A long time ago I bought for the princely sum of £100 (that was a lot to me then !) the film/tv rights for one year to all the stories about the wild west that had been published in a local folk history publication called The Black Country Bugle. My Mum used to buy the magazine when I was a kid and I became fascinated by the Editor's many fanciful and exciting stories about outlaws, preachers, ranchers and gangs in the bad old Wild West who he contended all had connections in the Black Country (it's not Birmingham in case you were wondering). For example John Wesley Hardin, 'Bad Roy' Hill and the Sutton-Taylor gangs who fought a long running feud in Texas in the 1800s which he wrote had begun in 'Mud City' - which is todays modern (or arguably not so modern) village of Lye (it's near Stourbridge). The editor was convinced they were all true - and I really wanted to believe they were. As he said when you watch a Western movie they say "hoss" and not horse so that's like the slang of the local Black Country dialect. And so I set off on an odyssey across the United States for 4 weeks - having persuaded an English producer that this was a fantastic subject for a film - the idea being I would meet experts (including the Outlaw Hunters), academics, visit the actual locations where the stories were set; from Washington to Tennessee to Chicago to Texas and eventually to LA where I was to meet the English producer who was arranging a meeting with a big time Hollywood producer so I could pitch the story...

...To Be Continued...