Didn’t Butch Cassisy die in 1908? Well, not according to a new film that’s in the works. Despite the famous gunfight freeze-frame at the end of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, the planned movie, currently titled Blackthorn and referred to by Variety as a ‘reprise’ of Cassidy’s legend, will suggest the outlaw didn’t die in a gunfight in Bolivia, and was still around several years later, going incognito and planning a return to US so that he could retire.
Sam Shepard has been lined up to play Cassidy, while Eduardo Noriega (Vantage Point) will be a trigger-happy cowboy who loses the outlaw’s life savings, which forces Butch into one big final job, a mine heist (didn’t you just know that was coming). Also starring is Steven Rea, as a railroad employee who’s still trying to track Cassidy down to kill him. Backed by Spanish company Arcadia, the low-budget movie will start filming in Spain and Bolivia in the spring.
Although the traditional view is that Butch Cassidy was indeed gunned down in 1908, there’s been much speculation since then that he survived. At the time of his supposed death, making a positive indenitfication of the body was difficult, and while the Bolivian authorities said they’d killed the people responsible for a payroll robbery, at the time they couldn’t confirm the real indenities of the bandits, although it was presumed to be Butch and Sundance. There were later claims by people such as his sister, that Butch had indeed survived and returned to the US to live in anonymity, although this has never been proven. Whatever the truth, it certainly allows for a interesting mining of the outlaw’s legend with Blackthorn.