Wyatt Earp

"Inventing Wyatt Earp: His Life and Many Legends," by Allen Barra. Carroll & Graf. 426 pages. $27.This is an age when debunking and demythologizing are popular national pastimes. Heroes, it seems, must be built up quickly so that just as quickly, they can be torn down. Historical figures fare no better. The tides of revisionism ebb and flow like a great avenging sea, sweeping heroes from their pedestals like so much flotsam and jetsam.Into this arena strides an unlikely combatant, Allen Barra, a sports columnist for the Wall Street Journal and a frequent contributor to the New York Times and ESPN Magazine.

Oct. 26 1881 The "Gunfight at the O.K. Corral" took place in Tombstone, Ariz., as Wyatt Earp, his two brothers and "Doc" Holliday confronted Ike Clanton's gang. Three members of Clanton's group were killed.

Los Angeles -- Megastar, sex symbol, Oscar-winning director -- phooey. First and foremost Kevin Costner is a movie fan."I like Westerns too much to be in a [crummy] one," he declares, just prior to the release of "Wyatt Earp," his third in the genre (following "Silverado" and "Dances With Wolves").Epics, too, are Mr. Costner's forte -- he has now starred in three movies that run more than three hours in length ("Dances," "JFK" and "Earp"), more than probably any other Hollywood star working today.

WALL, S.D. -- What do Wyatt Earp, T. rex, a flea-scratching hound and a 6-foot rabbit have in common? Absolutely nothing. But you'll find them all on the edge of the Badlands, at the intersection of Kitsch and Camp. Wall, population 800, is a dusty cow town at the geographic center of nowhere. But it draws a million visitors a year, thanks to a drugstore that morphed over the decades into a 76,000-square-foot Western wonderland. Welcome to Wall Drug, where you can spend an hour or a day among the wacky and whimsical.

Oct. 26 1881 The "Gunfight at the O.K. Corral" took place in Tombstone, Ariz., as Wyatt Earp, his two brothers and "Doc" Holliday confronted Ike Clanton's gang. Three members of Clanton's group were killed.

Harry Lauter, 76, a veteran cowboy actor in television westerns, died Oct. 30 of heart failure at his home in Ojai, Calif. A regular black hat in westerns, Mr. Lauter appeared in such series as "Wagon Train," "Rawhide," "Gunsmoke," "Bonanza" and "Wyatt Earp." He also had two series of his own: "Waterfront," in 1954, and "Tales of the Texas Rangers," from 1955 to 1959.

Ask Lawrence Kasdan how he researched "Wyatt Earp," and he'll tell you about the shelves full of books about the lawman. But a local Earp authority said only a few books are worth bothering with.Carl Chafin, who has spent a quarter of a century boning up on Earp, recommends Richard Erwin's "The Truth About Wyatt Earp" as "the newest and best book I know of." Mr. Chafin also recommends two books by Al Turner, "The Earps Talk" and "The OK Corral Inquest."The original source of most Wyatt Earp lore is Stuart Lake's "Wyatt Earp: Frontier Marshal," a book based on his late-in-life interviews with Earp, who died in 1929 at age 80 in a rented Los Angeles bungalow.

To lovers of Wild West folklore, he's Wyatt Earp - lawman, saloonkeeper, gambler, quick-triggered centerpiece of the legendary gunfight at the OK Corral. To Charles Earp Jr. of Catonsville and Pamela Earp Young of Ellicott City, he's cousin Wyatt. That the man who almost single-handedly defines the Wild West would have a couple of relatives in Maryland - and that those relatives would meet by coincidence - is perhaps not as far afield as it might seem. As it turns out, the Earp clan got its start in the United States when Thomas Earp Jr. of Ireland came to the Baltimore area in the 17th century as an indentured servant.

"Savage Nights," opening today at the Charles, is so notorious that the film itself is stunning in its inability to stun. In fact, what's surprising about it is how unsavage it turns out to be made.It's the nearly posthumous, thinly fictionalized semi-autobiographical story of Cyril Collard, a bisexual French filmmaker who learned that he was HIV-positive. In a novel, and later this film, he told his own story, suggesting that he had elected to go on having unprotected sex with various partners and anonymous men under the Seine bridges as his disease progressed through the late '80s.

A. B. Guthrie Jr., a Kentucky journalist who turned to fiction and won a Pulitzer Prize as one of the century's leading Western historical novelists, died Friday at his home at Choteau, Mont. He was 90.Carl D. Brandt, his agent, said he died of lung failure. He had been in poor health for several months.Mr. Guthrie, who won the Pulitzer in 1949 for his novel "The Way West," also wrote the screenplay for the 1953 motion picture "Shane."His final book, "A Field Guide to Writing Fiction," was published two weeks ago. His published works consisted of six novels, a book of essays, a children's book, a book of poems and five mystery novels.

To lovers of Wild West folklore, he's Wyatt Earp - lawman, saloonkeeper, gambler, quick-triggered centerpiece of the legendary gunfight at the OK Corral. To Charles Earp Jr. of Catonsville and Pamela Earp Young of Ellicott City, he's cousin Wyatt. That the man who almost single-handedly defines the Wild West would have a couple of relatives in Maryland - and that those relatives would meet by coincidence - is perhaps not as far afield as it might seem. As it turns out, the Earp clan got its start in the United States when Thomas Earp Jr. of Ireland came to the Baltimore area in the 17th century as an indentured servant.

James Stewart was afflicted with all the earmarks of a has-been actor in 1950 -- his last few films (including It's a Wonderful Life) had been moderate successes at best, his acting style seemed hopelessly outdated to postwar audiences and good parts were seeming fewer and further between -- when he took a chance on a movie whose real star was a rifle. By the end of that year, Stewart was back up among the kings of Hollywood -- he'd crack the box-office top 10 for the first time and stay there for the rest of the decade -- and Westerns had a new star.

The invigorating quality of June's fiction suggests the novel's expanding vitality. The great social novel of the 19th and early 20th century has re-emerged as biography. Novels of manners which depict the temperature of an epoch have retreated; psychological novels dedicated to examining how we perceive have disappeared. The self-conscious post-modernist novel, where artifice becomes story and language is about only language, is gone, while experiment resides finally in the competent hands of a DeLillo or a Pynchon.

"Inventing Wyatt Earp: His Life and Many Legends," by Allen Barra. Carroll & Graf. 426 pages. $27.This is an age when debunking and demythologizing are popular national pastimes. Heroes, it seems, must be built up quickly so that just as quickly, they can be torn down. Historical figures fare no better. The tides of revisionism ebb and flow like a great avenging sea, sweeping heroes from their pedestals like so much flotsam and jetsam.Into this arena strides an unlikely combatant, Allen Barra, a sports columnist for the Wall Street Journal and a frequent contributor to the New York Times and ESPN Magazine.

Two teen-agers shocked a 3-year-old Old Mill boy with a stun gun Monday night as he rode his tricycle outside his home, county police said.The youngster was playing with his next-door neighbor about 8 p.m. The boy's mother rushed outside when she heard her son screaming.The 6-year-old neighbor told the mother that the two teens had shocked her son with a stun gun and then ran down Allen Road. The mother called police, but the teens returned to the area before officers arrived. The boys ran off toward Heritage Hill Drive when a neighbor tried to follow them, police said.

Television's ability to explore and educate is on display tonight in a pair of PBS documentary series -- but so is its ability to take talented performers and reduce them to mushy misfits.* "The 1995 Essence Awards" (8 p.m.-10 p.m., WBFF, Channel 45) -- Sinbad and Natalie Cole preside over the annual show that honors outstanding African-Americans. Among the recipients this year: Janet Jackson, Stevie Wonder and Gen. Colin Powell. Local note: Jada Pinkett, a graduate of the Baltimore School for the Arts, is among the scheduled performers.

Tune in today and enjoy Martina Navratilova's going out in style (win or lose) in the Wimbledon women's final, and Germany and Switzerland facing Belgium and Spain, respectively, in the first two second-round games of World Cup Soccer.* "Wimbledon tennis women's final." (9 a.m.-conclusion, WMAR, Channel 2) -- Billie Jean King had worried that, due to the luck of the draw and the upset defeats of some major seeds, Ms. Navratilova had yet to be truly tested as she advanced through the Wimbledon tournament.

Two teen-agers shocked a 3-year-old Old Mill boy with a stun gun Monday night as he rode his tricycle outside his home, county police said.The youngster was playing with his next-door neighbor about 8 p.m. The boy's mother rushed outside when she heard her son screaming.The 6-year-old neighbor told the mother that the two teens had shocked her son with a stun gun and then ran down Allen Road. The mother called police, but the teens returned to the area before officers arrived. The boys ran off toward Heritage Hill Drive when a neighbor tried to follow them, police said.

Sony just wrote off a whopping $2.7 billion on its investment in Columbia Pictures. The proud Japanese giant discovered that mastering Hollywood is no walk in the park.But it's not just Sony. Industry insider Peter Bart puts his finger on the issues in "That Sync-ing Feeling" (GQ, November 1994); it's one of the best analyses of innovation failures I've come across.The problem Bart unearths: mimicry. When Wyatt Earp got hot in Tinseltown, Disney put out "Tombstone"; Warner released "Wyatt Earp."

Panned by critics and ignored by the public, the movie ''Wyatt Earp'' quickly vanished into oblivion this past summer. Americans seemed to prefer the ''feel good'' movie of the summer -- ''Forrest Gump'' -- to the biography of the legendary frontier lawman. But there is much the 3 1/2 - hour Lawrence Kasdan epic tells us about the crime and violence that plagues Americans today.Director Kasdan depicts the young Wyatt Earp as a peaceful soul adverse to violence. He vomits when he sees two men gun each other down in the street.