Fact to legend

Growing up in El Paso, author/screenwriter Kirk Ellis became fascinated by the history of the West and with westerns.

“We in 21st century America consider ourselves the heirs of the frontier, the people who moved across the Mississippi and colonized the West,” Ellis said in a phone interview from his home in Santa Fe.

“We learned about it mainly from film and television. It’s not history but a nation’s origin myth. And it is intertwined with firearms as a tool of our independence.”

Ellis’ newly published book is “They Kill People: Bonnie and Clyde, a Hollywood Revolution and America’s Obsession with Guns and Outlaws.”

“Bonnie and Clyde” was the title of a landmark 1967 feature film about Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, the leaders of a gang that terrorized Middle America in the mid-1930s, killing almost a dozen lawmen before they were gunned down in a police ambush in rural northern Louisiana.

Ellis argues director Arthur Penn and screenwriters David Newman and Robert Benton transformed the Bonnie and Clyde story from an historical biography to a view of America’s obsession with guns and outlaws.

That same obsession applies today, Ellis said.

Penn’s own experiences living through the Depression, fighting in World War II and observing the young America’s opposition to the Vietnam War influenced his thinking as a director about the constancy of violence in society.

The “Hollywood Revolution” referenced in the book’s subtitle is about the end of an era of the American film industry’s censorship, which had imposed restrictions on the onscreen graphic violence, language, sexuality and lawless behavior.

“Bonnie and Clyde” was one of the first films of the “New Hollywood” era that took advantage of the lifting of those restrictions.

The book also addresses the provision in the Second Amendment on the right to bear arms, and the enduring legend that a man with a gun trumps all.

However, Ellis contends, a study of the history of the American West will reveal something else: There was “the building of community, the coming together of people, which was the opposite of individualism. That’s a story we tend to forget.”

Another reason for writing the book was to separate fact from myth. Ellis said marquee outlaws Jesse James and Billy the Kid have been lionized because they were outlaws, though their historical roles were relatively insignificant.

In the case of Bonnie and Clyde, the couple will continue to have a place as legends in American history and, Ellis predicts, the Penn-directed 1967 film about them and their gang will never go out of style.

Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, the author said, were the poster children for a crime wave across Middle America in the 1930s, and for the firearms legislation and laws of the period.

In the opening of the afterword and acknowledgements section, Ellis writes, “Neither a straightforward production history nor a traditional biography, ‘They Kill People’ aims instead to center Bonnie and Clyde as the entry point to explore how fact is transformed into legend — even within the lives of the participants themselves — and what that fascination has to say about American society and culture.”

The epilogue reveals an unexpected swerve to the story. Ellis declares that “if your legacy counts for anything, it will become the subject of a musical.”

A musical? Yes. Titled “Bonnie and Clyde,” a musical premiered in 2009 at the La Jolla Playhouse in California. Ellis’ book says the musical was a commercial and critical success.

Until it reached Broadway.

Despite receiving a handful of Drama Desk and Emmy nominations, New York Times and Wall Street Journal reviewers panned it. The show closed after only 36 performances.

But the musical enjoyed a rebirth in England. Ellis writes that a revamped 2022 production received critical and popular acclaim in London’s West End. A definitive staging there followed the next year. Ellis’ book is a remarkable, readable work that shines a penetrating light on the braided issues of guns and violence that still haunt our society.

Ellis won two Emmys and other awards for his work as writer and co-executive producer on the HBO miniseries “John Adams.” He also received an Emmy and other awards for the ABC miniseries “Anne Frank: The Whole Story,” which he wrote and co-produced.

Ellis also wrote and executive produced the 2024 Apple TV+ limited series “Franklin,” which chronicled Benjamin Franklin’s efforts to negotiate a treaty with France during the American Revolution.

“I have spent my life as a writer, largely for television. That experience has imbued in me an understanding of how history can be transformed, can be corrupted and can be iconographed,” Ellis said.

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