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

By Joe Holley
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, June 22, 2006

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.

* * *

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.

Geoffrion is a native Virginian who grew up around horses and made them his career (aside from stints in business publishing). He and his wife of 36 years, Danielle, own stables near Duvall's ranch. The men forged an easygoing, natural friendship unimpeded by Duvall's star status.

"When he and Sharon split up, I wound up spending more time with him," Geoffrion says. "We'd go blue fishing on the bay and then, when I could get away, I'd go on location with him."

He started screening a portion of the avalanche of scripts that come Duvall's way. For "Gods and Generals," the Civil War epic with Duvall as Robert E. Lee, Geoffrion read a number of books about the Confederate general, looking for details of habit, appearance and personality that Duvall could incorporate into his portrayal.

Brown eyes, for example. When the actor found out Lee's eyes were brown, Geoffrion tracked down a Wal-Mart optometrist who was willing to open his office on a Sunday and outfit the blue-eyed actor with brown contacts.

"Broken Trail" owes its origins to a connection Duvall made a few years back. "Bobby collects characters," Geoffrion says, meaning real-life characters.

One was an elderly Nebraska rancher named Waldo Haythorn he had met while filming "We're Not the Jet Set" in 1975. Geoffrion enjoyed knowing such old-timers; Duvall suggested a meeting. Geoffrion stopped by one morning in 2002 during a Midwestern horse delivery trip and had breakfast with Haythorn.

More than a year later, Geoffrion and Duvall were having lunch at the Rail Stop restaurant in The Plains, shortly before the actor and his new (and fourth) wife, Luciana Pedraza Duvall, were leaving to spend the Christmas holidays on their ranch in Argentina. Geoffrion happened to mention a story Haythorn had told him about his grandfather, a British immigrant named Harry Haythornwaite, who fulfilled a government contract in the 1880s to drive a herd of 700 horses from eastern Oregon to the Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota.

"Write it down," Duvall told him.

"You better do it," Duvall's wife urged. "Bobby doesn't do that for most people."

Geoffrion's phone rang at 8:30 the next morning. "How much you got done?" Duvall wanted to know.

The horseman started writing, although it didn't come easy. "I kinda came to the dance late," he says. "I'd written ever since I was in high school, but I never felt comfortable with it."

He got down a 23-page outline. "Then I just started writing it," he says. "I didn't have any particular knowledge, any books, any guidelines. I was just writing the story. Then it just kind of morphed into a screenplay."

At some point fairly early in the process, Geoffrion married the trail-drive story to another that intrigued him, one that was "part of my endless search for useless information."

It was the sadly neglected chronicle of Chinese girls -- thousands of them -- who were brought to America throughout the 19th century and forced into prostitution across the West.

From his reading, Geoffrion discovered that the young women had been ripped from their families in China and lived an average of five years in America before succumbing to suicide, violence or disease.

Geoffrion works out of a spare bedroom at a ceiling-high mahogany desk with doors, drawers and fold-up sections that are perfect for hiding his messiness at the end of the day. He keeps books, articles, oral histories and other items of research scattered haphazardly on a single bed behind him.

As he labored over "Broken Trail," he would get calls from Duvall, sometimes twice a day: "Hey bud, what's up?"

"Not too much, Bobby," he would answer, then maybe read the actor what he had written that day.

Duvall would offer a critique, and then he would start spinning out some new possible story element. Often his suggestions reflected their mutual effort to capture the intricate fabric of the West. Although Duvall grew up the son of a Navy officer in San Diego and Annapolis, he and his brothers spent several summers on an uncle's ranch in the Sweet Grass Hills of northern Montana. He recalled that many of his uncle's cowhands were Swedish immigrants, that his best cowboy was a Scotsman.

Even though the main character in "Broken Trail" resembles earlier Duvall characters, notably Gus McCrae in "Lonesome Dove" and Boss Spearman in "Open Range," Geoffrion insists he wasn't writing the character with Duvall in mind as the story transformed from novel to screenplay (and eventually back again). He was simply trying to create a fully realized individual.

"Wilford Brimley, Richard Farnsworth if he were still alive -- any number of actors could have played him," he says.

"You have to make him as real as General Lee's eyeballs," he added, "because Bobby has a truth detector on him. You wouldn't be able to get away with it."

Duvall also passed along the script to industry pals, including the venerable Texas writer Horton Foote, a friend for nearly half a century and an Oscar winner for his adaptation of "To Kill a Mockingbird" (in which Duvall played Boo Radley).

"I was very lucky," Geoffrion says. "It was wonderful. I told Horton Foote I had no training at all in writing scripts. 'Oh, that's great!' he said."

In early 2005, ICM, the talent and literary agency, took on the project, offering it as a package to networks and production companies. The package included Geoffrion as writer. AMC took it as the network's first-ever original movie.

Trouble ensued almost immediately. As Geoffrion and Duvall tell the tale, Hill, a director best known for "48 Hrs." and other action hits, had his own team of writers immediately set about rewriting.

After shooting began last August, the Hill-Duvall feud grew more contentious by the day, becoming a battle of dueling scripts. "At one point I had 22 different versions of the script spread across my bedroom floor," Geoffrion recalls.

He sensed he wasn't wanted. "I think there were people there who thought I was Bobby's pet poodle," he says. Duvall stood by him.

Hill could not be reached for comment, but a spokeswoman for the production attributed the conflict to Geoffrion's inexperience. The first-time writer didn't know much about story arcs and plot points to keep a four-hour miniseries moving.

Somehow, through what Duvall terms "a daily process of anarchy," a movie got made. "The overall thrust, the vision, is ours," he says. "From A to Z, I think the acting's better in this, overall, than 'Lonesome Dove.' "

At 75, Duvall has two other movies coming out and says he has no intention of slowing down. "I'll work till they have to wipe the drool from my chin."

Geoffrion recently signed a contract for a prequel to "Broken Trail." Called "Daughters of Joy," it tells the true story of a San Francisco woman whose mission in life was rescuing young Chinese women trapped in the "yellow slave trade."

But the Virginia horseman remains reluctant to call himself a writer. He still has his day job, hauling horseflesh and even mucking the stables.