The Power of a Savage Typewriter

Thomas Savage, author of The Power of the Dog, used for much of his writing career a “huge, old, glossy black” Remington Noiseless, the “huge” suggesting a standard size model. He bought it in the autumn of 1936. The typewriter is described by Savage’s son Russell Yearian Savage (1943-) in Oliver Alan Weltzien’s 2020 biography of Thomas Savage, Savage West. Weltzien adds that “Later Savage replaced [the big black] Remington [Noiseless]  with a tangerine orange typewriter …” The possibilities as to what this may have been range from a Triumph Tippa to a Consul-Optima (such as Nobel Prize laureate Patrick White used), an Olivetti Lettera 82 to a Hermes Baby, an Olympia Traveller to a Adler Contessa. Or maybe even an ABC or a Silver-Reed. We may never know.

I’ve lost count of the times in the past 50 odd years that I’ve driven across New Zealand’s Southern Alps, between my home town of Greymouth and the Canterbury Plains and back, looked across at the steep, barren rocky outcrops along the way and thought, “That’d be a great place to film a Western.” Someone else has got there before me, having obviously cottoned on to the same idea. And now we have the movie that’s all the rage around the civilised world.

The New Zealand-made Western The Power of the Dog is actually set in mid-1920s Montana but was filmed in the Maniototo in Central Otago, a southern part of New Zealand’s vast alpine regions. One giveway are the uniquely Australian magpies in a tree. Yet this is a universal story. The “psychological drama” was written and directed by New Zealander Jane Campion, who gave us The Piano and the Janet Frame biopic An Angel at My Table. The Power of the Dog is based on Thomas Laman Savage's 1967 novel of the same name and stars Benedict Cumberbatch, Kirsten Dunst, Jesse Plemons and Kodi Smit-McPhee. It had its world premiere at the Venice International Film Festival last September and won Campion won the Silver Lion for Best Direction. It was released worldwide on Netflix in November and is regarded as one of the best films of 2021 by multiple top-10 lists. It has received 12 nominations for the Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director for Campion, Best Actor for Cumberbatch, Best Supporting Actor for both Plemons and Smit-McPhee and Best Supporting Actress for Dunst. It also received seven nominations at the Golden Globe Awards, winning Best Motion Drama, Best Supporting Actor for Smit-McPhee and Best Director for Campion.

LIFE, May 17, 1948

Campion was quoted as saying, “I was actually thinking of retiring before I did this film, but then I thought, ‘Oh man, this is gonna be a big one.’ I’d read the book and loved it and afterwards I just kept thinking about it. When I made a move to find out who had the rights, that’s when I knew it had got me. I needed to do it.” What wasn’t mentioned is that the screen rights to the novel The Power of the Dog were originally held by Cornel Wilde (1912-89; real name Kornél Lajos Weisz), the Hungarian-born actor and filmmaker. Wilde had just produced, directed and starred in The Naked Prey, a film made in Zimbabwe and based on a true incident about a trapper named John Colter being pursued by Blackfeet Indians in Wyoming. Instead of The Power of the Dog, however, Wilde made Beach Red, a World War II film depicting a landing by the United States Marine Corps on an Japanese-held Pacific island and based on Peter Bowman's 1945 novella about Bowman’s experiences with the United States Army Corps of Engineers in the Pacific War. By 1982 the screen rights to The Power of the Dog had changed hands more three times. It was to be five times by 2001. In 1982 Van Vactor & Goodheart had regained the paperback rights, and it had completed a screenplay, planning to turn Power of the Dog into a television miniseries. Van Vactor & Goodheart’s paperback edition came out in 1983.

The Back Bay-Little, Brown paperback edition was published in 2001 and included an afterword from Annie Proulx, who in 1997 wrote the original short story "Brokeback Mountain" for The New Yorker (the screenplay was co-written by Hermes 3000 typewriter-wielding Larry McMurty). Calling tbe book a work of literary art, Proulx said, “The Power of the Dog was published in 1967 by Little, Brown in Boston after Thomas Savage’s editor at Random House asked for changes that the writer refused to make. It earned extremely good reviews, stayed on The New York Times ‘New and Recommended’ list for nearly two months, was five times optioned for a film (which was never made). It is … unusual in dealing with a topic rarely discussed in that period - repressed homosexuality displayed as homophobia in the masculine ranch world.” Proulx is said to have credited The Power of the Dog as an influence on Brokeback Mountain.

Thomas Savage as a baby.

Boston Globe, May 9, 1948

Boston Globe, April 28, 1948.

Thomas Laman Savage was born in Salt Lake City on April 25, 1915. His parents divorced when he was two and he moved with his mother to a ranch near Lemhi, Idaho. When his mother remarried in 1920, Savage moved with her to a cattle ranch in Beaverhead County, Montana. In 1932 Savage graduated from Beaverhead County High School and went on to study writing at Montana State College. He married Elizabeth Fitzgerald on September 15, 1939. The couple lived briefly in Chicago before moving back to Montana in 1942. A year later they settled in Massachusetts, where Savage taught at Suffolk University in Boston and Brandeis University in Waltham. By 1955 Savage was able to leave Brandeis and devote himself to writing full-time. The Savages bought a home in Georgetown, Maine, where they remained for nearly 30 years. In 1982 the Savages built a home on Whidbey Island in Puget Sound. Elizabeth died in 1989. Savage lived briefly in Seattle and San Francisco, before moving to Virginia Beach, Virginia. He died there on July 25, 2003, aged 88.

Elizabeth Savage as a young mother.