A VISIT TO ‘SIEGE AT
RHYKER’S STATION’ - FIRST WESTERN MOVIE SET WITH COVID PRECAUTIONS
At first I thought maybe
Western films could go on even as the rest of the film industry screeched to a
Covid-19 halt. After all, in a Western,
it’s no shock when a gang of masked men burst into a bank with drawn guns. But
when the bank tellers are also masked, you know something’s wrong. So, it’s been a waiting game, and the great
news is that the waiting is over, and cameras are, cautiously, rolling
again!
Last week I had a chance
to drive out to Peter Sherayko’s Caravan West Ranch, and watch some filming on
what I am pretty sure is the first Western to shoot in California since
March. Here’s how the director of Siege
at Rhyker’s Station, Michael Feifer, tells the story. “This movie is about
a girl named Jocelyn Miller (Skylar Witte), who marries a kind of pretentious,
impetuous, annoying young man named Jody Callahan (Michael Welch). And right
after the wedding, Jocelyn hears her father-in-law (Bruce Dern), and
brother-in-law (Cam Gigandet) talking about how they actually killed her
father. She had no idea. So she takes off -- she just gets on a horse and
leaves. And they go after her.” Reminds
me a little of Mariette Hartley and James Drury’s wedding in Ride the High
Country. The Callahans and their
gang catch up with Jody at a stagecoach stop, Rhyker’s Station, where she’s
befriended Billy Tyson (Brock Harris), Red Lindstrom (Peter Sherayko), and Joe
Rhyker (David DeLouise), who aren’t about to hand her over without a fight.
On the set, everyone on
the show was Covid-tested twice a week – videos of actors having cue-tips
driven through their noses and seemingly into their brains are on Facebook –
and masks are everywhere. But one of the
real health advantages is that Westerns are, as John Ford called them, “outdoor
pictures,” with plenty of circulating air: the Monday before I was there, there
was so much wind that sets were blowing over.
I arrived at 3 in the
afternoon, in time to watch several takes of a half-dozen bad-guys galloping
their horses down a hill, firing away, then stopping, regrouping, and heading
back. For the first time on a set, I
watched a mortar repeatedly fired for explosive effects. Though convincing on camera, especially with
sound effects, the mortar is powered by compressed air, and fires a mixture of
Fullers Earth and chunks of cork. Best
of all, I got to obliquely watch, but clearly hear, Bruce Dern shooting his
final scene of the film. Dad is none too
pleased at all the trouble his briefly-wed son has made for the family, and
hearing Bruce Dern blow his top will long be a favorite memory of my film-set
visits. It was met with thunderous
applause by the crew. Oh, and Dern was
cracking jokes constantly between takes.
Michael Feifer has
directed an astonishing 67 feature movies since 2005. I’d first met him back in 2012, when I
visited the set of his first Western, Wyatt Earp’s Revenge. He’s directed quite a few since then,
especially in the past year or so. I
asked him about the challenges of making a film during the COVID crisis.
MICHAEL FEIFER: Well, nothing stops me. I shot a movie in
July in Georgia. I shot a movie in August in Wyoming, and now here we are in
October, shooting another movie in Los Angeles. And what more perfect movies to
shoot during COVID than Westerns? The one in July was not a Western, it was like
a Lifetime thriller. I've been averaging about six movies a year. Hopefully
this year I'll end up with five. So it's slowed me down. Right before this
whole thing. I was shooting a movie in Hawaii in February, and then we get on
the plane to go home and people start wearing masks and it's starting to
happen. So at least I was in Hawaii right before it all happened.
HENRY PARKE: I understand
Siege at Rhyker’s Station is one of a group of Westerns.
MICHAEL FEIFER: I don't
know if I'd call them a series, but a company hired me to make three Westerns
in a row. By the way, (post production for) Shooting Star is going to be
done in a week or two.
HENRY PARKE: And that’s another Western, not part of the
group of three. I’d love to see it.
MICHAEL FEIFER: It's
pretty cool. Do you know it's in black and white? It's beautiful. So, I had three Westerns in a
row to do. The last one was called Catch
The Bullet. This is called The Siege at Rhyker’s Station. And then
the third one is called Desperate Riders. They're not related to each
other, but it's an opportunity, and we like making westerns. I like them when
they're not in the cold and the wind, but otherwise.
HENRY PARKE: For this one, what particular challenges are
you facing?
MICHAEL FEIFER: This one
is challenging because there's a lot of characters stuck in this little
stagecoach station. There's a lot of characters up on the hill shooting at
them. A lot of disparate moments and actions. It's easy to shoot a scene where
you have a finite beginning, and a finite end, and dialogue that sort of
resolves itself. You understand what the characters are doing and what their
points are. When you're shooting an action scene where one person shoots here,
one person shoots there, another person's shooting from over there, it makes it
a little harder to keep the continuity of the scene, the consistency of it. A
lot of that material, I'm going to shoot over a period of time, but I only have
Bruce Dern for a short time and Cam Gigandet for a time. So that makes it more
challenging.
HENRY PARKE: Have you
worked with Bruce Dern before?
MICHAEL FEIFER: I have not, and he's been a joy. I've heard
more Hollywood stories in two days than I've heard in my entire life, except
for maybe when I worked with Peter Bogdanovich,
HENRY PARKE: What did you direct Bogdonavich in?
MICHAEL FEIFER: A movie called Abandoned, starting
Brittany Murphy, Dean Cain, Mimi Rogers, and Peter. Super-nice guy. One of the
few actors that, when we finished, he says, Mike, you have everything you need?
Are you good? Just a really giving guy,
really nice.
HENRY PARKE: Tell me a about shooting Catch the Bullet
in Wyoming.
MICHAEL FEIFER: Actually
it's kind of interesting. I made a deal with a ranch in Wyoming called the TA
Ranch. It’s 8,000 acres. Kirsten Giles, her family owns it. I didn't scout it
ahead of time. I had somebody else scout it, so I'd seen pictures, seen video. When
we got there, Peter Sherayko and I were sitting out by what they call the milk
house, a building you'll see at the beginning of the movie, with Tom Skerritt,
that looks out over their ranch, And Kirsten, who runs the ranch says, you
know, this is the location of Johnson County War. Peter's like: what? She says, this is
the exact location. The barn here is where they actually fired guns from. She
showed us the bullet holes. She showed us the holes where they put the rifles
through. I swear Peter almost cried
because you know, the history means so much to him. Peter has one scene in that
movie, and I made his scene start off in the barn. It was a neat moment, to see Peter so
affected.
HENRY PARKE: Your previous Western, A Soldier’s Revenge,
was released in June.
MICHAEL FEIFER: We just won The Wild Bunch Film Festival. We won best picture, best director, best
produced feature, best ensemble cast, best actress, best lead actor.
HENRY PARKE: You've
cleaned the slate.
MICHAEL FEIFER: We did
quite well there. I was very appreciative of Rock Whitehead and his wife, what
they put together, and we had a good time. Soldier's Revenge came out on
DVD, so people can pick that up. And if you have Amazon Prime, you can watch it
for free.
Peter Sherayko and I sat
down – at least six feet apart – and I asked him if this was his first time
working with Bruce Dern. It was
not.
PETER SHERAYKO: No, it's
the fourth. We did Badland last year, and we did Hickcok couple
of years before. And Traded. So it's my fourth time working with Bruce.
HENRY PARKE: So what's he
like to work with?
PETER SHERAYKO: You know, he is really good, and he's a
wealth of stories on the old west, and on different movies that he did.
HENRY PARKE: Who are you playing in this picture?
PETER SHERAYKO: Actually the third lead, a guy named Red
Lindstrom who runs a freighting outfit.
HENRY PARKE: I've never
been on a film set where you were acting, where you weren't also doing a few other
things. What else are you doing on this picture?
PETER SHERAYKO: The costumes, the location and the guns; I'm
the armorer. Kevin (McNiven) came down from Wyoming with the horses, he and
Addie (Ardeshir Radpour) are the wranglers, and all the guys that they hired to
ride are The Buckaroos (Peter’s group of horsemen). They can ride and shoot, so that's what
they're doing. And Dan Dietrich brought the stagecoach in from Shingle Springs,
California. He taught me how to drive
the wagon, which I hadn't done in 20 years, and I totally was inept then. But
now I feel very competent. We have a three-picture
deal to do for the same company. The Desperate Riders is the third one,
probably in December and probably in Arizona. We were going to do Rhyker’s
(in Wyoming), but one day it was 90 degrees, two days later we had five inches
of snow, and Mike said, I can't film here.
HENRY PARKE: Not good for continuity.
PETER SHERAYKO: (laughs)
There's no continuity. It's bad enough here with the wind yesterday, fog
in the morning, today's a totally different day than yesterday.
(At that moment, Molly
the costumer appeared to ask Peter if he has a pair of 1880s period glasses, the
kind with circular lenses, for one of the actors. He assured her he’d bring them the next day.)
PETER SHERAYKO: This is why I started the business. Because
as an actor, I always brought whatever props I needed. I would look at my
character, saying this I want, this I want. I want to have a match-safe with
matches, or I want to have a cigar or I want to have glasses. Or a walking
stick. So I would bring them. And I started bringing my own guns, talking to
the director saying, can I use these guns? It drives me crazy when actors come
in and then all of a sudden, they go, can I have this? Especially on small
budget movies that we do, the prop people have no time to pull everything for
every character. There's one actor I've worked with six times. We've been
friends for 30 years. And when we're working on a movie, I'll call and I'll
say, Marty, what do you want? And he'll say, I don't want anything. The day he's there, oh, can I have this? Can
I have that? It's not in the script. So that's why I started the business,
because I wanted to make things more efficient.
HENRY PARKE: How many pictures have you done with Michael
Feifer?
PETER SHERAYKO: Eight; the
next one will be the sixth one as an actor. I like Michael because he doesn't
shoot fast, but he gets everything he wants done. We had a nine o'clock call today and we'll be
out of here by six.
(We were interrupted a
few times by phone calls. A man wanted
to rent props. Another wanted to rent
the ranch to shoot a rock video.)
HENRY PARKE: You’ve got
your ranch working all the time.
PETER SHERAYKO: You know, on a normal year without COVID we
do 40 to 60 shoots: commercials, music videos, TV, movies. Last year we did six
movies, and they brought two stagecoaches in for one of them. We keep on
working because everybody knows that I'm cost-effective. A producer called me
this morning; he's having a hard time raising $500,000 to do a movie. He used
to work for Showtime, and now he's been trying to independently produce. He
said a couple of years ago, shows were a million and a half. Now the low budget
shows are all down to four, five, $600,000. They're not bigger than that. Even all the shows for Hallmark are way down.
This year, their budgets had to go up $2 million just for COVID testing. And
they had to cut a lot of other stuff because Hallmark says, no, we're not
giving you any more money. So they had to really pull back, all those networks:
USA, Lifetime, all those movies are less than a million dollars. A couple of years ago they were one or two
million dollars. He says, the biggest budget you can have is a million two. If
you go over a million two, they won't be able to recoup the money, because
there is so much product out there.
HENRY PARKE: That's very interesting. I'd never thought
that protection from COVID would be pulling money directly out of a budget, that
that would not be something added on.
PETER SHERAYKO: Well, they already have a budget, and a
budget is a pie, cut up in pieces. Line producer says, okay, camera's going to
get so much. We have so much for props. We have so much for costumes. We have
so much for talent. We know that we have to have your A-list person, your major
star, or you're not going to sell it. We were going to film this movie a couple
of months ago, but the money people gave Michael a list of 10, 12 actors. You
have to get these. Some of them turned it down because it wasn't enough money.
Bruce was on the list, and we had to increase his pay to to get him, or they
wouldn't get the money (for the movie).
All photos from Siege at Rhyker's Station are by www.barryjholmes.com.
‘THE COMEBACK TRAIL’
DECEMBER 18TH!
Back in 1982, a very
talented, quirky filmmaker name Harry Hurwitz, who’s The Projectionist
(1970) became a cult classic, made the wonderful but rarely seen black comedy, The
Comeback Trail. It starred Chuck McCann as a failed movie producer who
tries to get rich by hiring a broken-down former Western star, played by Buster
Crabbe, to star in a movie, insure him for a fortune, and kill him. It’s been remade, and while I usually don’t
get excited about remakes, the trailer looks hysterical. And it stars, as the producers, Robert
DeNiro, Morgan Freeman, Zach Braff and, as the broken-down Western star, Tommy
Lee Jones.
ALPHA VIDEO’S BOB STEELE,
EDDIE DEAN, ‘END OF AN ERA’ RELEASES
Alpha Video always seems
to come up with something unusual, and this pair of new releases is no
exception. After 120 starring roles in
B-Westerns since 1927, Thunder Town, a 1946 Producers Releasing Corporation
film, would be Steele’s last. Two years
later, P.R.C.’s The Tioga Kid would not only be star Eddie Dean’s final
B-Western, it would be the last B-Western that P.R.C. would ever make.
Steele had begun his
career as a kid, co-starring with his twin brother in a series of shorts, The
Adventures of Bill and Bob, directed by their father, Robert N. Bradbury,
who would later direct John Wayne’s Lone Star Bs. Bob starred in Western Bs for fly-by-night
outfits, as well as Poverty Row ‘majors’, often one-offs, but also in series
like The Trail Blazers for Monogram, Billy The Kid for P.R.C., and in the final
years of The Three Mesquiteers at Republic.
Though not so well
remembered as his contemporaries, Roy Rogers, Gene Autry and Hopalong Cassidy,
Steele was extremely popular in his day, especially with young boys. Their
sisters may have liked his good looks, warm smile, and wavy brown hair, but the
boys loved Steele because, while standing no more than five and a half feet
tall, he could convincingly whip the tar out of six foot six villains.
He was also a far better actor than most B-Western stars. In 1939’s brilliant Lewis Milestone production of John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, he plays hateful Curley Jackson, working amongst some of the finest of America’s stage and film actors: Burgess Meredith, Betty Field, Lon Chaney Jr., and Charles Bickford.
In his final B, Thunder
Town, Bob Steele plays Jim Brandon, who receives a cold reception in his
home town when he returns from prison on parole. Of course, Brandon says his bank-robbery
conviction was a frame-up, and although his ranching partner committed suicide,
supposedly over guilt in letting him take the rap alone, Brandon thinks it
wasn’t suicide, but murder. And who
might be behind it all but the Duncan brothers, led by the older brother,
played by hissable villain Charles King.
And Duncan just happens to be legal guardian to Brandon’s girlfriend
(Betty Morgan), and is pressuring her to marry his kid brother.
It’s an interesting film,
and a nice performance by Steele, who is shunned by many and, being on parole
and having to keep out of trouble, has to eat a lot of dirt. This is one of the few times he wears a
mustache, which not only makes him seem all of his 39 years, but makes him
resemble J. Carrol Naish. Syd Saylor is adequate as the sidekick.
After Thunder Town,
Steele’s next part would be arguably his greatest A role, in Raymond Chandler’s
The Big Sleep. Acting opposite –
and beating up – Humphrey Bogart, he plays Canino, the sadistic henchman who
grins as he bullies Elisha Cook Jr. into drinking poison. Maybe Steele, about to turn forty, wanted to
move to character roles in bigger pictures.
Sadly, it didn’t happen. He would work steadily for years, but mostly
lending support in Bs until they petered out.
Surprisingly, in the 1960s he achieved his most enduring fame, and
showed his comedy skills, on F-TROOP, playing Trooper Duffy, who endlessly
bragged about his time at The Alamo. The
Golden Boot Awards, which from 1983 to 2007, celebrated the contributions of
actors and crew members to Western film, was the brainchild of Gene Autry’s
sidekick, Pat Buttram. He created them
specifically to acknowledge Bob Steele, whom he felt had not gotten the credit
he deserved. Along with Thunder Town
is a fascinating short also from 1946, Shanghai: The Falling Horse,
featuring ace stuntman Fred Kennedy training his horse to take convincing falls
without being injured. You can buy Thunder
Town here: https://www.oldies.com/product-view/8361D.html
Eddie Dean, maybe the
best singer of all the singing cowboys, stars in 1948’s The Tioga Kid as
himself, a lawman; and as the outlaw he’s sent after, the infamous Tioga
Kid. The movie opens with a montage of
the Kid’s privations, and PRC must have lifted shoot-outs, chases,
bank-robberies, and blown-up houses from a dozen movies, some of them silent,
and including an outstanding nighttime train wreck, interspersed with Tioga Kid
newspaper headlines. With the help of
sidekick Roscoe Ates, Eddie tries to save the ranch of feisty and lovely
Jennifer Holt, and bring his evil twin (might they really be brothers?) to
justice. A remake of Dean’s 1946 film Driftin’
River, much of the cast and plot – and footage – was repeated. The one song that is added, “Ain’t No Gal Got
a Brand on Me,” is definitely the best of the three featured.
It would be P.R.C.’s last
B-Western not because of collapse, but because of a change of business model.
The studio was absorbed into British filmmaker J. Arthur Rank’s Eagle-Lion
Pictures, to produce low-budget second-features to be teamed with their British
releases. While superior competitor
Republic would continue making B’s into the 1950s, it was the end of the trail
for most. While sidekick Roscoe Ates
would move to Republic for a time, and have a very busy career in television, Dean
would never do another movie, and precious little TV, aside from an
unsuccessful try at a Western series, The Marshall of Gunsight Pass,
costarring with Roscoe Ates, which you can find on Youtube, if your eyes can
take it. It was Jennifer Holt’s last
film as well. Tioga Kid is
accompanied by a 1949 short, Hold ‘Em Cowboy, featuring cowboys
preparing for a rodeo, and some very interesting early footage.
You can buy Tioga Kid
here: https://www.oldies.com/product-view/8363D.html
BIOGRAPHY – KENNY ROGERS
– A DVD REVIEW
The A&E biography of
music superstar Kenny Rogers, who passed away this March at the age of 83, is
built around his 2017 Farewell Concert in Nashville, and its cavalcade of stars
paying tribute to Rogers. The 86-minutes
film traces his career from his early days with The New Christy Minstrels,
splitting off to form the more rock-oriented First Edition, his ups and downs
professionally as he struggled to make it as a single, and his career-making
shift from rock and pop to country. The
interviews with former bandmates, producers, and songwriters are illuminating,
and his friendships with Lionel Richie and Dolly Parton are illuminating, not
only of Rogers’ character, but of his professional technique.
But the gaps in this
telling of his story are jarring. An ex-wife is interviewed, their child
mentioned, and Rogers’ widow is seen, though not spoken to. But Rogers had five wives and leaves five
children. While too much time is spent
on some songs, other important hits like “Coward of the County” are not even
mentioned. Neither is Rogers’ hugely
successful (for a time) foray into the restaurant business, the Kenny Rogers
Roasters chain.
Much is made of his hit
song “The Gambler”, and the fact that it was made into a TV movie. Not mentioned is that there were four
sequels, a film based on “Coward of the County”, as well as the Westerns Wild
Horses and El Diablo, a couple of crime dramas, and the theatrical
film Six Pack.
In addition to being a
wonderful singer and entertainer, Rogers also had a sense of humor, and put up
with friend Johnny Carson’s frequent needling about his chicken
restaurants. And while he had a
well-crafted image that he was careful to maintain, he could still laugh at
himself. In an article about performers and plastic surgery, he confided to TV
Guide that he’d had so many face-lifts that his sideburns were now behind his
ears, requiring him to shave there. In
fact, in later years he had so much plastic surgery that if not for his voice,
he would have been unrecognizable. As an
informal celebration of Kenny Rogers’ music, the documentary is very
entertaining. As a biography, it falls
short.
One more thing…
A lot of famous people
have passed away recently, including the great Sean Connery, and Jeopardy
host Alex Trebek. But often, important
people who work behind the scenes pass away with little notice. Screenwriter William Blinn died in October,
at the age of 83. He created several TV
series, including Starsky and Hutch, wrote the groundbreaking
mini-series Roots, and Brian’s Song. He wrote for a number of Western series, including
being the story editor on the short-lived but excellent TV series Shane,
which starred David Carradine and Jill Ireland, and is available from Shout
Factory. He gave me a great interview
about his Western writing career. Here
is the link: https://henryswesternroundup.blogspot.com/2015/05/carradines-shane-series-plus-interview.html
And please check out the
November issue of True West magazine, featuring my interview with Earl
Holliman!
And that’s a wrap!
Happy Trails,
Henry
All Original Contents Copyright
November 2020 by Parke – All Rights Reserved
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