The Show for July 30, 2026: Autonomous vehicle safety study, history of Westerns exhibit and more

The introduction of autonomous vehicles on Valley roadways has led to debates about their safety. We’ll find out what a new study can and cannot tell us about that. Plus, an exhibit at a Valley museum explores the history of Westerns.

Transcript

ANNOUNCER: KJZZ’s original production, The Show, is supported by Banner Health, Arizona’s largest nonprofit healthcare system. Last year, Banner reinvested more than $1.1 billion in community health and charity care. Banner Health, nonprofit for Arizona. bannerhealth.com/nonprofitforaz.

MARK BRODIE: Hi, I’m Mark Brodie, co-host of The Show, an original production from KJZZ. Every weekday, we bring you the latest news and culture from across the state. You can find much more at theshow.kjzz.org. Here’s today’s episode.

MARK BRODIE: Good morning, it’s The Show here on KJZZ 91.5 in Phoenix. I’m Mark Brodie. Coming up, what new data say about how safe Waymos are on Valley roadways, and we’ll visit an exhibit that showcases the history of Westerns.

But first, Harry Mitchell has died. He was 86 years old. Mitchell served as the mayor of Tempe for 16 years, from 1978 to 1994. During much of that time, he also taught government at his alma mater, Tempe High. After leaving City Hall, Mitchell served in the State Senate and then two terms in Congress. As mayor, he played a major role in developing Tempe Town Lake. In Congress, he was a sponsor of the 21st Century GI Bill and also voted in favor of the Affordable Care Act.

Robbie Sherwood served as district director for Mitchell from 2007 through 2011. He’s currently the communications director for Arizona House Democrats, and he is with me in studio to talk about his former boss.

MARK BRODIE: Robbie, good morning. Thanks for being here.

ROBBIE SHERWOOD: Good morning. Thank you. It’s an honor to be here to talk about Harry.

MARK BRODIE: So, how did it come to be that you worked for him?

ROBBIE SHERWOOD: Well, I had been a journalist at the Arizona Republic for years covering politics. So, I knew him as a state senator there and had a relationship with him there, a professional one.

I didn’t cover his race in 2006, where he was like the "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington" story. He beat the bully, J.D. Hayworth, and defied the odds and won as a Democrat in this Republican-leaning district.

I had left journalism. I had been out for about a year working in public relations. A year after he won, they weren’t expecting to win. So, there was nobody on his campaign staff who knew how to run a congressional office. So, they hired a veteran chief of staff out of retirement. I believe his name was Gene. I’m forgetting his last name. I’m sorry about that.

But he had vowed to work for Harry for one year, get you up and started, show you where the bathrooms are, show you how to run a congressional office, but then I’m leaving. And he kept that promise.

So, a year in, he retired. They promoted Alexis Tameron, who you might know

MARK BRODIE: From running the state Democratic Party for a while.

ROBBIE SHERWOOD: Yeah, from district director to chief of staff, and they were looking around for a district director. And someone suggested maybe they should call me. Thankfully, that happened. It was really a life-changing call for me because it put me directly into Congressman Mitchell’s orbit, and I became part of what I like to call the Mitchell Mafia from that point.

MARK BRODIE: What was it like working for him in that role? Because during the week, of course, he would be in D.C. You would be here. But if memory serves, he came home a lot.

ROBBIE SHERWOOD: Yeah. He was someone who wanted to be home on weekends. So, he flew back almost every weekend unless there was something to keep him in D.C. It wasn’t easy for him or us. If you’re in a competitive congressional district, there’s not really much time off. So, there were events, business tours, Congress on Your Corner events, town halls, media interviews scheduled all day long on Saturday and sometimes on Sundays.

So, it wasn’t always easy for him. It was exhausting. But what he really wanted was to be home and mowing his lawn. That was his happy place, working in his yard, making it beautiful. He was very house proud, this home that he and his wife, Marianne, had moved into when they were married and where he still resided until he passed away.

MARK BRODIE: I would imagine you must have had a lot of conversations in the backseats of cars, going to different events and interviews and things like that. What were those like?

ROBBIE SHERWOOD: Harry would speak to you in stories and anecdotes. When he needed to make a point, there was always a story. And if you heard the story more than once, that was really on you, because apparently you needed to hear it again.

He loved to talk about Tempe and the history of things. He really was an architect for the Tempe that you see today when he was mayor. He would say things in aphorisms like, one I remember, “a city stops growing, then it starts to die.”

He was talking about Tempe. And that was a challenge for Tempe when he was mayor and after, because Tempe didn’t go on this big expansion where they started annexing land the way their neighbors did. They became landlocked. Ahwatukee went to Phoenix, not to Tempe.

So, how then do you keep your city growing and not let it die? Well, he started initiatives to start rehabbing Mill Avenue and turning it into a destination. Old-timers will remember there used to be more biker bars than college bars on Mill Avenue. And he began advocating for Tempe Town Lake and the Rio Salado Project that started and was completed under subsequent mayors. But it started with his vision to create something new in Tempe, and Tempe’s thriving. But it started with that vision under Harry Mitchell.

MARK BRODIE: So Robbie, you had a really nice post on Facebook last night as news of Harry Mitchell’s death started to come out, and you talked about his vote on the Affordable Care Act, which you referenced as a vote that, as you say, all of you knew would cost him his seat and you your jobs.

What was the thought process, what were the conversations like leading up to and after that vote?

ROBBIE SHERWOOD: Well, to take you back to that time, this was the beginning of the Tea Party movement to oppose that vote in particular. And so there was a lot of pressure. There were people outside of our office, lobbying in phone calls, threats sometimes even. So, it was a very intense political environment.

But we were also hearing from other people who had pre-existing conditions and could not be insured and were wanting something to be done. And I think that’s where he was at. He knew that this was a historical vote, that this was our one and perhaps best chance to create some sort of affordable healthcare infrastructure in the country.

He also knew his own political environment. This was, again, as I said, a Democrat in a Republican district. This vote would almost assure that he wouldn’t be reelected a second time.

But he knew it was the right thing to do for the country, and so did our staff. And so, it was the proudest professional moment that I have in my career, and it’s one that he and I shared. And I tend to get very emotional about it.

And we did. We got swept out in a big red wave, similar to the one I hope we see in reverse this November. But we never looked back on it. I think that vote has been vindicated many times over to where Obamacare, the Affordable Care Act, however you want to say it, is now more of a third rail for politicians who mess with it. That’s a good way to lose your job in reverse. So, I think he always understood that and knew that that would be a lasting legacy.

MARK BRODIE: So Robbie, before we let you go, when you think of Harry Mitchell’s legacy and your experiences with him, what will sort of be the enduring thing that comes to mind for you?

ROBBIE SHERWOOD: Anytime that I roll past Tempe Town Lake, I think of Harry. Anytime I walk into a Costco, I think of Harry. That’s his happy place, other than his front yard.

Yeah, he was just such a fixture in this community, and he loved it so much. And it loved him back. So, if you wanted to feel like a celebrity for a moment, like a somebody, just walk into a Costco with Harry Mitchell someday. You’d be there for half the day, forget what you came for, just because he was stopping and talking to people who knew him and wanted to catch up and say hello to him.

So, I just — it’s a way you want to aspire to be. He was in public service for all the right reasons, and he did a really good job at it.

MARK BRODIE: All right, that is Robbie Sherwood. He served as district director for then-Congressman Harry Mitchell. Robbie, thanks so much for being here. Thanks for helping us remember Harry Mitchell.

ROBBIE SHERWOOD: That was my pleasure. Thank you.

MARK BRODIE: There are hundreds of Waymo cars on Valley roadways. The company says it’ll also be returning to freeways after a software upgrade to improve how the cars behave around construction zones. One of the key questions surrounding the autonomous vehicles is: Are they safe? And perhaps more specifically, are they safer than human drivers? Waymo has put out data that suggest they are, and now an independent study seems to largely confirm that.

David Kidd is vice president for vehicle research at the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety and one of the lead authors of the paper. He joins me. David, good morning.

DAVID KIDD: Good morning.

MARK BRODIE: So, is it a fair assessment that what you found in large part kind of mirrors what Waymo has said about the safety of its vehicles?

DAVID KIDD: It is, in large part. Our study, using a different method, found that for Waymo vehicles, they get in 68% fewer crashes than human drivers.

MARK BRODIE: And what are some of the limitations, though? I mean, I know that there are some things that the data really cannot tell us.

DAVID KIDD: So, the way that we did this study is we had to read a whole bunch, nearly a thousand crash narratives. Companies that have automated vehicles on the roadways are required to report crashes — used to be any kind of bump in the road, but now it’s things that cause at least $1,000 in damage or involve vulnerable road users like pedestrians or bicycles — to report it to the government. And so we used those narratives to be able to understand if this is something you or I would report to police so we could compare it to police-reported crashes from human drivers.

MARK BRODIE: And am I right there’s also an issue in terms of trying to figure out like how many miles an autonomous vehicle actually drives, like in terms of getting a sort of a ratio there?

DAVID KIDD: Absolutely. That is the most challenging part of all this. The government does not require these companies to report how many miles their automated vehicles travel. Waymo does it voluntarily. And that allows us to take the number of crashes that they’re involved in and divide it by the number of miles that they’ve driven to derive this rate. And we can compare that rate directly to crashes that we are involved in as humans that we report to police.

MARK BRODIE: So, you reference the 68% fewer crashes per mile that you found, and those are over a few cities, including Phoenix, Austin, LA and San Francisco. But in Phoenix, the number of decline is actually higher: 76% fewer crashes per mile. Any sense of why the data are even better in Phoenix than they are elsewhere?

DAVID KIDD: You know, the one thing that I need to stress is that so we looked at nearly a thousand of these crash narratives. Waymo, we only had 64 narratives that we used from across these different areas. So, to be able to say something definitive about “they operate better in Phoenix than they do in Austin or San Francisco,” we can’t put any strength behind a claim like that. It’s really we’re looking at the bulk of them together, what that means for safety.

MARK BRODIE: OK. What about the severity of the crashes? One of the things that Waymo talks about is the fact that even when there are crashes, the vehicles maybe are going more slowly when they hit somebody or something than a human driver. Did you find anything about the severity of the crashes?

DAVID KIDD: We did look at crashes where there was an injury or reported injury, and we found that for Waymo vehicles, that crash rate of injury crashes was 81% lower than crashes where humans were involved and where there was an injury. So, yeah, one of the things to note that these automated vehicles do if they’re programmed that way, which Waymo certainly does, is they follow speed limits.

They certainly are not impaired, they’re not distracted, and they — obviously being a computer — don’t have to worry about belt use, right? But they force their occupants to wear seatbelts. These are things that us as people, we struggle with. Certainly, we could do better, and that’s where a lot of crash deaths result from.

MARK BRODIE: Is there anything you can draw about trends that you saw in terms of the crashes that Waymos were involved in? Maybe things that the programming struggles with, or particular situations on the roadway that these vehicles struggle with?

DAVID KIDD: I think that one of the biggest things is they just struggle with interactions with human drivers. One of the most common type of crashes they were involved in were where the Waymo vehicle was struck in the rear by another driver. And another top that they were involved in often was T-bone or angle crashes, where you have people pulling out of a parking lot or people who are trying to make a turn in front of the Waymo vehicle.

And so they don’t necessarily behave like we would expect as human drivers, or the culture around a certain type of intersection or driving pathway. And those differences can violate our expectations and lead to some conflict when we interact with automated vehicles, even if they are more conservative and trying to be safer.

MARK BRODIE: That’s interesting. So, even though they are following the rules and behaving as sort of the ideal human driver would behave, humans, being humans, are not acting necessarily that way, which is leading to some number of these crashes.

DAVID KIDD: That’s right. And in some cases, you and I, we have to violate the rules in order to drive, right? There’ll be situations where there may be an obstacle in the road, and so we have to pull off the road a little bit to get around that obstacle. Those are situations that computer-driven vehicles may not be able to handle as fluidly as you and I.

MARK BRODIE: So, is it safe to say that, like, just as, you know, in a perfect world, we’d obviously love there to not be any collisions or any crashes, but, you know, humans, again, being humans, that’s probably not realistic. Safe to say that’s probably the case for autonomous vehicles as well?

DAVID KIDD: Oh, there’ll always be the case that these vehicles get into some sort of crash, right? The biggest benefit for these vehicles that these vehicles have is that because they follow the rules of the road, the base speed limits, they’re going to get people inside to buckle up before they are able to get a ride, that those crashes hopefully will be less severe, have less crash energy, and people will be safer in them.

Now, again, we’re in the early stages of all this. There’s limited deployments, mostly in urban areas. It’s typically in ideal conditions where it’s sunny out and the roads are well marked, and there’s been a ton of mapping done and a ton of testing. You and I, we drive in all sorts of conditions: nighttime, when there’s winter weather, probably conditions we shouldn’t drive in, right? But we do OK. And so there’s a long way to go with these automated vehicles, but the early signs are promising.

MARK BRODIE: Interesting. All right. That is David Kidd, vice president for vehicle research at the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. David, thanks so much.

DAVID KIDD: Thank you.

MARK BRODIE: Good morning. It’s The Show on KJZZ 91.5. I’m Mark Brodie. Coming up, Westerns have captured the imaginations of lots of filmmakers and moviegoers.

PATRICK NELSON: What’s remarkable is they haven’t changed all that much. I mean, the nice thing about the Western, though — and we might compare it to other genres that have persisted for a long time, maybe the horror genre, right? — is that there’s a reason we tell the same stories over and over again, because that’s a new generation offering their spin on a particular story.

MARK BRODIE: We’ll visit a museum exhibit that doubles as a love letter to Westerns.

But first, the races for governor and secretary of state are set for November’s general election, but a pair of Green Party candidates are raising questions about whether they’re actually representing their party. Risa Lombardo and Duwayne Collier are the nominees for governor and secretary of state, respectively, but the Green Party itself is disavowing them. And reporting by my next guest has uncovered ties between the candidates and the Republican Party.

Caitlin Sievers is deputy editor of the Arizona Mirror. She joins me. Caitlin, let’s start with who are Risa Lombardo and Duwayne Collier. What do we know about them?

CAITLIN SIEVERS: So, Risa Lombardo is — well, she says she’s not — but she was married to Mike Lombardo, who is a Republican precinct committeeman for Legislative District 2. She says she’s divorced him, but we can’t find any records of that, and they still live at the same address in Phoenix. Risa was also elected as a Republican precinct committeeman for Legislative District 2 in 2024 alongside Mike and has a ton of other connections to local Republican Party members and businesses and whatnot.

Duwayne Collier is running for secretary of state. He does not have as many close ties to the local Republican Party that we could find, but he is a former employee of Uncle Sam Petitions, which is a petition gathering company that gathers signatures to get a lot of Republicans on the ballot.

MARK BRODIE: And we should note that the Arizona Green Party is not backing these candidates, right? They say that they are not actually members of the Green Party.

CAITLIN SIEVERS: Yeah, absolutely. I think it was back in December, the Green Party noticed that these people were running and said, “We have no idea who these people are. We’ve never heard of them. They’ve never come to a meeting.” And in May, the Arizona Green Party voted to actively oppose both of these candidates instead of just not backing them, and they’re calling them sham candidates.

MARK BRODIE: And as you report, there are also some potential violations of Clean Elections rules. What are they alleged to have done?

CAITLIN SIEVERS: So, both Lombardo and Collier’s campaigns have paid large lump sums to a company called Bootstrap Campaigns that is based in Nevada. This company was created on May 12 of this year, and Lombardo’s first payment to it was on June 4th. It has no online footprint at all, and they both paid these huge lump sums to this company to do a wide range of different campaign activities like sending out mailers and doing photography and video and all sorts of other things. Something that even large, established campaign management businesses typically wouldn’t do in-house, right? They would hire subcontractors to do that.

MARK BRODIE: They wouldn’t do all of it themselves.

CAITLIN SIEVERS: Right, right. They would probably hire a subcontractor to do videography and photography and whatnot. But both Lombardo and Collier paid this one company to do all of these things, and it’s a company that was just set up. Clean Elections says that you have to list the specific subcontractors and their addresses for every subcontractor that does work, even if it was through another vendor.

But we found through reports from the U.S. Postal Service that the mailers that both Lombardo and Collier sent out in June came from a Phoenix printing company that was not listed on either of their campaign finance reports. So at least one company subcontractor wasn’t listed, so it seems likely that there are probably others that weren’t listed as well.

MARK BRODIE: What are Lombardo and Collier saying about all this in terms of either the Clean Elections, the alleged violations there, or the fact that maybe they’re actually Republicans?

CAITLIN SIEVERS: Not much. Not much at all. I have reached out to both of their campaigns numerous times via email and phone call, and I’ve not heard from Collier at all. Lombardo got back to me once when I wrote my first story about this in April and sent me an email saying she was a genuine Green Party candidate and that she had been registered as both a Democrat and a Republican, but the Green Party most aligns with her values now.

But I have heard nothing from her since then. In that email, she told me that she and Mike Lombardo had divorced, but they were still living together in May, or at least using the same address. And she has not said anything to explain all of these connections to the Republican Party or any of that since then.

MARK BRODIE: And we should note that, as you report, the company in Nevada is tied to sort of Republican operatives there, right? Like this is not just some random company.

CAITLIN SIEVERS: Yeah. So, the officer positions for that company were originally listed as being held by two men named David Wilson and Bryan McPartlan. And they only held the officer positions for a couple of weeks before they were changed to a man named Chris Silva, who we can’t find — we can’t identify him. But David Wilson and Bryan McPartlan are Republican campaign consultants, well-established campaign consultants who have worked together in California.

MARK BRODIE: Now, obviously, especially in the governor’s race, Gov. Hobbs won four years ago by a very, very slim margin. Is there a thought that if there is a Green Party candidate, that that could in some way sway the outcome of this year’s election?

CAITLIN SIEVERS: That is what the Arizona Green Party is saying. They say that this is the whole reason for these candidates running, right? That in a close election, which this is expected to be, that a Green Party candidate who might get more votes from progressive-leaning Arizonans could take enough votes away from Katie Hobbs to swing the election.

MARK BRODIE: All right. That is Caitlin Sievers, deputy editor with the Arizona Mirror. Caitlin, thanks so much. I appreciate it.

CAITLIN SIEVERS: Thank you.

MARK BRODIE: Good morning. It’s The Show on KJZZ 91.5. I’m Mark Brodie.

Our next guest this morning is a little younger than most of the voices you hear on our show, but she’s got a lot to say. Katie Chan is just 15 years old. She’s a junior at Hamilton High in Chandler, and she’s one of just seven student winners of the New York Times’ third annual Open Letter Contest. She wrote to former Arizona Senator Kyrsten Sinema, who lobbied for an AI data center being built in Chandler just a few miles from Katie’s home. She and a group of students from her school protested the move, and eventually, the Chandler City Council unanimously rejected the proposal.

My co-host, Lauren Gilger, spoke with Chan more about her letter and how she got interested in public policy at such a young age.

KATIE CHAN: Yeah. So, my interest in public policy actually started back when I was in seventh grade, four years ago, when I started congressional debate. And congressional debate is a form of debate that simulates real-life Congress. So, in this event, you would debate a lot of bills and resolutions and pieces of legislation that real-life Congress would also be debating.

Throughout the tournaments that I’ve attended, I’ve debated about topics like healthcare, education, military, the environment, housing. It’s honestly a really wide variety. And as I started getting into high school, I became more interested in how I myself could get involved in fighting for the ideas I care about.

LAUREN GILGER: You’re writing in this letter that you want to stay here. You want to go to U of A, maybe become a doctor. Obviously, you’re young, but you have goals. But you write that the Arizona that you know is disappearing. And I think this is a feeling that a lot of us who have lived here for a long time have. You write, and I’m going to quote this here, “I’m scared that Arizona will one day be too hot to live in, that the streets will be empty and there won’t be anybody left to enjoy the sunsets that turn our grocery store parking lots pink and orange.”

Have you felt that change here? What does that feel like in your everyday life?

KATIE CHAN: I feel like the summers have been getting hotter and hotter and hotter. And as I did more research to write this open letter to look at the actual statistics for this heat, in fact, in March, I believe, of this year, we had the earliest 100-degree day ever. And I feel like that was just really putting a number to the feeling that I had, which was that, like, humans, like I’m not sure how possible it is for us to survive in this extreme heat for much, much longer, especially since we’re also — we’ve always been facing issues with water scarcity and just electricity use and other environmental issues like that.

LAUREN GILGER: How does it make you feel as someone who clearly, you know, loves this place?

KATIE CHAN: It makes me feel a little bit anxious. I really wish that there was more like being done or like more things that policymakers or legislators would do to like communicate with young people, to communicate with the public about their opinions and how they can maybe take action to try to combat these negative environmental effects that are clearly impacting local communities.

LAUREN GILGER: OK, so let’s talk about that, because you wrote this open letter as part of this competition for the New York Times, were one of seven winners out of very, very many entries. And you wrote it — you address it to former Arizona Senator Kyrsten Sinema. Tell us why.

KATIE CHAN: So, I originally like chose the topic of AI because I’ve debated about AI and its potential impacts in various sectors like healthcare, education, the military, national security. And I’ve also like debated and researched about AI data centers. And I originally like found out a while back that Kyrsten Sinema was actually behind this effort to try to get a data center built here in my own community in Chandler.

And since she was a senator for a long time back like during my childhood, I had heard about her a lot. And honestly, like it was just kind of surprising, and I thought it would just be very interesting to also write an open letter like more broadly that was questioning how we should balance technological development with the real-life environmental impacts that may sometimes be negative. And I thought that writing the letter to Kyrsten Sinema would best get this contrast across.

LAUREN GILGER: And that data center that was proposed in Chandler that Kyrsten Sinema backed was just a couple of blocks from your house, you say?

KATIE CHAN: Yeah.

LAUREN GILGER: I mean, so you went with a group from your school to protest that. What was that like?

KATIE CHAN: I feel like it was honestly just like really encouraging to be able to see that all of us young people could come together and try to express our opinions. And I think it was also really interesting seeing like how there were a lot of like disagreements about this. And I think this is something that goes with a lot of societal issues, not just environmental, that there will be a lot of disagreement.

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah, and that data center was unanimously rejected in Chandler, so we should say that. A lot of folks though will argue that we, you know, we need data centers, too, which I’m sure you’ve read in your research for debate, right? Like that they are what store our photos, they’re the reason your phone works, right? Like, and not just for AI, but for a lot of things. What do you make of those arguments? Like, do you see a balance?

KATIE CHAN: Yeah, I don’t really consider myself strictly like leaning to one side or the other. I feel like we really should, when going about public policy and data centers specifically, try to find a balance. I think it would be a great idea for policymakers and just these construction workers and designers to consider more environmentally friendly ways of developing these data centers, like better ways, more efficient ways of like cooling, for example.

LAUREN GILGER: So, maybe some more creative solutions to the environmental impacts, which include water, but also heat, right, which is why you’re talking about the heat in the Valley. What do you hope for our state’s future as someone who grew up here and wants to stay, but, you know, you’re not sure you can at some point? Do you see it as something that’s savable?

KATIE CHAN: I still believe it is savable. I really hope that lawmakers from both ends of the political spectrum here in Arizona, at least, can try to work together to find a middle ground on this issue in regards to climate change and data centers, and trying to find more creative solutions to maybe keep the economic benefits of these data centers, but also try to protect the environment at the same time.

LAUREN GILGER: So, a hopeful view there. How do you view your role and the role of other young people in being a part of shaping that future? Like, do you think it’s going to take a lot of you or, you know, a lot of you getting very involved to make the outcome look a little different?

KATIE CHAN: Yeah, I personally believe that more young people should try to get involved and stay engaged in these like societal issues that are especially affecting their own community. Young people are the future generation, and we will, at the end of the day, be the people impacted by these policy decisions that are made about the environment and a lot of other issues.

LAUREN GILGER: Did you get any response from Senator Sinema?

KATIE CHAN: Not yet. Hopefully in the future.

LAUREN GILGER: Let me ask you lastly, because you sign the letter “from one human to another.” Tell us why.

KATIE CHAN: When I was writing the letter, like a recurring thought of mine was in this age of AI being so quickly, rapidly developing, how can we determine like what is human and how can we like keep that human part of ourselves? And the main idea behind signing off with “from one human to another” was that oftentimes, like as a young person, there’s a gap between me and people like me versus all of these politicians who are often much older than us.

But I was trying to convey the idea that when it comes to the climate crisis, that regardless of whether you’re a young person like me or you’re a former politician like Kyrsten Sinema, we are all humans at the end of the day, and we should really unite and try to find some common ground, because at the end of the day, we are all sharing this Earth, and we all need to work together to try to protect it in the best way possible.

LAUREN GILGER: Well, certainly giving me a little hope for the future. Katie Chan, junior at Hamilton High School in Chandler, one of the winners of the Learning Network Student Open Letter Contest published in the New York Times. Katie, thank you so much for coming on The Show. I really appreciate it.

KATIE CHAN: Thank you so much for this opportunity.

MARK BRODIE: Westerns have been part of the mythology of this region for decades, from John Wayne to Clint Eastwood to lots of actors you probably wouldn’t think of for their work in the genre.

[WESTERN MONTAGE PLAYS]

CLINT EASTWOOD: You see, in this world, there’s two kinds of people, my friend. Those with loaded guns, and those who dig. You dig.

JOHN WAYNE: Stand aside, Martin. No, you don’t, Ethan. Ethan, no, you don’t! Stand aside!

VAL KILMER: Don’t any of you have the guts to play for blood? I’m your huckleberry. That’s just my game.

JIM DAVIS: Just who in the hell do you think you are?

JOHN WAYNE: Jacob McCandles.

JIM DAVIS: Oh, I, uh — I thought you were dead, Mr. McCandles.

JOHN WAYNE: Not hardly.

[END OF WESTERN MONTAGE]

MARK BRODIE: And an exhibit at Western Spirit: Scottsdale’s Museum of the West pays homage to Westerns through the decades. It’s called “Still in the Saddle: A New History of the Hollywood Western” and is on display through the end of the year.

An exhibit at Western Spirit: Scottsdale’s Museum of the West pays homage to Westerns through the decades. It’s called “Still in the Saddle: A New History of the Hollywood Western,” and is on display through the end of the year. The exhibit is broken into six sections, each looking into a different aspect of Westerns, and includes movie posters, screens showing scenes from some of the films, and reprints of movie listings from Arizona theaters in 1969, among other displays.

Earlier, I met Andrew Patrick Nelson at the museum to take a look at the show. He’s the museum’s chief curator, and for the record, says his favorite Western is the 1971 John Wayne movie “Big Jake,” while “The Searchers” is his all-time favorite movie.

And we started at the entrance to the exhibit, which features a 20-foot-tall neon cowboy, vintage cars, and a big screen. Nelson says it’s meant to evoke the late ’60s and early ’70s, and that that timing is intentional.

ANDREW PATRICK NELSON: Well, it’s a little bit after the heyday, and that’s one of the reasons why I wanted to do this show. It’s based on a book that I wrote called “Still in the Saddle.” And the book is about the Western in the late ’60s and 1970s. And there’s a certain story that we tell about that period, that it came after that heyday of the ’50s, that it was a time when the Western was declining, maybe wasn’t as popular. And it’s true that it wasn’t as popular, but that doesn’t mean that there weren’t interesting films, entertaining films, doing interesting things.

So, the advantage of the museum show is you can actually immerse people in the diversity that was the Western at this exciting moment where you had so many different things happening. You’ve got, like, yes, you’ve got Clint Eastwood, but you’ve also still got John Wayne, who’s a big star. So, yes, you have a film like “The Wild Bunch,” but we’ve got Western comedies, more traditional films.

It’s just a reminder of that, you know, art when it exists in the moment is always complex and interesting, doing different things. And then, you know, over time, we tend to forget how complicated it was, and our memories shrink it down to something a simpler story.

MARK BRODIE: Well, it’s interesting, because I think for a lot of people, they look at Westerns at this point, maybe even the recent past, and think, “OK, this is sort of an oversimplified version of what the West really was.” It sounds like you don’t necessarily disagree with that.

ANDREW PATRICK NELSON: No, not necessarily. I mean, movies are art. They’re an interpretation of history. So, it’s never the case that Westerns, whether Westerns in the ’50s, whether Westerns in the ’70s, or Westerns today, are what you would call historically accurate. That’s not the reason to watch a Western movie. It’s not a history lesson, maybe to get interested in history. It’s not that.

But, you know, certainly Westerns tell us more about changing ideas, changing standards, like in this moment of time, suddenly filmmakers could be more expansive when it came to, say, the violence that they portrayed. So, it’s never the case that earlier filmmakers didn’t want to show violence or sex; they couldn’t because of the censorship apparatus in Hollywood.

MARK BRODIE: All right. Let’s go take a look.

ANDREW PATRICK NELSON: OK. So, the show is organized into different sections. So, we begin here with the Westerns of 1969, again telling that story about all the different movies that were made at that moment in time, telling us that this isn’t a moment when the Western — it certainly wasn’t dead, it wasn’t even dying. It was against, I guess, a backdrop of social unrest, political turmoil, generational change. You had competing visions vying for the attention of Americans, let’s say.

And so as we move into the gallery from here, we can sort of from this vantage point see in the distance a giant poster, billboard-size poster of Robert Redford in “Jeremiah Johnson.” So, we have a section there about the representation of American Indians. Then we have sections dedicated to the changing depiction of classic heroes, so the way Wyatt Earp or Billy the Kid change. Got a big section here dedicated to John Wayne.

And then to round it off, a section dedicated to Clint Eastwood, sort of the inheritor of the mantle of great Western star who then becomes a great Western filmmaker. And then the last section takes us into the 1980s and ’90s to see how the Western petered out to a certain degree over the course of the 1980s, but then came back in the early ’90s for one last hurrah.

MARK BRODIE: What is it about this part of the world, do you think, that appeals to filmmakers so much? I mean, you don’t see a lot of movies about the Midwest or New England or Florida or any place else really, but this is a whole genre.

ANDREW PATRICK NELSON: Yeah. No, people make that point that for this remarkably confined period, as I said, end of the Civil War, maybe a little bit earlier, maybe the Gold Rush, to the turn of the century, and then a very restricted place, west of the Mississippi, east of the Rockies. So, that brief moment in this sort of strip of land has occupied more imaginative territory not only in the United States, but maybe in the world, than any other period in the United States.

So, that big question is why. Why is that? Well, it could be that this was just the moment that forged the American character. Many people have made that argument, that it was the pioneer experience that distinguished America from many other nations, that westward-moving frontier on which the opposed forces of so-called civilization clashed with so-called savagery or wilderness. And that then became ingrained in our popular culture.

MARK BRODIE: How have you seen the stories that are told in these movies evolve over the years?

ANDREW PATRICK NELSON: So, what’s remarkable is they haven’t changed all that much. I mean, the nice thing about the Western, though — and we might compare it to other genres that have persisted for a long time, maybe the horror genre, right? — is that there’s a reason we tell the same stories over and over again, because that’s a new generation offering their spin on a particular story.

MARK BRODIE: When you talk about the characters in these movies, I’m curious how you see sort of the character of the place changing, and maybe different filmmakers looking at it differently, because obviously the Western is not a Western if it’s not in the West, right?

ANDREW PATRICK NELSON: That’s absolutely the case. Now, what the West is, of course, is there are different Wests, right? Like Monument Valley is a different West than Colorado or Utah or Wyoming and so on. So, the West itself is maybe a bit of a misnomer, because there are different Wests, even if they all tend to be kind of conflated.

But that landscape becomes very important. I think one thing you do begin to see in later Westerns, and I think we see it today, is that landscape has been codified in particular ways because we’re so familiar with it, right? So, some filmmakers approach the landscape with a kind of reverence, but at the same time, in a lot of these films, you see some filmmakers trying to push back against that a little bit, either trying to show familiar landscapes in new ways or to take us to potentially different places in the West to show us the West the way it really was.

MARK BRODIE: You kind of alluded to this, but I want to ask you more specifically about how have you seen over the years Native Americans’ portrayal in Westerns change?

ANDREW PATRICK NELSON: Yeah. I mean, this is a nuanced topic, and I come at this just having seen a lot of Westerns. So, I would push back on the idea that uniformly American Indians were depicted as one-dimensional savages or something like that. It’s never been that simple.

I think what you see over the course of history, I mean, there are some historical factors. The big one is you almost never had an American Indian actor in a leading indigenous role. Was it wrong? Yes. Was it the case that there weren’t important American Indian actors or filmmakers doing important work really from the teens onward? No. I mean, there are many remarkable stories of great Native actors and filmmakers in the film business. But when it comes to the Western, yeah, we have to concede that redface performance was a part of it. It’s still a part of it at this moment.

You know, this ’70s moment, this is the moment of the American Indian Movement, a moment of indigenous rights visibility growing largely from a frustration of the lack of gains for Indian peoples coming out of the civil rights movement. But even in this moment, we still have Hispanics or white actors, or sometimes Asian actors playing lead Indian roles.

So, we’re standing in front of a poster for “Little Big Man,” which is a very famous movie because of the performance of Chief Dan George, right? So, he’s a chief from British Columbia, Canada, limited acting experience, and only on television in Canada — not to say anything bad about television in Canada. I watched a lot of Canadian television growing up. But that’s kind of seen as a real watershed moment for Indigenous representation. And so that’s great. We never want to take that away. But he was not the first choice for that role, and there are many other Indigenous roles in that movie that are played by non-Indigenous actors. So, it’s sadly never straightforwardly beneficial.

MARK BRODIE: Andrew Patrick Nelson is chief curator at Western Spirit: Scottsdale’s Museum of the West. The exhibit, “Still in the Saddle: A New History of the Hollywood Western,” runs through the end of the year.

MARK BRODIE: Thanks for listening to The Show’s podcast. The Show is produced by Sativa Peterson, Nick Sanchez, Amber Victoria Singer, Athena Ankrah and Ayana Hamilton. The Show was created by Jon Hoban. Our executive producer is Amy Silverman. You can find more of The Show and sign up for our newsletter at theshow.kjzz.org. You can also find us on Instagram @kjzztheshow.

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