PRASHANT GUPTA
	HBO's new Western-themed series Deadwood

Culture of Personality
A throwback genre for HBO and the movie about an eccentric billionaire

Posted Sunday, August 31, 2003; 2:31 p.m. EST

television
THINK NYPD BLUE, BUT WITH STETSONS
A Western set in 1876 with the downer title Deadwood may not sound like a promising addition to HBO's spring 2004 lineup. But it has gold diggers, prostitutes, gunslingers and criminals and is being created by David Milch of NYPD Blue and Hill Street Blues. Plus, Milch deadpans, "it's in color!"

Deadwood was the epicenter of a gold rush in what is now South Dakota. Just one small problem: the land had previously been "given" to the Indians. "Custer was sent in to strong-arm the Indians, and we all know how that turned out," says Milch. The story begins two weeks after Custer's last stand at Little Bighorn and features fictional characters like a marshal turned merchant played by Timothy Olyphant (Gone in Sixty Seconds) as well as historical figures like "Wild Bill" Hickok (Keith Carradine).

To Milch, the times felt right for the story. "In the aftermath of 9/11, people are so guarded emotionally, savaged by what they experienced through TV," he says. When fiction can't possibly trump the headlines, taking viewers out of a contemporary setting can help them check their disbelief at the door. Don't expect chaste, old-fashioned behavior, though; there's already buzz about the skin, violence and language. "I'm just trying to get that world right," says Milch, who helped bring nudity to prime time in NYPD Blue. "When a man was killed in Deadwood, he was fed to the pigs." Even the Sopranos haven't tried that.
—By Lisa Takeuchi Cullen

STEPHEN KING'S HAUNTED HOSPITAL
In 1996, Stephen King wandered into a video store and picked up the Danish film Riget (The Kingdom). The thriller, directed by Lars von Trier (Dancer in the Dark) and set in a haunted hospital, spooked even the King of Creepy. "I thought, We really ought to do this for American TV," he recalls.

King continued to covet the project even after film studio Sony acquired it. Then, in 1998, he was hit by a car in rural Maine and confined for months in—that's right— a hospital. Inspired and determined, he made a deal with Sony, secured a series with ABC and swiftly banged out most of Stephen King's Kingdom Hospital.

The 15-hour series, which begins on Feb. 5, takes place in a state-of-the-art hospital built on the grounds of—cue minor-key music—a textile mill that burned down long ago. The lead characters include Dr. Hook, played by long-lost Brat Packer Andrew McCarthy, a "brilliant" surgeon who isn't so brilliant that he can find a home outside the hospital basement or a hobby outside of collecting scalpels. Diane Ladd is Mrs. Druse, a "psychic hypochondriac." Bruce Davison plays Dr. Stegman, a hopelessly incompetent yet arrogant doctor. Naturally, the spirits of the child workers who died in the fire lurk in the corridors; naturally, the living characters foolishly ignore them.

What's next for King, who has retired, sort of, from writing novels? "John Mellencamp and I are talking about a Broadway show," King says. O.K., now you're really scaring us.
—L.T.C.

movies
THE AVIATOR
The Man, the Myth, the Millions—and Marty
Martin Scorsese is as much a movie fan as he is a moviemaker. He poured his love for classic American and Italian films into two four-hour documentaries that are their own kind of classics. Now he is making a big Hollywood picture about Howard Hughes, a giant figure in business, aviation and movies. And he has signed Leonardo DiCaprio, star of the biggest hit in Hollywood history, to bring the legend to screen life.

Hughes is remembered today as the billionaire bohemian who built that Edsel of airplanes, the Spruce Goose, and spent the late 1960s as the reclusive, emaciated owner of a slew of Las Vegas hotels and casinos. His death in 1976, as a reader wrote to TIME, "disproved the saying that 'you can never be too rich or too thin.'"

But Hughes was also a flamboyant and gifted Hollywood figure. At 21 he produced a movie (Two Arabian Knights) that won an Oscar at the first Academy Awards ceremony. Before he was 25, he had directed and supervised the thrilling dogfights in the World War I fly-boy spectacle Hell's Angels, the flick that made Jean Harlow a star. Two years later, Hughes produced the best and most brutal of the early gangster dramas, Scarface. After a decade-long vacation from films, he made The Outlaw, a notorious Western whose main point of interest was Jane Russell's bosom. By the mid-1950s, he had run a major movie studio, RKO, into the ground. Then he vanished into eccentricity.

The brilliance and waywardness of Hughes' hectic, high-flying movie career were surely part of what fascinated Scorsese and screenwriter John Logan (who scripted RKO 281, about the making of Citizen Kane). But if Hughes had been a homebody, they would have far less to tell. So The Aviator will detail this rich and randy bachelor's dalliances with Katharine Hepburn (played by Cate Blanchett ), Ava Gardner (Kate Beckinsale) and Harlow (Gwen Stefani of the band No Doubt). The film teems with other Hollywood potentates, from MGM mogul Louis B. Mayer to supercensor Joseph Breen, and promises to be a loving, caustic tribute to a town whose glittering streets can be every bit as mean as those in Scorsese's Little Italy. And unlike the director's Gangs of New York, it won't take 32 years to finish. We can hope to see it late next year.
—By Richard Corliss

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