Award-winning author Johnny D. Boggs hosts the final Cowboy Movie Night on Friday, Jan. 17, at 5:30 pm in the History Museum Auditorium. He’ll talk briefly about the Billy Crystal movie, City Slickers, before a free showing of the filmed-in-New-Mexico flick.
“Could you imagine Charles Bronson in the Jack Palance role?” Boggs asked of the actor who plays the movie’s crusty trail-driver. “Bronson couldn’t either.”
Good thing for Palance that Bronson turned down the role, because it turned into one of his most memorable.
“City Slickers may not be the best Western ever filmed in New Mexico, but it won Jack Palance an Oscar,” Boggs said, adding, “And, no, I’m not doing pushups before my introduction.”
(Oscar fans may recall Palance ripping out a few impressive one-armed pushups during his acceptance speech. He was 73 at the time.)
Boggs, a Santa Fe resident, is no slouch in the award-winning arena. This year, he picked up a Rounders Award from New Mexico Secretary of Agriculture Jeff Witte for living, articulating and promoting the Western way of life. Praised by Booklist magazine as “among the best western writers at work today,” he’s one of the few authors to have won both the Western Heritage Wrangler Award and Spur Award (six times on that Spur Award, by the way) for his fiction. True West magazine named him the Best Living Fiction Writer in its 2008 Best of the West Awards, and the magazine’s readers voted him Best Living Fiction Writer in 2012.
His oeuvre includes some 60 books and nearly 40 short stories, including, most recently, Billy the Kid on Film, 1911-2012; West Texas Kill; and Legacy of a Lawman. Find out more at www.johnnydboggs.com.
Download an image of Boggs by clicking on "Go to related images," below.
City Slickers is a 1991 comedy about a group of men in the throes of a mid-life crisis who find renewal and purpose on a cattle-driving vacation. It was filmed at various locations in New Mexico.
Cowboys Real and Imagined explores New Mexico’s cowboy legacy from its origin in the Spanish vaquero tradition through itinerant hired hands, outlaws, rodeo stars, cowboy singers, Tom Mix movies and more. The exhibit grounds the cowboy story in New Mexico through rare photographs, cowboy gear, movies and art. It includes a bounty of artifacts ranging in size from the palm-sized tintype of Billy the Kid purchased at a 2011 auction by William Koch to the chuck wagon once used by cowboys on New Mexico’s legendary Bell Ranch.
The exhibition is generously supported by the Brindle Foundation; Burnett Foundation; Albert and Ethel Herzstein Charitable Foundation, Houston; Candace Good Jacobson in memory of Thomas Jefferson Good III; New Mexico Humanities Council; Newman’s Own Foundation; Palace Guard; Eugenia Cowden Pettit and Michael Pettit; Jane and Charlie Gaillard; Moise Livestock Company; the New Mexico Cattle Growers’ Association; and the many contributors to the Director’s Leadership, Annual Education, and Exhibitions Development Funds.
