Doc

by Pete Hamill

Doc Holliday Movie 1971. Screenplay, starring Stacy Keach and Faye Dunaway.

202 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1971

About the author

Pete Hamill was a novelist, essayist and journalist whose career has endured for more than forty years. He was born in Brooklyn, N. Y. in 1935, the oldest of seven children of immigrants from Belfast, Northern Ireland. He attended Catholic schools as a child. He left school at 16 to work in the Brooklyn Navy Yard as a sheetmetal worker, and then went on to the United States Navy. While serving in the Navy, he completed his high school education. Then, using the educational benefits of the G.I. Bill of Rights, he attended Mexico City College in 1956-1957, studying painting and writing, and later went to Pratt Institute. For several years, he worked as a graphic designer. Then in 1960, he went to work as a reporter for the New York Post. A long career in journalism followed. He has been a columnist for the New York Post, the New York Daily News, and New York Newsday, the Village Voice, New York magazine and Esquire. He has served as editor-in-chief of both the Post and the Daily News. As a journalist, he covered wars in Vietnam, Nicaragua, Lebanon and Northern Ireland, and has lived for extended periods in Mexico City, Dublin, Barcelona, San Juan and Rome. From his base in New York he also covered murders, fires, World Series, championship fights and the great domestic disturbances of the 1960s, and wrote extensively on art, jazz, immigration and politics. He witnessed the events of September 11, 2001 and its aftermath and wrote about them for the Daily News.

At the same time, Hamill wrote much fiction, including movie and TV scripts. He published nine novels and two collections of short stories. His 1997 novel, Snow in August, was on the New York Times bestseller list for four months. His memoir, A Drinking Life, was on the same New York Times list for 13 weeks. He has published two collections of his journalism (Irrational Ravings and Piecework), an extended essay on journalism called News Is a Verb, a book about the relationship of tools to art, a biographical essay called Why Sinatra Matters, dealing with the music of the late singer and the social forces that made his work unique. In 1999, Harry N. Abrams published his acclaimed book on the Mexican painter Diego Rivera. His novel, Forever, was published by Little, Brown in January 2003 and became a New York Times bestseller. His most recently published novel was North River (2007).

In 2004, he published Downtown: My Manhattan, a non-fiction account of his love affair with New York, and received much critical acclaim. Hamill was the father of two daughters, and has a grandson. He was married to the Japanese journalist, Fukiko Aoki, and they divided their time between New York City and Cuernavaca, Mexico. He was a Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University.

Author photo by David Shankbone (September 2007) - permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation.

Reviews

[Julie Bozza · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very mixed feelings about this one! It's well written, and makes clever, interesting use of the historical material. Doc and Kate are wonderful characters, and were beautifully brought to life by Stacy Keach and Faye Dunaway in the film. However, it's written with an agenda in mind that involves a thorough Earp-debunking, and blaming the tragedy of the Vietnam War on America swallowing the "lie", the founding myth, the White Hats and Black Hats, that has been presented by the Western genre.

Hamill discusses this in his introduction to this volume, "Making Doc". While I have some sympathy with his analysis of myths and modern history, Hamill believes that the notion of Wyatt Earp as a hero has no foundation in truth at all. He claims, for example, "there is much evidence that he wasn't even a marshal in Dodge City" (which isn't so, as newspaper and legal records show). So Hamill is coming from a place where the legend is all a load of cobblers, and has led to real harm done in the real world.

Wyatt was a complicated man, who lived a long life, and did indeed contribute to the building of his own legend and the suppression of the darker parts of his story. He remains a divisive figure even now. It's probably already clear I'm an Earpian, though I certainly don't think him perfect or even entirely righteous. He wouldn't be as interesting if he were.

I am told that Earpians "loathe" this film.

However, I am fascinated by Wyatt's relationship with Doc Holliday, and was prompted to watch the film Doc and read this screenplay because it features a homosexual Wyatt who is in love with Doc. (Doc, in turn, is a loyal friend, but he's straight and he's falling in love with Kate almost despite himself.) The screenplay is clear about Wyatt's sexuality and feelings, though it's toned down somewhat in the film and much of the relevant dialogue is dropped.

I loved all of that - but it's horribly problematic when the homosexuality is paired with the striking presentation of Wyatt as the villain of the piece. Indeed, the screenplay notes at one point that Wyatt is "the most evil man in Tombstone". He is venal, amoral, and willing to use anything - even a brother's death - to score political points.

The screenplay was developed in 1968-70, and the film was released in 1971. One hopes that 5o years later we're beyond making the villain gay (and the gay guy the villain). Doc becomes an interesting historical document, but I hope would be told differently today.