Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is coming to television, so get your cowboy hat and six-shooter ready. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Scott Steindorff and Dylan Russell’s Stone Village Television bought the rights to Charles Leerhsen’s Butch Cassidy book, Butch Cassidy: The True Story of an American Outlaw, after a bidding war with a few other buyers. As of right now, it’s unclear to whom Stone Village intends to sell the program; however, they have stated that they intend to self-finance the production before making a decision.
The studio has also stated that the show will be produced for an international audience, including Latin American and European sources and production to create a series that will appeal to both North American and Latin American consumers. Butch Cassidy will be followed across the United States and into Latin America in this series, which will conclude in Bolivia. This decision was made, according to Steindorff, to keep the series in accordance with Leerhsen’s account of the infamous historical character and to present the story that “needed to be told.”
“Much of the book and the adventures of The Sundance Kid (Cassidy’s partner Harry Longabaugh) and the ‘Wild Bunch’ gang takes place in South America. During that time period, Butch Cassidy and his gang were more well-known there than in North America. This isn’t just an American Western story, but a Latin American story, and it needs to be told. There are so many aspects of this story that will excite the audiences of today.”
If you’re worried about the impending series because of the 1969 Paul Newman and Robert Redford rendition of the Butch Cassidy narrative, don’t be. It appears to be in very good hands. Stone Village is currently working on two projects: HBO’s Station Eleven and a television adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. In addition, author Leerhsen believes Steindorff is “uniquely prepared to investigate the Butch Cassidy narrative as a TV series” because he is a lifetime lover of the story and a friend of Paul Newman.
“He’s been a lifelong fan of the movie and was a colleague and friend to Paul Newman, who to many people is Butch. But beyond that he is as excited as I was to discover that the movie, as great as it was, left out some of the most intriguing parts of Butch and Sundance’s great adventure. Scott is drawn to the fact that there’s so much untapped drama and romance in the true tale — as well as a mind-blowing finale that the Hollywood of 50-something years ago felt it just couldn’t handle. He’s as at-home with my book and its characters as Butch Cassidy was on the Outlaw Trail.”
