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Tuesday, November 23, 2010

'True Grit' and the town of Fort Smith

...Fort Smith is on the border of Arkansas and Oklahoma. It was once, as they say, the last bastion of law and order before the wild frontier. What was unusual about the federal court in Fort Smith was that it had an unbelievably large coverage area: 75,000 square miles of lawless Indian Territory (now the State of Oklahoma) with one judge to hear all those cases. Any crimes committed in Indian Territory were automatically federal cases. Seeing the frontier as a probable safe haven, troublemakers from all over the country would flee to hide out in this territory, raising hell and robbing, raping, murdering and generally terrorizing anyone who got in their path. There was a popular saying back then, “There is no law west of St. Louis and no God west of Fort Smith.”


Also:
- Friends and family turn out to mourn slain publicist Ronni Chasen. (Thompson on Hollywood)
- Katie Couric interviews the women who inspired the British film Made in Dagenham. (CBS News)
- A South African critiques the just-released trailer for the Winnie Mandela film Winnie, starring Jennifer Hudson - and is not impressed. (Guardian)
- Two labors of love: Mark Wahlberg goes on 60 Minutes to talk about his boxing biopic The Fighter, while Halle Berry discusses her late-season contender Frankie and Alice. (CBS News, Scott Feinberg)
- Check out these interviews from 1975 with Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg and Werner Herzog. (Cinematical)
- A deejay takes the classic silent film Birth of a Nation and remixes it, making modern audiences see the blatantly racist film in a new context. (Silent Volume)
- What if someone other than David Fincher directed The Social Network? (College Humor)

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