Following up on Butch Cassidy

Mateo Gil, Sam Shepard and Magnolia's Eamonn Bowles bring back Butch. "I don't have a career, I have a life," Sam Shepard declared Thursday at the Manhattan Cinema 2 preem of "Blackthorn," wherein the scribe-thesp brings Butch Cassidy back to life. "I'm a writer primarily and then everything else is around that." Does he ever write something and then play it onstage? "I have and it's a huge mistake and I will never do it again," Shepard said, laughing. Magnolia Pictures' "Blackthorn" is set in Bolivia decades after Cassidy and the Sundance Kid's supposed demise, and tells what happens when the aged bandit decides to go back home. "It's just an excuse to talk about some old heroes and old values that we wanted to do," helmer Mateo Gil said at the Desmond's after-party. The potency of the subject was reinforced, Gil said, when his Bolivian producer got a call while they were filming there. "This guy said, 'I'm a grandson of the Sundance Kid. He survived and lived in Bolivia for many years and I'm his grandson.' We don't know if it's true or not." But it would make a good "Blackthorn" sequel. Contact the Variety newsroom at news@variety.com

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