This TV movie was largely masterminded by its writer, Gore Vidal, not simply as a remake of his 1950s television play and its 1958 movie version ("The Left-Handed Gun"), but as an overt rebuttal of the latter, a film Vidal detested. The screenplay he had written for that film was rejected by director Arthur Penn, something Vidal never forgave. He took the opportunity to rewrite his original somewhat for this new version, giving himself a small acting role as a frontier preacher (Vidal was, of course, a militant atheist) and making the homosexuality of the character played by Rene Auberjonois explicit, whereas in the 1950s, this was merely implicit. (Hurd Hatfield had played the part in the 1958 film). Vidal thought this new version far superior to Penn's - a view with which many disagreed.
