True West

Overview

A Comic Masterpiece by the Pulitzer Prize Winning Author

Written in 1980, True West is an adroitly constructed comedy with serious overtones. Austin and Lee are brothers, children of a California landscape that is poised between town and desert, sons of a desert-dwelling alcoholic and a suburban wanderer seeking meaning in Alaska and Picasso, respectively. The brothers represent two possibilities that might spring from this terrain.

Austin is the achiever. A college graduate and career screenwriter, he is staying in Mom's home near L.A. and working on a film project, although he's got a family of his own in northern California.

Lee is a petty thief and desert dweller who drops in on Austin.

It's film producer Saul Kimmer who shakes things up after Lee tells him about a movie idea of his own, a western story.

Saul says OK and orders Austin to junk his bleak, modern-day California love story and write Lee's archetypal -- and very likely archetypally trashy -- western tale.