CIVIL WAR COMES TO SANTA CLARITA APRIL 18-19!
In addition to the previously announced musical,
literary, eating and shopping-related events happening at the Santa Clarita Cowboy Festival this
coming weekend, something new has been added!
Marking the 150th Anniversary of the end of the Civil War,
for the first time the Festival will include living history encampments, plus at
12:45 and 3:15 on both days, Heritage Junction will be transformed into a Civil
War battleground! These events are
peopled by dedicated history buffs, and will immerse you in that time in a way
no book or movie ever could – it’s a wonderful way to introduce kids and adults
to the history of the Civil War and the American West!
And you can test your stamina on the mechanical bull,
and your skill at hatchet-throwing, archery, and fast-draw laser tag! For a rundown on all of the musical events, go HERE . For my rundown of all the separate-ticket events, go
HERE
Once again I’ll have the pleasure of moderating several of the panels
and conducting interviews at the Buckaroo
Book Shop, starting Saturday at high noon for a talk with author and
screenwriter Miles Swarthout, about THE SHOOTIST, THE LAST SHOOTIST, and THE
HOMESMAN. At 2 pm I’ll discuss Unsung Heroes of Film: The Hollywood Stunt
Horse, with Karen Ross, senior consultant at the American Humane Society’s
Film & TV Unit, authors Petrine Day Mitchum and Audria Pavia, Gene Autry
Entertainment president Karla Buhlman.
Saturday
at three I’ll be talking with novelists and screenwriters Miles Swarthout, C.
Courtney Joyner, Stephen Lodge and Dale Jackson about their adventures adapting
novels into screenplays and screenplays into novels. At 5 pm I’ll be chatting with Karla Buhlman,
President of Gene Autry Entertainment, about the legacy of
America's Favorite Singing Cowboy, Gene Autry.
On Sunday I only have one panel, Name That Horse – Famous Horses and Their
Pards, featuring Karla Buhlman and authors Petrine Day Mitchum and Audria
Pavia.
There will be many other interesting panels both
days -- for an official schedule of all of the events happening at the Buckaroo Book Shop, go HERE. Every book mentioned or shown will be available at the Buckaroo Book Shop, And they can all be purchased right now from OutWest -- just click the link at the top left of the page!
I’m particularly excited that the Buckaroo Book Shop
will be located in the cluster of historic buildings called Heritage Junction, in the Pardee House, which
was built in 1890, and was used as a film location by Tom Mix, John Ford and
Harry Carey among many others. Other
structures at the Junction include the Newhall Ranch House, Saugus Train
Station featuring the Mogul Engine, Mitchell Adobe, Edison House, Kingsburry
House, Callahan Schoolhouse, and the Ramona Chapel.
For all of the specifics of the entire Santa Clarita
Cowboy Fest, visit http://cowboyfestival.org/http://cowboyfestival.org/
THE TCM FEST PART 2: MORE WITH PETER FONDA
We think of Peter Fonda as a film actor, but he has
worked extensively on stage as well; one of his first successes, in college,
was the James Stewart role in HARVEY. “I
was listening to Chris Plummer and Julie Andrews talk about this last night,
what it is to share with an audience. I
liked starting my career out, as my dad did, on stage, because it’s a much more
defined area of acting. Film acting is
totally different. One thing I’ve taught
to students in colleges, if they are actors, and want to know about stage
acting, I tell them this, if you catch this, and let it bleed out to all the
other things you do on stage, this is the key:
if you’re supposed to cry, and then the audience cries, you have to be
very, very tender with the timing.
Because if you drop a tear first, the audience will let you cry for
them. But if you wait until you hear the
first sniffle, the first catch in somebody’s the throat somewhere in the
audience, and then drop a tear, the audience goes Niagara. In movies, it can be helped by editing. But if you’re on stage, and you want them to
laugh, don’t laugh first, don’t cry first.”
Interviewer Scott Eyman, author of PRINT THE LEGEND
– THE LIFE AND TIMES OF JOHN FORD, and JOHN WAYNE – THE LIFE AND LEGEND, noted
that Peter’s and Henry’s relationship had been ‘fraught,’ but said that by the
time Hank passed, they were ‘very tight’.
What changed their relationship?
Peter replied, “Well, I got to direct him, and act with him (in WANDA
NEVADA) – which he thought was totally nuts.
Brooke Shields, me and dad. I
hired my dad. It was funny, I called him
on the phone and asked him, if he’d be able to work with me for one day, and I
could only pay him fifteen-hundred bucks.
He said, ‘Is it a good
part?’ Yuh, I’ll send you the
sides. ‘Sides, you’ll send me the
sides? You don’t know what sides
are!’ Now I do, if you recall me on the
road, feeding your cue lines to you from sides.
That's bearded Hank with Peter and Brooke
“He came and worked with me, and the experience was
remarkable. I don’t have enough time to
tell you all of the beautiful details, and how it started to crumble. He hated the beard, and I don’t blame him,
but he didn’t hear me when I said it was a fairy tale, and it didn’t need to be
a real beard. I say Dad, you’re supposed to be chewing tobacco
in the scene, and you’re not well, and I’ve got this little bag of ground up licorice. And he absolutely adored this stuff, and the
camera doesn’t know it’s not tobacco. No,
it’s my dad, the perfectionist, the realist.
(He) took out a bag of Red Man Chewing Tobacco. Don’t take this the wrong way; he said, ‘Bill
Cosby gave me this!’ You’re too sick to chew tobacco, and I’ve got this all
ready for you. ‘No.’ I knew when the no
meant no further talk. I popped the licorice
in my mouth, got over him, and started to drool the licorice into his
beard. I got a little spirits of mineral
oil on it – ‘Close your eyes, Dad!’ Whew
-- threw dust into his beard. ‘You’re
ready for your close-up now – see you on-set!’ Went ouside, and Michael Butler,
the cameraman said, ‘Wow! How do you do
that?’ I said, ‘First time, I never did
it before. But I was the director, what
the heck.’
“He did the job for me, and three weeks later, I got
a letter from him in Page, Arizona. And it was hot. I was glad Dad didn’t die of the heat; but I
knew Dad was dying. And he wrote me this fabulous letter – perhaps
the fifth that he had ever written me. And
it was that he felt bad about the beard, and he wouldn’t blame me if I cut it
out of the film, but it would have been such a gas – his phrase. Here comes the hard part to tell. It was a five page letter. And at the end, ‘In my forty-one years of
making motion pictures, I have never seen a crew so devoted to the
director. You are a very good
director. And please remember me for
your company.’ Now a company is a word
we normally use in stage. But in John
Ford’s time, he carried a (stock) company of actors with him from one film to
the next. Ward Bond was one of them. John Carradine was another. Great
characters. Walter Brennan. Great characters that he would have as his
company. And the fact that my dad wanted
to be part of my company… How cool is
that?”
Peter and Scott Eyman talked about the films they
re-watched in preparation for this interview.
Fonda recalled, “I had to watch THE OX-BOW INCIDENT, and THE GRAPES OF
WRATH, of course. And then I blew it on
the red carpet last night. They asked me
what my favorite film was, and I said DUCK SOUP. I should have said BEST YEARS OF OUR
LIVES. I should have said EMPIRE OF THE
SUN, a great film by Steven Speilberg.
Of course, Groucho loved EASY RIDER.”
Scott Eyman asked, “When you look at your dad’s work
today, one actor to another, what do you see?”
Warren Oates and Peter Fonda in THE HIRED HAND
Peter replied, “I watch his timing. I watch how his eyes move or don’t. And I’ve learned that, when you’re in close-up,
eye movement can really be disturbing on a big screen. And I can see, and I always watched him
on-stage, he had this tension in his fingers like this (his arms straight down,
his fingers drumming on his leg). He
knew how to do hands-down performances day-in and day-out. There’s a reason I call them hands-down performances.
He didn’t have to do this (Peter makes a bunch of hand-gestures). You just have your hands at your sides, and
say the lines, and say them with such fullness and conviction that the audience
understands them without any added movements.
I was watching one of my favorite Westerns - and I blew it again on the
red carpet. They asked me what my
favorite Western was, and I said (laughs) THE HIRED HAND (which Peter Fonda
directed and stars in). And when my dad
finally saw that, by the way, he was thoroughly pleased. ‘That’s my kind of Western,’ he said. I couldn’t ask for a better compliment. But now I see it (the hands) in MY DARLING
CLEMENTINE, he’s doing that again, and it doesn’t distract me from the story,
from the character. He is Wyatt
Earp. I believe, and I knew Ward Bond
very well, I knew John Wayne, I knew all these guys. I knew them all, I believe all their
characters. And Victor Mature was so
incredible in that film. It was his best
performance. I don’t know how many of
you have seen that film. It was his
finest performance, and he did it for John Ford. And I’m so thrilled to be able to say that
about another actor, even though this talk is called Fonda on Fonda.”
Some questions were taken from the audience. One man asked if, in making EASY RIDER, Peter
Fonda was making references to two of his father’s films, GRAPES OF WRATH, and
MY DARLING CLEMENTINE. “You’re going across-country,
but in opposite direction from GRAPES; your scene in the commune is a lot like
the WPA camp; your character is names ‘Wyatt’.
The end of EASY RIDER is a bit like the gunfight at the O.K. Corral. Or am I all wet?”
EASY RIDER
Fonda replied, “You’re not wet; it was unconscious,
but thank you, that’s a great compliment.
When I was first writing that, the concept I came up with was two guys
-- not one hundred Hell Angels riding to a Hell’s Angels funeral -- which had
been WILD ANGELS, because I had been told no more motorcycles-sex-drugs-and-rock-and-roll
movies. As I started writing EASY RIDERS,
the first thing that came to my mind was riding through John Ford’s west. We were going to ride east, as an homage to
Herman Hesse’s JOURNEY TO THE EAST. I
didn’t expect the audience to go – “Wow!
That’s Herman Hesse’s JOURNEY TO THE EAST!’ We would have blown it if that happened – I did want to say that line again. And
then watching a couple of shots from CLEMENTINE, and looking at that one rock
that Hopper and I would shoot at in the background when we entered Monument
Valley, where CLEMENTINE was shot. Of
course, there’s never been a town in Monument Valley except the ones that John
Ford dropped there. Tombstone certainly
isn’t there. But there’s Tombstone. A town that has a road and buildings. Not on the other side of the road. There’s a church being built on the other
side of the road. And in this one-sided town you had three bars, one Shakespearean
actor doing a play; John Ford was a genius.
And he helped my dad get past THE MAGNIFICENT’S DOPEs and THE IMMORTAL SERGEANTs,
and get to THE GRAPES OF WRATH, MY
DARLING CLEMENTINE, YOUNG MR. LINCOLN. I
think Ford released him to do that.”
Another guest asked Peter to comment about his
father’s performance in ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST. “I would love to, in fact. He was not so sure about working with (Sergio)
Leone. He came in with brown contact
lenses. And Leone flips, because he had
hired my dad for his blue eyes. If you’ve
ever seen spaghetti westerns, all of those Italians have really blue eyes. So Sergio
Leone flipped out, but that’s my father.
He would go to those extremes. So
there he is, and (in his first scene) he’s identified. ‘What are you gonna do with the kid, Frank?’ ‘Well, now that you’ve named me.’ And he shoots the kid in the stomach. This
is the first time my dad had ever done anything like that in any film. He did some noir films that people don’t know about. He shot the shit out of the Clantons in
CLEMENTINE, but this is a kid – and gut-shooting
a kid? The audience freaked out, because
there was Hank Fonda shooting a kid in the stomach. But because of Sergio and my dad, and the
other actors, they just kept the story going.
To take it a little further, I was in Almeria, Spain, to direct a
commercial for Citroen cars, and I got my daughter in it, and we would go by
the big house from ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST – it’s still there. And so on the wrap day, which was a week
later, I had taken all these pieces of paper together, and written on them ‘ONCE
UPON A TIME IN MY LIFE’. And I got
everybody together, start up the camera, run and get in the shot, we all hold
up the sign, and I wanted to show it to myself and to my family. Dad was already gone, but I thought, this is
so fff-so-bloody cool. But I thought it
was a very interesting Western. Very
different from the greatness of Ford’s MY DARLING CLEMENTINE, or OX-BOW INCIDENT,
or some of the others, but it was very interesting, very entertaining. I liked it a lot.”
Henry Fonda in once upon a time in the west
The third and, probably, final installment of my
coverage of the TCM Fest will include highlights from film introductions by Katherine
Quinn, the widow of Anthony Quinn; Oscar winner Christopher Plummer, speaking
at the THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING screening about director John Huston and star
Sean Connery; and Oscar-winning special effects men Craig Barton and Ben Burtt
on the making of GUNGA DIN.
‘DJANGO’ AND ‘SUSPIRIA’ BOTH TO BE REMADE AS EURO
TV-SERIES!
French TV producer ATLANTIQUE PRODUCIONS and Italian
indie CATTLEYA will co-produce a pair of series based on the classic Sergio
Corbucci spaghetti western that helped ignite the genre, and the hypnotic Dario
Argento horror film – and Argento is aboard as artistic advisor! Each has received orders for twelve
fifty-minute episodes. No more info yet,
except that they will be shopped at Cannes next week, at the MIP TV Market!
AND THAT’S A WRAP!
With the Santa Clarita Cowboy Festival coming this
weekend, I don’t know what I’ll be able to manage for next week’s
Round-up. Did anyone catch the premiere
of LEGENDS & LIES – THE REAL WEST, from Bill O’Reilly, on Fox News? The few minutes I caught looked good,
certainly well-produced, but I had to finish writing the Round-up. Let me know what you thought of it. One criticism I’ve heard is that it covers
the usual suspects – Jesse James, Doc Holliday, Davy Crockett – yet again, but
on a news network, I’m hoping it’ll reach a wider audience. If you’re reading the Round-up, you don’t
need to be convinced that Western history is fascinating. Hopefully this will round up some strays for
us, maybe start a stampede, along with TURN, which reTURNs for season two tomorrow. Still a moronic title that tells you nothing – what’s wrong with the
book’s title, WASHINGTON’S SPIES?
Have a great week, and hope to see you at the Santa
Clarita Cowboy Festival!
Happy Trails,
Henry
All Original Contents Copyright April 2015 by Henry
C. Parke – All Rights Reserved
Good stuff, Henry! Thanks.
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