Focus : Westward, Ho! : NEW DOCUMENTARY, ‘THE WILD WEST,’ FOLLOWS SUCCESSFUL BLUEPRINT USED FOR ‘THE CIVIL WAR’

The Old West has spawned so many legends and myths, the truth has often been lost in the shuffle. A new 10-hour documentary, “The Wild West,” attempts to tell how the West was really won.

“The Wild West” premieres Monday on the commercial Prime Time Entertainment Network, a conglomerate of independent TV stations, including KCOP, around the country that are owned by Chris-Craft Industries.

Like “The Civil War,” Ken Burns’ acclaimed 1990 PBS documentary series, “The Wild West” features vintage photographs from the period, excerpts from diaries and letters read by well-known actors, interviews with historians and music from the era. Jack Lemmon is the narrator.

Dick Robertson, president of Warner Bros. Domestic Television Distribution, which is distributing the series, says the success of “The Civil War” and ABC’s recent four-hour documentary “Lincoln “ proved that the public can find documentaries appealing.

“There’s a recipe for success by taking the actual words people wrote during that period of time, and then re-creating them through the voices of famous actors over original photographs,” Robertson says. “What that does, it connects you in an emotional way to this history, rather than being sort of preached to and lectured to. It is regular everyday people and the lives that they lived.”

Putting together the documentary series was a vast undertaking for its producers. Given a timetable of 14 months in which to complete the project, executive producer Doug Netter (“The Sacketts”) and producer John Copland decided to narrow their focus to the 30-year period after the Civil War. Because they were novices in the documentary field, they brought in co-producer Jamie Smith, a 15-year veteran.

“Assisting Jamie were four full-time researchers,” Netter says. “We divided all the museums and historical societies into four sections. We simultaneously put in a new visual data base which could receive photographs in the data base and catalogue them. There are over 12,000 photographs in that data base.”

More than 3,500 photographs were used in the documentary, which is divided into such topics as “Cowboys,” “Settlers,” “Gunfighters,” “Indians” and “Soldiers.”

“ ‘The Civil War’ used 1,200 images for all of their 10 hours,” Copland says. “They repeated a lot of images. Soldiers look like soldiers, but in dealing with 30 years of history, we knew we were going to be a lot broader.”

In order to personalize the stories, Netter says, “we tried to access as many of the letters, diaries, anything of the written word, that we could find so we could attempt in every instance to personalize the story.”

Netter didn’t want to take the romance out the West: “I love all of those John Wayne movies. But at the same time, we tried to separate fact from fiction.”

“The Wild West” airs Monday-Thursday at 8 p.m. and March 28 at 8 p.m. on KCOP; weekdays through April 3 at 12:30 a.m. on XETV.