Germinal Press Blog - The case for Sam Shepard

The case for Sam Shepard

Monday, 11 April 2011 Blog Post

I was flicking through TV channels on Saturday night, when I stumbled on "The Right Stuff", a film directed by Phillip Kaufman.

Made in 1983 and based on the Tom Wolfe book of the same name (do yourself a favour, read the FT), it lost out to the lachrymatic "Terms of Endearment" in the Oscars that same year. Not that I minded - any film that featured Ed Harris, Scott Glenn, Barbara Hershey, Lance Henriksen, Dennis Quaid and the underrated Fred Ward didn't need a trophy in my books to be a winner.

The Right Stuff also featured a guy I'd never seen before called Sam Shephard, who played the legendary test pilot Chuck Yeager. Sure, as a then teenage rock scribe, I'd heard of him, primarily as one of Patti Smith's lovers, but he certainly didn't look the part of a New York punk boy.

It was Shephard, though, that held me transfixed throughout the film.

He was everything I loved - and still love - about America: impossibly good looking (even with his crooked teeth), cowboy-ish, magnetic, slightly mythical, a risk-taker.

So I checked him out, found he drummed in a rock 'n roll band, wrote screenplays, directed films, painted and did all the stuff I fancied I would do when I got older.

Over the years, he's continued to write screenplays - most obviously, "Paris, Texas" - and act in films as maddeningly diverse as "Days of Heaven" and "Black Hawk Down". He also hooked up with Jessica Lange, she of "King Kong" and "Frances" fame, an ideal bond if there ever was one.

In recent years, I'd heard surprisingly little of Shephard, until he was convicted of drink-driving in 2009 in the town of - wait for it - Normal, Illinois. So I learned he was not only immensely talented, someone who had risen to the top in everything he'd tried his hand at, but he was also an alcoholic. Just like his old man.

I've liked him even more ever since.

Stephen Townshend is the publisher of Germinal Press