At home in the big country: Nancy Silverstone. Photo: James Glader

Go West, Young Woman

One day, Nancy Silverstone, J89, was sitting at her desk at Starz Entertainment, the Colorado-based cable network, when the phone rang. The caller had a request from an old cowboy named Monte Hale, who had been a singing star, a baby-faced hero in films like Under Colorado Skies and Along the Oregon Trail, in which he subdued bad guys between ballads.

Hale was now in his eighties, and wanted to know if Silverstone, in her capacity as vice president of acquisitions and film evaluations for the network’s 16 channels, had shown any of his old movies on the Encore Westerns channel. The man who’d starred alongside Roy Rogers, who’d taught James Dean rope tricks, didn’t even have copies of his own movies, which he wanted his grandkids to see.

“Our Westerns channel is one of our biggest channels,” says Silverstone, who lives under Colorado skies herself (that’s where she met her husband a few years ago, on a canoe trip, and where the two are now raising their year-old daughter). “It’s part of our heritage. It’s part of our culture. Especially being in Denver, which was the heart of the Wild West, I feel like it’s still here.”

Westerns are also part of what built Hollywood—a massive industry back when Hopalong Cassidy could move a million jackknives in 10 days, when Davy Crockett could sell 4 million albums and 14 million books. More than 3,300 Westerns were made between 1930 and the late 1970s, and at the genre’s peak, in the late 1950s, there were 28 Western series on prime time, including 7 in the top 10 shows. That means there’s no shortage of material for Silverstone to keep her big channel stocked in 10-gallon hats.

The challenge, rather, is finding and restoring lost gems, like the old black cowboy films from the 1930s, many of which have vanished or been destroyed. It’s a quest that takes Silverstone to film festivals and film markets, as well as to private archives and libraries. And over the years, she has struck some real gold.

“The Gene Autry library had never been seen before,” says Silverstone. “That kind of came out of nowhere. The Hopalong Cassidy library came out of nowhere as well. But typically at this stage, if a studio or a distributor doesn’t have it, it’s lost in someone’s attic. I’ll bet there are still some finds out there, waiting to be discovered.”

Of course, not all Westerns are antiques. Hollywood still turns them out now and then, be they revisionist projects like Dances with Wolves or modern classics like Unforgiven, or hopeless bombs like the straight-to-video Gang of Roses (starring Bobby Brown and Lil’ Kim), which one viewer called “Gunfight at the Hokey Corral.” Encore Westerns shows them all.

The trail to Starz Entertainment was fairly straightforward for a young film buff armed with a Tufts degree in international relations. Living in New York after graduation, Silverstone found herself pining for the thrill of her college travels: crossing the Berlin Wall, climbing medieval towers in Italy, sitting in a café in Yugoslavia as a man told her about the coming civil war. She found a job at a foreign-film distributor. “It was the best of all worlds,” she says. “I was in New York. I was in international business. And I was in film. I’ve always loved film. It’s such an expression of what’s going on around us.”

Later, after earning an M.B.A. from the University of Chicago, Silverstone took a job in acquisitions at HBO. It was there, in 1998, that she was approached by Starz Entertainment, which offered to make her director of acquisitions. She hitched up her wagon and headed west to start acquiring rights to movies for Encore Westerns and its sister channels (devoted to mystery, comedy, African-American, and other themes). She didn’t know she’d also be answering requests from old cowboys.

Silverstone did track down some of Monte Hale’s films and mailed him copies. In return, he sent a sweet handwritten thank-you, along with an autographed studio photo of himself and other legends of his day. “I framed the letter and photo to remind me of a genre of films that helped build the industry I work in, and the type of actors who worked in a system that doesn’t really exist anymore,” Silverstone says. “It helps ground me when things get crazy in the office.”

FRANK BURES, whose writing has appeared in Wired, Mother Jones, and The Best American Travel Writing 2004, is the books editor for WorldHum.com. He hangs his hat in Madison, Wisconsin.