Estevez

My point is, people act like they care about accuracy when complaining about how old the Kid looks in the film, but no one ever complains about Garrett's age. Why are people complaining about historical accuracy if they haven't actually done much reading about the real history?

There's actually a lot more info about Garrett's life than the Kid's. We have no idea where the Kid was born or even what his real name is (Could be Henry McCarty or could be William Henry McCarty, but for years it was accepted fact that he was born with the name William Bonney). Before his death, the Kid himself told a census taker that he was 26 years old. Most agree that he was 21, but there's no certainty about that.

Paulita Maxwell said that Garrett & the Kid were "like two peas in a pod", she might have been lying, but John P. Meadows, a friend of Garrett's and the Kid's, said Garrett told the Kid to leave the territory over a card game (much like in the film).

As for Alias, he's mentioned in Pat Garrett's book on Billy the Kid, co-written with Ash Upson in 1882 (a year after the Kid's death), on page 14: Billy's partner doubtless had a name which was his legal property, but he was so given to changing it that it was impossible to fix on the right one. Billy always called him 'Alias.'

Alias also wasn't written for Dylan. He's in Wurlitzer's script long before Dylan was attached. He's an itchy, nervous stutterer, and though Dylan didn't do the stuttering, he got the itchiness down pretty good.

Bo Hopkins was considered, but the studio didn't think he was a big enough star. The guy Peckinpah really wanted for Billy was Jon Voight, who wanted to work with Peckinpah. For some reason that didn't work out. I can't remember if it was a scheduling conflict or just miscommunication. Voight would have been a perfect mix of youthfulness and weariness. I think Kristofferson is great in the film, but he wasn't able to build on a somewhat underwritten part, at least not in the way Voight would have. I think the deepness of his voice also makes people less willing to accept him as the Kid. I know that Peckinpah was trying to show an outlaw that is at the end of his rope, so I accept an older actor (a 21 yr old wouldn't get that weariness across). This is because Peckinpah was enamored with a brilliant fictionalization of the Kid called The Authentic Death of Hendry Jones that portrays the outlaw as a burn-out. Peckinpah wrote a really good adaptation of the novel in the 1950s. His draft was thrown out and that film ended up being One-Eyed Jacks, which had little to do with the book. Peckinpah then used pieces of his Hendry Jones script when rewriting Rudy Wurlitzer's Pat Garrett screenplay.



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