There’s both good and bad news for fans of HBO’s gritty western Deadwood. Its recently launched third season will be its last as the cost of producing a period drama with a large ensemble cast—over $4 million per episode—was deemed prohibitive by the cable network. But HBO and creator David Milch were able to reach a compromise that will wrap up the story in back-to-back two-hour specials.
“The episodes of the first three seasons each took place in a single day,” reminds Milch. “Each of the two two-hour films is going to cover a period of about a year and a half, and give us the chance to tell the story on a larger canvas. It’s a different approach.” He claims not to know how it will end, history notwithstanding, though fire and flood will likely come into play. “I let the history shape itself in my imagination. There are a lot of things that aren’t accounted for in the history books,” he notes.
Already working on another series for HBO, a dark drama about surfers, Milch characterizes Deadwood’s third season as “maybe a little rougher. Some new shooters come to the table [including] a theater producer played by Brian Cox, but center stage is still occupied by Swearengen and Bullock,” the bar and brothel kingpin played by Ian McShane and the sheriff played by Timothy Olyphant.
Other developments include the opening of Deadwood Bank, mayoral election, and the power grab of George Hearst (Gerald McRaney), who arrived in the bustling mining town in season two. “This year is [about] the manipulation it takes to put an empire together in Deadwood,” says McRaney, whose research revealed that Hearst had once roomed with Mark Twain and that he won his newspaper business in a poker game. “Hearst is a businessman who sees people the way he sees a piece of mining equipment. If you break one, you get another,” he observes.
McRaney, who will play a contemporary mayor in the CBS fall series Jericho, grew up on westerns and has Gunsmoke as one of his earliest credits. He wouldn’t have liked to live in the show’s 1870s era, however: “No plumbing and no antibiotics. Not a good combination.”
Hearst and Swearengen locking horns this season will be a central conflict. “It’s really the American story of capitalism,” comments McShane. “It’s a political show in many ways—having to compensate for bureaucracy, and government coming into our lives and having a town that was lawless becoming a town governed by rules and regulations.”
The show’s raw, violent and uncensored depiction of life in the truly wild west scandalized those raised on sanitized TV and movie westerns, but Milch insisted that the Shakespeare-influenced yet profane language “was kind of the way they talked.”
“What surprises me is when people won’t watch because they want to hear western men speak like Yosemite Sam,” says Paula Malcolmson, who plays Trixie, the whore now “shacked up” with mayoral candidate Sol Star. “Victorian women were very put under and put down but she’s managed to survive. She’s such a breath of fresh air,” says the Belfast-born actress, though actual breathing isn’t always easy when she’s required to “smoke like 50 cigarettes in one take. I’ve got to quit!”
While Malcolmson fantasizes about playing a modern-era cop next, she loves Deadwood’s hyper-real milieu. “It’s really beautiful to walk down those streets and see the horse piss and the mud.” Those dusty streets were recreated 35 miles north of Los Angeles in Santa Clarita on the 22 acre Melody Ranch, formerly owned by cowboy star Gene Autry (his horse Champion is buried there).
The authentic-looking sets are dressed with a mix of actual antiques and facsimiles, along with the carefully researched costumes “just add to the reality. It transports you,” notes Kim Dickens (Joanie Stubbs). Even with pumped-in air conditioning and ice packs affixed to inner thighs, wearing layers of wool in triple digit summer heat was “quite brutal,” acknowledges Molly Parker, who plays Alma Garret, newly married to Ellsworth as the season began. “At the same time, it’s a constant reminder of the challenges of life for women at that time.”
Parker had an extra issue to deal with: morning sickness. “I was quite nauseous the first trimester,” says the actress, who’ll have her first child in October. Coincidentally, Anna Gunn, who plays Martha Bullock, was dealing with the same issue—she’s due to give birth to her second daughter in September. “I kept saying, ‘You’ve got to let out the corset,’” she laughs.
For Jim Beaver, who plays Ellsworth, the biggest challenge of the show is “getting the dirt off at night,” grime that turned to mud with winter rains that occasionally flooded the one road into the ranch and once forced a production standstill for three days.
He’s nevertheless eager to resume the role in the two-hour episodes, and hopes to finally get on a horse. “If I had my druthers the town of Deadwood would, like it actually did, burn down and Ellsworth would be the last man standing. I have a feeling it’s not gonna happen that way,” muses Beaver, who’ll be clean-shaven as the FBI director in the contemporary thriller Next with Nicolas Cage and Julianne Moore. He already has his eye on a souvenir from the set, “the goofy hat Ellsworth wears. I’ll just wear it to the 7-11.”
