FREE LIVE ONLINE: Emmy Winning Mark Archuleta & the Bank Robber Henry Starr

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Mark Archuleta is an Emmy-winning screenwriter, journalist, and performer. A fifth-generation Coloradoan of Spanish Basque descent, he grew up steeped in the history of the American West and the colorful characters who inhabited it. Archuleta loves exploring how historical fact is refracted through the prism of film and television.

In this interview he will be talking about his book The Reel Thrilling Events of the Bank Robber Henry Starr, From Gentleman Bandit to Movie Star and Back Again. This passion project began as just another screenplay, but years of research turned into an exceptional biography of a Hollywood matinee idol who turned out to be the greatest bank robber of the horseback bandit era.

Born in 1872, Cherokee outlaw Henry Starr had survived shootouts and death sentences and lived long enough to witness the invention of moving pictures. In 1919, after Starr was released from the Oklahoma State Penitentiary, a hotshot movie producer convinced him he had the looks, charisma, and “wild and woolly” life story to become the next big movie star. When filming began in 1920, powerful organizations aligned to censor Starr, attempting to prevent him from exposing Oklahoma’s corrupt legal system and the government’s mistreatment of the Cherokee. The Women’s Christian Temperance Union pressured theater owners to ban his film, state and federal lawmakers drafted legislation to stymie theatrical distribution, and police and district attorneys threatened to send him back to prison.

Starr’s only film, the biographical movie A Debtor to the Law, is lost to history, but through surviving memorabilia, newspaper accounts, and interviews with people who worked with him on set, author Mark Archuleta traces how the reformed Gentleman Bandit attempted to use the power of cinema to reframe his life story and redeem himself in the eyes of the public, his family, and the Cherokee Nation.

The Reel Thrilling Events of Bank Robber Henry Starr is about more than heists and Hollywood glamor. Starr’s journey is about the American myth of reinvention, recidivism, and the founding of the motion picture industry when racial tensions were simmering to a boil.

This is the perfect event for writers, screenwriters, and producers. We’ll discuss:

• Why the research writers do for their projects often belongs in books, documentaries, and podcasts.
• Why the entertainment industry now relies so heavily on writers to prove the value of their work by finding a market before big dollars are invested in an option or purchase.
• Why screenwriters are great at writing books, and how their skills in characterization, tight prose, and story pacing really pay off in fiction and non-fiction books.

Mark will discuss his work as a screenwriter, his process in turning years of research into an excellent book, and his marketing strategies for getting the word out to those who love tales of the Wild West, old Hollywood, Native American History, and the turbulent melting pot that has always defined the United Stages.