"Yellowstone" creator Sheridan is the King of the Nouveau Western
The Bosque County cowboy who was a Fort Worth theater kid
Paramount Network has announced that Season 4 of the highly addictive “rope opera” Yellowstone will debut with a two-hour episode Sunday Nov. 7. Then, six weeks later on Paramount + comes Y:1883, another series from Taylor Sheridan, which tells the Yellowstone origin story, with Tim McGraw and Faith Hill as the great-grandparents of Kevin Costner’s John Dutton. In-between those series debuts Mayor of Kingstown, a power family drama in a Michigan prison town. Texas native Sheridan also created that one, starring Jeremy Renner. He didn’t start writing scripts until his early '40s, but Sheridan’s keyboard has been golden the past six years. He’s like an old West wordsmith: Aaron Sorghum.
This profile of the writer-director is longer than the one that ran in the Jan. 2021 issue of Texas Highways.
Taylor Made: The Central Texas Roots of “Yellowstone”
“There’s no shortage of rattlesnakes in Bosque County,” says Taylor Sheridan, co-creator of the Paramount Network series Yellowstone, the highest-rated cable TV show of 2020. “I don’t know how I never got bit. Now I’ve gotta find wood to knock on because we’ve got a scene with some rattlesnakes tomorrow.”
Yellowstone is set on a Montana ranch that’s “the size of Rhode Island,” according to the show’s ruthless patriarch, John Dutton (Kevin Costner). But the roots of the gripping contemporary Western can be traced to a 214-acre ranch near the town of Cranfills Gap, 54 miles west of Waco. That’s where Sheridan, who writes and directs the series, learned to ride horses, shoot guns, and make movies in his head. He named his production company Bosque Ranch to remember where he comes from.
“I’m deeply influenced by where I grew up and how I grew up,” says Sheridan, speaking by phone from the set in Montana, where he was wrapping up filming of the fourth season of Yellowstone. The cliff-hanging season three finale drew 7.6 million viewers, so anticipation is high and letdown anxiety a concern, but Sheridan has been automatic since creating the “neo-Western” film trilogy of Sicario (2015), Hell or High Water (2016), and Wind River (2017), a run that had Esquire declare him “our generation’s greatest Western storyteller” in 2018.
“We didn’t depend on our ranch for income,” continues Sheridan, whose father was a cardiologist in Fort Worth. “But it’s where I learned how to become a cowboy.”
His mentor was Marcus Munden , who owned a ranch a couple miles away. “One day he was talking to another rancher when he saw someone had dumped a trash bag on the side of the road. He said ‘Taylor, go get that bag’ and I ran over and got it.” The other rancher was so impressed he offered Taylor a job working on his ranch for a summer at $400 a month. “He said, ‘I don’t know how good you’re on a horse, but I could use somebody who does what he’s told without complaining.” The 14-year-old had his first job.
His mother, Susan Gibler Drew, grew up in Waco, and her sanctuary was her grandparents’ ranch near Bosqueville. She wanted her children to similarly “have an opportunity to learn firsthand about the peaceful feeling of freedom in nature,” she says. The family bought the Cranfills Gap ranch in 1978, when Sheridan was 8, sister Catherine was 9 and his brother, John Gibler, a noted Mexico-based journalist, was 5. The family would drive the 85 miles from Fort Worth on weekends, holidays, and summers.
“Back then, the Gap had a hardware store, a grocery store, a feed store, and a fillin’ station,” Sheridan says. “And that’s about it. We were pretty isolated on the ranch. We’d get excited when the propane man would come to fill the tank.” Otherwise, the only other voices they’d hear would be on the phone’s party line.
The Gibler spread was part of a Norwegian settlement comprised of the family’s 1870 stone house, which is listed in the National Register of Historic Places, and 14 other 19th-century homes built on a ridge above “Little Norway,” which includes the town of Norse. The ranch is a couple miles up a dirt road from the area’s most popular tourist attraction, St. Olaf’s Kirke, better known as “The Rock Church” for its intricate stone masonry. Built by Norwegian immigrants in 1886, the landmark was beautifully restored in 2010 and is open to the public.
The church was a place of mischief for Sheridan when he was about 12 or 13. “Me and a couple friends liked to sneak upstairs to the organ and wait for visitors. When someone came in, I’d wait a minute and then play a really dramatic chord,” he says, laughing at the memory of tourists running out of the “haunted” church. Told there’s now a locked gate protecting the organ, Sheridan says, “That’s probably because of us.”
Sheridan’s first horse was named Comanche for the Native Americans whose presence in the Gap predated the Norwegians by thousands of years. The 1970 discovery of a Paleoindian burial site in Bosque County made the area a focus for archeologists. “We always had folks from the University of Texas digging around on the ranch,” says Sheridan, who found not only Native American arrowheads and tools, but an ancient pistol, still loaded. The artifacts fueled Taylor’s imagination, as did a bit of local lore.
In 1867, Comanches kidnapped 14-year-old Ole Nystel in the upper settlement of the Gap and held him for three months. “We all knew that story,” says Sheridan, whose interest in Native Americans is found in several of his screenplays, especially his directorial debut, Wind River, a crime story set on a reservation in Wyoming.
The Norwegian influence is still felt in the Gap (pop. 281), though the Viking Theater on Main Street hasn’t shown a movie since 1941. The old mohair and wool-weighing station is still where it was in the ’70s, when the fields were full of angora goats. But after mohair prices plummeted due to fashion shifts, the scale today is merely a curiosity inside the Horny Toad. The former feed store, which became a bar and grill in 2006, is famous for its chicken quesadillas, not lutefisk and boiled potatoes. That traditional dish is served at the Cranfills Gap school cafeteria on the first Saturday of December, in conjunction with Bosque County’s “Norwegian Country Christmas.”
During his high school years, in the late ’80s, Sheridan lived a dual identity that would merge in his adult life. He was that rare weekend wrangler who was also a theater kid at Paschal High in Fort Worth. “We had a drama teacher, Susan Williams, who was a real force of nature,” he says. Williams had plenty of females for her plays but had to hunt for males to fill out the cast. “I was on the football team, but always hurt, and she said ‘You’re never going to make it to the NFL, but you might be able to have a career in acting.’” Taylor was hooked from his first play, the musical Grease, and from then on he split time between roper and trouper.
At 16, he auditioned for the Stage West production of Piaf and got a part. “The play was held over and I had to miss some school dances,” he says. “But I was getting paid to act.”
After dropping out of Texas State University, Sheridan moved to Austin and went to a shopping mall looking for a job. There was a booth sponsored by a modeling agency looking for young talent. With Sheridan’s ruggedly handsome looks, they offered to represent him as a model. He said he wanted to act instead, and they helped him in that regard, getting him a commercial in Chicago. Sheridan cashed in his plane ticket and drove his pickup 2,000 miles instead. “I did the math and figured it would be cheaper to drive.” Plus, he’d have his pickup.
A few more commercials led to a move to New York and, eventually Los Angeles, where he scrambled his birth name Sheridan Taylor Gibler Jr. to become the more screen-worthy “Taylor Sheridan.” He was scraping by with small roles, including Danny Boyd in season 2 of Veronica Mars in 2005. He also picked up a new rodeo obsession. “There was no cattle on the West Coast,” he says, “so I started reining,” which is basically training a horse to spin, slide and moonwalk like Michael Jackson. Sheridan finally made his mark in Hollywood three years later, playing the no-nonsense deputy police chief in the hit FX series Sons of Anarchy. But when he asked for a raise after two seasons, the writers killed him off.
It wasn’t long, however, before Sheridan was doing the killing off. He took to screenwriting in his early 40s because, he says, “I’d read so many bad scripts as an actor, I knew what not to do.” And he hated the phony way the West was usually portrayed. “I was burned out on L.A., but I still wanted to make movies and the only way you can do that and live somewhere else is to write screenplays,” he says. Sheridan bought a screenwriting program for his computer and started working on Hell Or High Water, which was his first script, though the film was made after Sicario, which was informed by his journalist brother’s work covering the cartels in Mexico.
Sheridan leaned on life experiences, as noted in the diner scene in Hell or High Water, starring Jeff Bridges. The surly waitress takes the order from Bridges and his partner, by asking, “What don’t you want?” It was a fixed-menu place where the only decision was to not have the corn or not have the green beans. “That actually happened to me and my father when we ate at a West Texas diner when I was about 19,” Sheridan says.
The Bridges character was inspired by Taylor’s mother’s cousin Parnell McNamara, a retired U.S. marshal recently re-elected McLennan County Sheriff. “Taylor showed an interest in law enforcement growing up,” says McNamara, “but he was just born for that ranch. He was really upset when his mom sold it.”
Sheridan’s screenplay for Hell or High Water, about a pair of brothers taking desperate measures to save their family’s West Texas farm, was nominated for an Oscar. Holding on to your land is a constant Sheridan theme.
“There’s something to being on a ranch where you’re solely responsible for everything around you,” reflects Sheridan, who turned 52 in July. “The ranch becomes a part of you.”
“When you write, it’s always of an autobiographical nature,” he says. “Our family ranch has informed Yellowstone in many ways, but losing it was the biggest one.” While TV’s Dutton family turns to violence and intimidation to hold onto its territory, the Gibler ranch was sold in 1991, after Sheridan’s parents divorced and Taylor was away in college. “I don’t think Taylor spoke to me for a year,” says mother Susan, who decided she couldn’t run the ranch by herself after her husband married his nurse.
Sheridan thinks about the feelings attached to his family’s old spread when he writes the show he pitched to Paramount as “The Godfather on the biggest ranch in the country.” The Corleones of Cattle make for an addictive high drama in the Big Sky Country, but the show also hits home with those raised in rural communities because of its authenticity.
Sheridan remains an avid equestrian who’d rather go to horse shows and rodeos than the movies, as would his wife, Nicole Muirbrook. The Utah-raised model and actress and her husband ride reining and cutting horses on the new family ranch in Weatherford, an hour west of Fort Worth. Sheridan is also part of a buyer group that recently bought the 266,000-acre Ranch 6666, between Lubbock and Amarillo. Was there any chance the Sheridans wouldn’t raise their son, Gus, named after a character in Lonesome Dove, on a Texas ranch?
“Everybody wants to be a cowboy,” Sheridan says. “It’s a romantic way of life. But it’s rarely portrayed realistically in Westerns. We want to show the real cowboy life.”
RIP: Sheridan Taylor Gibler Sr. died at 80 in May. Here’s the obit.
I enjoyed this article although I've never seen any of the Yellowstone programs. It's interesting (and telling?) that no children were mentioned in that obituary...