Hitch Your Wagon . . .

A Would-Be Writer's Dream Came True With the Help of Star Robert Duvall

Robert Duvall and Alan Geoffrion are neighbors who love horses and a good story, which led them to create the AMC miniseries "Broken Trail," airing Sunday on AMC. (By Michel Du Cille -- The Washington Post)

Alan Geoffrion, a big man with the kind of bushy mustache favored in the Old West, knows horses as well as anyone in the stable-and-saddle country of Northern Virginia. As the co-owner of Campbell House Stables near Warrenton, he has been transporting horses to buyers across the country for years.

But he always yearned to be a writer. Before he settled into the cab of his truck, his routine had been to pack several books on tape -- Tolstoy, Cormac McCarthy, Faulkner and his fellow Southerners. When the miles piled up, and he wearied of other writers' words, the English-major dropout from the University of Tennessee allowed his mind to range over lines and bits of dialogue for the novels he intended to write, one of these days.

Now Geoffrion's long-haul literary musings have come to happy fruition, in one of those stories of beginner's luck that stir envy among those who dream of seeing their name on a novel. At 59, Geoffrion has just seen the publication of his first book, "Broken Trail," its release paired with a film version on AMC, a two-part miniseries that stars veteran actor Robert Duvall.

It certainly helped that Duvall was his friend and fellow horseman -- and wanted the project to happen. The Oscar winner not only produced "Broken Trail" and co-starred, but he also served as Geoffrion's writing coach and guided him through the treacherous terrain of Hollywood.

He and Duvall recently were in New York for the gala premiere (the movie debuts Sunday), and with the novel into its fourth printing, a book tour is coming up. "It beats mucking stalls," Geoffrion says, laughing over breakfast on his wisteria-shaded deck the other morning.

Set in the waning days of the Old West, "Broken Trail" is the story of a "bowed and bandy-legged old cowboy" named Print Ritter (played by Duvall, naturally) and his nephew Tom Harte (Thomas Haden Church), who contract to drive 500 horses from eastern Oregon to Sheridan, Wyo., where an agent for Queen Victoria's army will purchase the hardy animals for use in the Boer War. They're on the trail less than a week when they encounter five Chinese girls purchased at auction in San Francisco and being taken to an Idaho mining camp to work as prostitutes.

Rescuing the frightened and heartsick slaves, the two trail drivers resume their picaresque journey eastward. Along the way, they encounter dangers worthy of a cowboy Odysseus: deadly tick fever, hired killers and Big Rump Kate, an Idaho mining-town madam with a heart that's anything but gold.

Duvall says he and Geoffrion were trying to reflect in "Broken Trail" the richness of the American West. The moral complexity and multiethnic mix of 19th-century mining camps and frontier settlements is much more interesting, he points out, than the Hollywood cliches. Duvall, who can be stubborn, fought to keep that complexity while "Broken Trail" was being shot in the Canadian Rockies last fall.

It wasn't always easy. Because of proverbial "artistic differences" with veteran director Walter Hill, the collaborators weren't sure until the final edit whether the project they envisioned would make it to the screen. "Walter wanted it to be a bang-bang shoot-'em-up, which covers a multitude of sins," Duvall says. "It was a nightmare." But he professes to be pleased with the finished product.

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Geoffrion and Duvall got to know each other in the early '90s, when the actor's then-wife, Sharon, held dance lessons several evenings a week in the hayloft of a dairy barn at Byrnley, Duvall's stunningly beautiful horse farm between Middleburg and The Plains. "It was a real cross-section of people who came for lessons," Geoffrion recalled. "Guys who had spent the day on their tractors, bluebloods from the area. In a way it was a social thing. I'm sure some were hoping they would get a glimpse of Bobby, but he was gone a lot during that time. It was fun."

Duvall did show up occasionally, to help out when his wife was teaching the tango, his passion. Afterward, he and Geoffrion and some of the others got in the habit of driving to a little bar in The Plains. They would sit around and talk about politics, about women, occasionally about movies. And always about horses.