Wild West Innovation

Abstract

see, in this world there's two kinds of people, my friend: Those with loaded guns and those who You dig. Clint Eastwood, The Good, the Bad and the UglyThe Western movie has been a part of American culture for over a century, almost since the invention of the movie projector. Such an established form of entertainment would seem to be outside the need for business innovation. But it is precisely because the genre is so well trodden that innovation has always been an essential ingredient, producing new plots and new leading that keep the genre fresh.The plot and hero of the western movie have been in constant evolution, with a number of very clear disruptors that shifted the entire genre, punctuating decades of incremental change. Just as the hero of many a Western film rode into town and overturned the established power brokers, new actors regularly rode into Hollywood and changed the established hierarchy of the Western movie business. These changes on the screen and on the back lot are characteristic of the disruption that inno vation cowboys like Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg have had on established markets. And today's innovators can take some important lessons from these silver screen disruptors.Western InnovationWorld famous innovator Thomas Edison is widely known as the creator of many of the technologies that led to the motion picture projector, but few know that he also owned the Edison Manufacturing Company, which produced and distributed movies to create commercial demand for the projector. His company created 1,200 films, beginning with short clips and moving on to full-length movies. Some of its earliest hit titles were The Life of an American Cowboy (1902) and The Great Train Robbery (1903), two of the first Western movies ever made ( Matthews 1984 ). In the years that followed, producers and actors created various images of the cowboy hero to appeal to the general public, making cultural icons of men like Bronco Billy Anderson, the star of the The Great Train Robbery, who appeared in 466 short films between 1902 and 1922, and Bill Hart, who brought a range-rough image that included shooting up the bad guys and hard drinking to 74 films from 1907 to 1925. Both of these stars were created from the rough clay of their own personalities and their own ideas about what a cowboy was and did. With more than 500 movies carrying their images to the American public, they created the Hollywood version of this American hero.But this image has never been set in stone, secure against change. Rather, the cowboy image has been open to regular re-creation, innovation, and disruption. New actors brought new styles to the screen, unseating reigning stars and redefining the Western. Hart's rough-clothed cowboy just offthe range was unseated by the newcomer Tom Mix, a clean-shaven, fancy-dressed cowboy who preferred to rope the bad guys rather than shoot them dead. Mix created the dandy cowboy, a wellgroomed, clean-living hero who looked good on the screen but was a far reach from Hart's range cowboy.Mix ' s career was in its latter years when a notable extra appeared on the set of The Great K&A Train Robbery (1926)-a football player from the University of Southern California who looked and acted the part of a strong onscreen cowboy. John Ford, the director of the film, invited Marion Morrison, or Duke, as he was known to friends, to appear in several movies and eventually cast him as the lead in The Big Trail (1930) under his new Hollywood name, John Wayne. Wayne did not wear fancy rhinestone suits, polished silver, or spotless chaps. His image was reminiscent of Bill Hart's rough range cowboy but without the violent vices. This update of the roughand-ready cowboy became the face of the Western for the next 30 years.But there was room for more than one type of cowboy on the silver screen. The 1940s saw the introduction of an innovative new idea in Western entertainment: the singing cowboy. …