Fri 19 Apr 2024
Reviewed by Tony Baer: RUDOLPH WURLITZER – The Drop Edge of Yonder.
Posted by Steve under Reviews , Western Fiction1 Comment
RUDOLPH WURLITZER – The Drop Edge of Yonder. Two Dollar Radio, softcover, 2008, 2017.
“Elk’s elk and meat’s meat, son, and nothin’ matters, and to hell with the rest of it.”
Wurlitzer, descendant of the jukebox maven, wrote a screenplay about Zebulon, a mountain man stuck between this life and the underworld, to be filmed by Sam Peckinpah. The screenplay can be found here: https://thescriptsavant.com/movies/Zebulon.pdf
Unfortunately, Peckinpah died before filming it. Then Hal Ashby was going to direct it. And died. Then Jim Jarmusch was going to direct it — but couldn’t agree with Wurlitzer on the script. So, instead, Jarmusch filmed Dead Man, lifting many of the same themes without crediting Wurlitzer. (For an interview discussing this stuff, see https://arthurmag.com/2008/05/21/on-the-drift-rudy-wurlitzer-and-the-road-to-nowhere/).
Giving up on the film, Wurlitzer reworked the screenplay into a novel: Drop Edge of Yonder.
Zebulon, mountain man, fur trader, outlaw, shootist, gold digger, horse thief, and gambler, gets shot in the heart during a card game gone wrong. But he doesn’t die. He should be dead. But he ain’t. At least not hardly. Maybe a little bit — but with one foot in this world and one foot in the other.
So he wanders. “Quien es,” he keeps asking. Going from town to town, from card game to card game, always losing to a royal flush with the queen of hearts pulled off the bottom of the deck.
He hooks up with Delilah, African courtesan to a Russian Count. But she’s just like him, cursed to meander this earth, neither of this world nor the other. Condemned to wander til they fathom this, that:
“All trails are dreams and there was never anything to try for or do; only to be.”
April 20th, 2024 at 1:35 pm
Wurlitzer’s Wikipedia page is here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudy_Wurlitzer
Here’s what they have to say about some of the novels he wrote:
“Wurlitzer’s first novel was the highly experimental and psychedelic Nog (1968) which was compared to the work of Thomas Pynchon. It was followed by the minimalist, Beckett-influenced Flats in 1970. Quake, published in 1974, takes place in a post-apocalyptic Los Angeles where mankind’s worst impulses are acted out in one long, unbroken narrative. 1984’s Slow Fade, also dealing with Hollywood, is a portrait of an aging, once-brilliant film director attempting to make peace with his demons and his past. It has been suggested that Slow Fade was influenced by Wurlitzer’s time with director Sam Peckinpah on the set of Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid, for which he wrote the screenplay. His most recent novel is The Drop Edge Of Yonder, which had its origins in a screenplay called Zebulon that had existed in various versions over the years. Directors Peckinpah, and Hal Ashby were attached to the project at some point, but the film was never made.”
Of the nine films he wrote the screenplays for and are listed there, the best known (to me) is Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (directed by Sam Peckinpah), 1973.