broken trail

LOS ANGELES, Sept. 16 ― Fox, which attracts television's biggest audience each year with its juggernaut "American Idol," used the opening of the 59th Primetime Emmys to skewer its competitors, including NBC for its recent struggles to keep its audience. But NBC had the last laugh on Sunday, taking home seven awards, including the Emmy for best comedy series for the inaugural season of "30 Rock."

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2007 Emmy Awards
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The TV Watch: A Friendly Stage With More Décolletage Than Politics (September 17, 2007)
List of Winners (September 17, 2007)
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David Chase, left, with cast members of "The Sopranos," which won the Emmy for drama series. The show had been nominated for 15 awards.

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Producer David Chase holds the award as producers and cast members accept the award for outstanding drama series for "The Sopranos" at the 59th Primetime Emmy Awards Sunday, Sept. 16, 2007, in Los Angeles.

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Jaime Pressly accepts the award for the best supporting actress in a comedy for "My Name Is Earl."

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Writers accept the award for outstanding writing for a miniseries, movie or a dramatic special for his work on "Broken Trail" at the 59th Primetime Emmy Awards. Robert Duvall, center, the star of the series, won best actor for his role.

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Jeremy Piven took his second consecutive award for outstanding supporting actor in a comedy series for his role as Ari Gold on "Entourage."
"The Sopranos" won the Emmy for best drama series in its final season, also taking awards for best writing and best directing. But what was expected to be a sweep of the major acting awards by the cast of that long-running HBO series never materialized, as it lost out to other shows in four acting categories.

Overall, HBO won six awards, including best actor in a comedy series for Ricky Gervais in "Extras," Jeremy Piven's second consecutive Emmy for best supporting actor in a comedy series for his performance as the bombastic Ari Gold on "Entourage," and the award for television movie for "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee."

ABC also took home six awards, including three of the top acting awards, two of which went to series in their first year. Sally Field won best actress in a drama series for "Brothers & Sisters," a first-year show; America Ferrera won best actress in a comedy series for "Ugly Betty," also in its first year; and James Spader won his third Emmy for best actor in a drama for his role as Alan Shore. Two of the wins, including Sunday's, came for the show "Boston Legal"; previously, Mr. Spader won the award for playing the same character on "The Practice." "Ugly Betty" also won a directing award.

On NBC, "The Office" and "Late Night With Conan O'Brien" won for writing. Jaime Pressly won best supporting actress in a comedy for "My Name is Earl." And the NBC special "Tony Bennett: An American Classic" took three awards, including a performance Emmy for Mr. Bennett.

Fox won none of the major awards. "American Idol," the most-watched show on television, lost the award for best reality/competition series yet again to CBS's "Amazing Race," which has won the award each year it has been given.

On a night typically associated with feel-good humor, there was an undercurrent of tension. With the specter of a debilitating strike hanging over Hollywood, actors and other performers used the awards ceremony to support television writers and to attack network executives for taking screen time away from the people who produce the work.

Lewis Black, the comedian, skewered network producers for their now-common practices of placing text on-screen to promote coming shows and for squeezing credits off the screen at the end of a show.

"We don't care about the next show; we're watching this show," Mr. Black intoned in his usual screech. He also lambasted the networks for the practice of moving production credits to one side of the screen and running them so fast that even a speed-reader would have difficulty keeping up with them.

"Don't clutter up the screen so we can't see who worked on the show we just watched," Mr. Black said. "They deserve to see their names."

To applause from the audience, he asked network executives, "What is it you do, except come up with bad ideas?"

As if in support of one another in the coming contract struggle, each of the early acting winners, including Mr. Piven, Ms. Pressly and Terry O'Quinn (who won for supporting actor in a drama series for "Lost") thanked the writers who have turned their often complex and frequently unlovable characters into familiar, well-liked personas.

And while most of the celebratory acceptance speeches on the broadcast were uninspiring, remarks by Sally Field sent the Fox network's censors to the mute button ― not for her antiwar statements but for a vulgarity made when she remarked that her character on "Brothers & Sisters" was a mother with a son headed for combat in Iraq. If mothers ruled the world, she said in essence, there would be no wars.

In place of a monologue, Ryan Seacrest, the show's host, tried only a few jokes before bounding into the audience to play Name That Gown with Eva Longoria of "Desperate Housewives," and to introduce the casts of several shows with multiple nominations, which Fox had seated together in its unusual theater-in-the-round format.

In the award show's opening, Fox quickly did away with the kindness that one network sometimes shows to another: It used its cartoon character Stewie from "Family Guy" and his dog, Brian, to skewer competing series on other networks. NBC's "Scrubs" and its star, Zach Braff, "reminds us a sitcom doesn't have to make you laugh," the duo sang. ABC, they said, is brewing up more "primetime swill" like its new series "Cavemen." The song also made reference to NBC's ratings declines and invoked the unsavory reputation of Charlie Sheen, a CBS star.

One of the big questions hovering over the Shrine Auditorium here early Sunday evening was the extent to which the awards ceremony would become a celebratory send-off for "The Sopranos," the enduring HBO series that ended this year with a season-long farewell and, famously in its final episode, a shockingly abrupt conclusion.

"The Sopranos" received 15 Primetime Emmy nominations, including nods for best dramatic series and for performances by James Gandolfini, Edie Falco and three other principal cast members.

HBO already was a big winner before Sunday's broadcast, having garnered 15 Emmys during the Creative Arts Emmy Awards last week. NBC finished second, with its programs winning 12 Creative Arts Awards. The network's winners included Elaine Stritch for guest actress in a comedy series for her role as Colleen Donaghy, the mother of Alec Baldwin's Jack Donaghy, on "30 Rock."

At this time last year "30 Rock" was the forgotten twin to the highly promoted NBC series "Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip." That show barely made it though the season, while "30 Rock" turned into a critical hit and was competing on Sunday for best comedy series. "Studio 60" did win one acting award, for John Goodman, who won for guest actor in a drama series for his role as Judge Robert Bebe.

Among the multiple winners, "Broken Trail," a cowboy saga on the AMC cable channel, won for best mini-series and took two additional awards for acting. Robert Duvall won for lead actor in a mini-series or movie for "Broken Trail" and Thomas Haden Church won for supporting actor for that mini-series.

"Monk," which has won Tony Shalhoub several Emmys for best actor in a comedy series, received another for guest actor, awarded to Stanley Tucci. Leslie Caron won for guest actress in a drama series for "Law & Order: Special Victims Unit."

The Primetime Emmys were being presented in an unusual format, with Fox transforming the staid Shrine Auditorium into a theater-in-the-round. The format was intended to play to the strengths of Mr. Seacrest, who is also host of television's biggest hit, "American Idol," which not coincidentally is also broadcast by Fox.

Neither a comedian, an actor nor a singer, Mr. Seacrest differs from many of the previous Primetime Emmy hosts. But he is known for keeping a weekly live television show running on time, a feat that can do more to win the enthusiasm of the sometimes jaded Hollywood audience than a monologue of predictable jokes.

Mr. Seacrest said he was looking forward to being close to the stage in case "American Idol" finally won an Emmy for best reality-competition show.

"American Idol" has not gone totally without recognition, however. At the Creative Arts ceremony, it received the 2007 Governors Award from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, which organizes the Emmys, for its "Idol Gives Back" charity special. The broadcast raised $75 million to assist children and young people living in extreme poverty in the United States and in Africa.

Broken Trail is a June 2006 Emmy Award winning revisionist Western miniseries that originally aired on American Movie Classics as their first original movie. It stars Robert Duvall and Thomas Haden Church, and was directed by Walter Hill.

The screenplay for Broken Trail was written by Alan Geoffrion, who also wrote the novel of the same name. (ISBN 1555916058, Fulcrum Publishing, June 2006). Novelist and screenwriter Alan Geoffrion weaves together two facts ― British were buying horses in the American West in the late 1800s and Chinese women were being transported from the West Coast to the interior to serve as prostitutes ― along with a series of Western vignettes.

Contents
1 Plot summary
2 Cast
3 Reception
4 Emmy nominations
5 References
6 External links



[edit] Plot summary
Set in 1898, the film concerns Prentice "Print" Ritter (Duvall), an aging cowboy who wants to buy a ranch of his own. To accomplish this, he agrees to transport 500 mustangs from Oregon to Wyoming, where he will sell them to the British Army. He recruits his estranged nephew, Tom Harte (Church), to join him, hoping to reconnect with him on the ride.

What starts out as a simple horse drive is complicated when Print and Tom encounter a particularly vile white slaver who is transporting five Chinese women to a lawless mining town, where they will face a life of prostitution and indentured servitude. Compelled to do the right thing, Print and Tom rescue the women and take them in, but as they continue their perilous trek across the frontier, they are tailed by a vicious gang of outlaws sent by the whorehouse madam who originally paid for the women.


[edit] Cast
Robert Duvall as Print Ritter
Thomas Haden Church as Tom Harte
Greta Scacchi as Mrs. Nola Johns
Scott Cooper as Henry "Heck" Gilpin
James Russo as Captain Billy Fender
Rusty Schwimmer as "Big Rump Kate" Becker
Olivia Cheng as Ye Fung
Gwendoline Yeo as Sun Foy
Chris Mulkey as Ed "Big Ears" Bywaters
Donald Fong as Lung Hay
Caroline Chan as Mai Ling
Jadyn Wong as Ghee Moon
Valerie Tian as Ging Wa

[edit] Reception
The miniseries received generally favorable reviews from critics. As of August 7, 2007, the film had a score of 78 out of 100 on Metacritic based on 15 reviews. Charlie McCollum of the San Jose Mercury News called it "the finest purely American TV film to come along in some time."[1] Allison Benedikt of the Chicago Tribune said it was "a gorgeous piece of cinema."[2] Alessandra Stanley of The New York Times said it was "not as well written or compelling as Lonesome Dove, but Mr. Duvall brings an earthy believability to even the most plodding lines."[3] The miniseries received 16 nominations at the 59th Primetime Emmy Awards, having the second most overall nominations. It received one less nomination than another film set in America in the late nineteenth century, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee.