Wild Wild West (1999) is a science fiction action-comedy film directed by Barry Sonnenfeld, starring Will Smith, Kevin Kline (in two roles, Artemus Gordon and President Ulysses S. Grant), Kenneth Branagh and Salma Hayek.
In the spirit of the original TV series, the film features highly advanced steampunk technology and many bizarre mechanical inventions, including innumerable inventions of the mechanological geniuses Artemus Gordon and Dr. Loveless, including nitroglycerine-powered penny-farthing bicycles, spring-loaded notebooks, bulletproof chainmail, flying machines, steam tanks, and Loveless’s giant mechanical spider.
Reception
The film was almost universally panned by critics. Robert Conrad, who starred in the original 60s series, repeatedly panned the movie and attended the 20th annual Razzies in 2000 to accept three of the five worst-movie awards for the picture.
After making a decent $49.7 million over its first 6 days, the box office numbers lost steam. At the end of its US theatrical run, Wild Wild West made $113 million, well below its $170 million production budget. It made just over $222 million worldwide.
Controversy
In 1997, writer Gilbert Ralston sued Warner Brothers over the upcoming motion picture based on the series. Ralston helped create The Wild Wild West television series, and scripted the pilot episode, “The Night of the Inferno.” In a deposition, Ralston explained that in 1964 he was approached by producer Michael Garrison who ‘”said he had an idea for a series, good commercial idea, and wanted to know if I could glue the idea of a western hero and a James Bond type together in the same show.” Ralston said he then created the Civil War characters, the format, the story outline and nine drafts of the script that was the basis for the television series. It was his idea, for example, to have a secret agent named Jim West who would perform secret missions for a bumbling Ulysses S. Grant.
Ralston’s experience brought to light a common Hollywood practice of the 1950s and 60′s when television writers who helped create popular series allowed producers or studios to take credit for a show, thus cheating the writers out of millions of dollars in royalties. Ralston died in 1999, before his suit was settled. Warner Brothers ended up paying his family between $600,000 and $1.5 million.
Shooting locations
The sequences on both Artemus Gordon’s and Dr. Loveless’ trains interiors were shot on sets at Warner Bros. The train exteriors were shot in Idaho. Much of the ‘wild West’ footage was shot around Santa Fe, New Mexico, particularly at the western town set at the Cooke Movie Ranch. During the shooting of a sequence involving stunts and pyrotechnics, a planned building fire grew out of control and quickly overwhelmed the local fire crews that were standing by. Much of the town was destroyed before the fire was contained.
