true” Communist would act solely for the collective good. So what does Arkady Zamatev deserve? The ending that I had in mind was that he would be broken in rank and posted to the loneliest radar station in the world, some horrible, bleak, snowbound, place above the arctic circle where he can spend the rest of his life regretting his hubris. I would have liked that to be the final image of the Graphic Novel.
Beau L’Amour
July, 2017
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