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The idea of the western, I believe, as people conceive of it, is really an artifact of the Hays Production Code of the ’20s and ’30s and it has really nothing to do with the West, and much to do with the influence of middle-European Jews who had come out to Hollywood to present to America a sanitized heroic idea of what America was. The first term of the Hays Code is that obscenity in word or fact or action is an offense against God and man and will not be depicted. In the early ’20s there were starting to be films that were kind of racy and these guys didn’t want their hustle to be jeopardized. So they formed this production board which essentially announced that, let us run the show and we will give you an America disinfected and pure.
Working in network television I had something of a similar experience. You know, you can spend your time pissing and moaning about the strictures within which you’re forced to work, or you can try and find ways to neutralize the distorting effect of those strictures, which is to develop personalities [or] characters whose own internal process winds up at the same place as the external strictures, but for internal reasons. So, what the great western storytellers did was develop stoic characters who lived by a code and then a kind of justifying dramatic structure which validated that. Every storyteller works within the conventions of his time, and there were some great westerns done. But by the time I was watching them, the pernicious effect of the code itself had created a kind of sanitized and mediocre version of it. So, when I came to do “Deadwood,” I sort of came to it fresh.
