Hollywood Flashback: ‘Dances With Wolves’ Rewrote Westerns 30 Years Ago

Back in the mid-1980s, Kevin Costner shopped a spec script called Dances With Wolves around town, but Hollywood wasn’t buying. Westerns were mostly extinct thanks to the 1980 debacle Heaven’s Gate. But in 1988, Costner — then 33 and a major star after turns in The Untouchables and Bull Durham — convinced Orion Pictures to fund his first directorial effort.

It was the Civil War story of a Union soldier (played by Costner) stationed on the Western frontier, where he befriends and is accepted by a Sioux tribe. Graham Greene, who earned an Oscar nom for playing medicine man Kicking Bird, the adoptive father of white tribeswoman Stands With a Fist (Mary McDonnell), remembers being blown away by Michael Blake’s screenplay.

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“I went, ‘Holy wow. This is really nice,’ ” recalls Greene, 68. “He portrayed Native people as real people, as family. Myself and all the Native actors, we said, ‘We got to play this as family’ — not stoic, non-smiling, non-laughing cliches.”

Also setting the Dances script apart was that most of its dialogue was in Lakota. (Greene and others learned their lines phonetically.) Costner was “as nervous as a cat in a roomful of rocking chairs” to be helming his first film, says Greene. But he proved himself a natural, successfully staging grandiose sequences like the film’s buffalo stampede.

“All the Native elders who were standing there started to cry — because they hadn’t seen a buffalo stampede since they were babies,” says Greene. “It broke my heart.” THR marveled in its review that the “epic-sized, huge-hearted” three-hour film, released Oct. 19, 1990, “de-mythologizes [John] Ford and other westernmakers’ blarney of the U.S. Cavalry, the murderous nature of the Indians and the John Wayne round-’em-up mentality.”

Dances was nominated for 12 Oscars and won seven, including best picture and director. It grossed $424 million worldwide ($844 million today) and launched a Western movie renaissance.

This story first appeared in the Nov. 2 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.