was a hard sell, but he couldn't very well turn it down if the rest of us were doing it. The idea that all the brothers in the story would be played by real-life brothers expanded, and Randy and Dennis Quaid also became attached to the project to play the Miller brothers. James Keach later recalled, "Everyone told me, 'You can't get all these guys together; family devotion is one thing, but this is Hollywood.' We decided to prove how serious we were by having a group picture taken. We did it at midnight in a recording studio where Keith was cutting some numbers. We sent limousines for everyone; it was quite a production." The photograph helped convince NBC to finance Long Riders as a six-hour mini-series. But then Fred Silverman became president of NBC and cancelled all mini-series ordered by his predecessors. "It was all happening while I was on Bora Bora making The Hurricane (1979)," said James. "I spent a lot of time fishing with Tim Zinnemann, who was producing the picture. We became good friends and I told him about The Long Riders." Zinnemann took the project to United Artists, "who were interested in funding the film if a suitable director could be found." Stacy Keach said the gimmick of the brothers playing brothers got the film over the line. Walter Hill Stacy Keach says George Roy Hill "scoffed at the notion" of the brothers casting. Zinnemann showed the script to Walter Hill who agreed to direct. Hill had been working on another film which had fallen through and, as he later said, "I'd been dying to do a Western for years. I just like 'em. There's a kind of an idyllic quality that surrounds the shooting of them, it seems like a more fundamental film process, more to me what movies are about than clearing crowds off a city street." Hill called the film a "strange piece"; Instead of the logical conclusion being at Northfield, it then goes on to another phase of a spiral downward, and ends with Jesse's death. It's very hard material to give the proper dramatic curve to. It doesn't lay out in a classic three-act structure. It's almost a four-act piece with Northfield and the aftermath being the culmination of the third act. The fourth act is almost epilogue: How They Went Down... There's a line from a Jean-Luc Godard film: