David F. Matuszak is a one-man story-team, including as a writer, frontiersman, and adventurer. David knows Westerns! Matuszak’s The Cowboy’s Trail Guide to Westerns is a complete guide to the genre. For decades he has been reviewing feature-length Westerns and fully understands what makes a great action-packed film. Just three Westerns have ever received the Academy Award for Best Picture: Cimarron (1931), Dances With Wolves (1990), and Unforgiven (1992). All of them classic films—none a perfect Western. So, Matuszak set out to write a screenplay that in the right hands has the potential of becoming the first perfect Western.
The ”real” West and the ”reel’ West are woven together in Beckwourth. It is historically accurate with just the perfect touch of Hollywood “myth.” The same myth of the Old West depicted in “dime novels” that lured pioneers to go West more than a century ago. And it is the same myth of the West that attracts every generation since then to Western movies, rodeos, country music, country dancing, Western fashion, and Western fiction. Matuszak understands that Westerns have universal appeal. Who doesn’t like a good Western?
The “spirit” and “myth” of the West has guided Matuszak throughout his life. He is a modern-day frontiersman with an academic background. His first Western history, Nelson Point: Portrait of Northern Gold Rush Town came from his doctoral dissertation and became a classic in Gold Rush literature. Beckwourth and the Nelson Point gold camp come to life in Matuszak’s screenplay. Much of what he wrote came from personal experience. He’s mined the bone-chilling waters of the Sierra Nevada Mountains in the Nelson Point mining district for decades.
Many of Matuszak’s frontier skills played a critical role in the writing of Beckwourth. He’s packed horseback across the West much of his life. Competes in working-cowboy “ranch rodeos.” Trains working cow-horses. Rode in an Old West show and with the mounted police. Has re-enacted the Lewis & Clark Expedition by canoe with period provisions, weapons, and technology. Built a log cabin from scratch in the Sierra Nevada near Beckwourth’s own cabin. (He even took measurements from Beckwourth’s cabin depicted in the screenplay.) He buffalo hunts with Native American friends utilizing period black-powder rifles. Matuszak’s entire life has been an adventure exploring the American frontier that now acts as the foundation to writing an epic Western movie.
Throughout his life, Matuszak has been unconsciously scouting filming locations. He fully understands that landscapes of the American West are the biggest stars of Western films. Beckwourth is full of those landscapes, from St. Louis, across the great plains, the Rockies, across the desert Southwest, all the way to the Sierra Nevada, Matuszak has seen and experienced them all. And he included them all as the uncredited stars of Beckwourth: My Mistress Was the West.
Today, Matuszak splits his time between his horse ranch in the foothills of the San Bernardino Mountains, his log cabin in the Sierra Nevada, and his writing (and surfing) retreat on the Pacific coast of the Baja frontier.