BREAKING MOVIE/TV NEWS

Tuesday, November 08, 2011

CBS Rebooting "The Rifleman" ?



CBS Television Studios plans to revive co-creator Sam Peckinpah's TV western "The Rifleman" for executive producer, director Chris Columbus, based on the classic 1958 western series of the same name, focusing on an adult 'Mark McCain', the son of 'Lucas McCain', who takes up his late father's proficiency with a gun:


In the original series, Civil War hero 'Lucas McCain', a sharpshooter and widower with a haunted past, moves to the territory of 'North Fork' to raise his son 'Mark'. There, he joins forces with the fatherly 'Sheriff' to protect his new town and become its unofficial guardian.


Peckinpah ("The Wild Bunch") wrote and directed episodes for the first season of "The Rifleman", basing characters and situations on real-life scenarios from his childhood growing up on a ranch. 


His insistence on violent realism and complex characterizations, as well as his refusal to sugarcoat the lessons he felt the Rifleman's son needed to learn about life, soon put him at odds with the show's producers at Four Star and he left the show, creating the series "The Westerner" and directing western features "Major Dundee" and "The Wild Bunch".


The trick feature of The Rifleman's 'rifle' was a screw pin attached to the large loop lever which was positioned so as to trip the trigger when the ring was slammed home, thus allowing Lucas to rapid-fire the rifle, similarly to a semi-automatic rifle.


McCain fires shots from this rifle during the opening credits, swings the rifle to cock it, then reaches for another round from his shirt pocket.


Click the images to enlarge...