INTERVIEW WITH MATT CLARK, PLUS COWBOY SHOW AT THE REAGAN, PODCASTS, COMMENTARIES AND MORE!

 

Matt Clark as doomed lawman J.W. Bell in 

PAT GARRETT & BILLY THE KID

INTERVIEW WITH MATT CLARK

Character actor Matt Clark has died at age 89, in Austin, Texas, after having broken his back some months ago. If you don’t know his name, you’ll definitely recognize his face, from roles in The Cowboys, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, The Outlaw Josey Wales, The Culpepper Cattle Company, The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid, Jeremiah Johnson, and if you’re younger, Back to the Future III and A Million Ways to Die in the West. From 1964 to 2014, he played 120 different characters onscreen: good guys, bad guys, losers and heroic types, all of them entirely believable. I had the pleasure of interviewing him back in 2020, when I was writing an article about Monte Walsh (1970) for True West.

Whenever I have the chance to interview someone with the extensive credits of a man like Clark, I ask him about as much of his career as I can, and I’m glad I did. I tried to follow up later on, but between phone problems and health problems, it never happened again.  While editing this interview it struck that, although not so long ago, everyone we discussed, whom I’d interviewed for the Monte Walsh article – Bo Hopkins, Mitch Ryan, casting agent Lynn Stalmaster, and of course Matt – is now gone. Here’s what Matt shared with me.

MATT CLARK:  One day I'm on the set of The Cowboys. I'm standing around the chair where John Wayne sits, and there were three or four people that follow him, his entourage, standing around. He wasn't there, and they're saying, “God damn, those damn bastards! Why don't they leave that Lieutenant Calley alone?” (Note: U.S. Army Lieutenant William Laws Calley Jr. was convicted of murdering 22 unarmed South Vietnamese civilians on March 16, 1968, in the My Lai Massacre.)  “God, the man's a hero! You never know when one of them gooks is gonna pull a hand grenade out, blow you up!” “You’re damn right! Shoot 'em, kill 'em all! Burn 'em all: women, children, everything!” So here comes Wayne lumbering up. And I really disliked Wayne at that time. ‘Cause he was so right wing, and it was during the war, and all of these statements he'd made. I liked his acting, liked it before. But when he started to get really politically crazy, I turned off. So here he comes, and I think, Oh my God, what is he got to say about this? And the guy said to him, “What do you think, Duke? We're just talking about Lieutenant Calley.” And Wayne said, “They ought to hang that murdering little coward up by his balls.” Everything went silent for a minute. And they all went well, “You're right about that, Duke! You got that one, right! Yeah, that was wrong!” I always liked Wayne a lot more after that. Anyway, let's get back to what you want to hear instead of my politics.

Jerry Gatlin, Walter Scott, and Matt Clark as the 

ranchhands who desert John Wayne in THE COWBOYS

HENRY PARKE: I understand that you're from Washington D.C. and you went to George Washington University.

MATT CLARK: I didn't go long. I made it about a year. I had this G.I. Bill after Korea. That's when I went. But I think I lasted a little over the first semester. I was in an economics lab with 300 people in an auditorium. I just got so bored, and all I wanted to do was be an actor. I said, I'm outta her,e and I up and left and never came back. So all that going into the Army in order to get the GI Bill, a lot of good that did me!

HENRY PARKE: You studied with Herbert Bergoff, did a lot of off-Broadway theater in New York.

MATT CLARK: I got a half a dozen shows, maybe all together. Only one that was The Living Theater.  (Note: The Living Theatre, founded in New York in 1947, is the United States’ oldest experimental theatre company) I was with the Living Theater for about a year and I didn't do much there. I stage-managed and I played tiny parts in a couple of things. And then I left to go into a play, playing James Joyce in The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. And that was a wonderful experience. I did that for eight months. Then I understudied Martin Sheen in The Subject Was Roses. And then I got a tiny part in a movie called Black Like Me, which was shooting in Washington, D.C. So I drove down to Washington. I had one day's work playing some nasty little Southern punk in an alley, who threatens (James) Whitmore. (Note: It’s the true story of a White reporter who dyed his skin to pass for Black in the 1960s South, to write articles about his treatment). I go down and I'm doing that. Then they call lunch, one hour. The crew, they were all going into a Ruth's Chris-type steak house. I said, that's a little over my pay grade. I was used to Flame Steaks on 42nd Street. I got a steak and a baked potato for $1.70. Remember that?

HENRY PARKE: I remember Flame Steak there and on 8^th Street in the Village.

MATT CLARK: Exactly. I went in with (them) and I sat down and I just was so uncomfortable, ‘cause I was, a hillbilly, I was a redneck. These guys were ordering prime rib, And I thought, I like ribs. I'll take the prime rib too. And they brought me this uncooked slab of meat. And I looked over and people were cutting into it with their fork. And I cut into it and I never put anything like that in my mouth. I said, and I don't pay for this? Whoo! I'm going to Hollywood! Up until that moment, the idea of being in the movies was foreign to me as being an airline pilot. I had a good time. Had a good life.

HENRY PARKE: With your background, I wouldn’t have guessed you go into Westerns, but you certainly had an affinity for them. Did you grow up with them?

MATT CLARK: No more than anybody else. Cowboys and Indians as a kid, but it was certainly a hell of a lot more Westerns available, even on TV. Now people won't watch the Western, young people, for some crazy reason.

HENRY PARKE: Unless Quentin Tarantino makes it. Your first Westerns were episodes of Dundee and the Culhane, and then Will Penny, and then the episodes of Death Valley Days and so on. What did you like in your early ones in particular? What's memorable?

MATT CLARK: Nothing. The only one was Will Penny. It was the only time I ever had a screen test in my life, and I got all excited, doing this film with Charlton Heston. So I went in, they said, thank you very much, then my agent says, yes: they want you. I said, that's great. Well, it turns out I don't have any lines. I just played a guy who gets shot by Charlton Heston, and I tumbled down the hill and into the river. And then take two, get up there, put on some dry wardrobe, bang, down the hill again. I did it three times. I thought, why were you getting a screen test just to be shot and fall in the river and have no lines? I don't get it. Then I began to realize I had saved them a bunch of money over having a stunt man, if nothing else. And I was doing Rat Patrol when that picture opened, with the same director, Tom Gries. I flew in (for the premiere), I didn't even see myself ‘cause it was halfway over. So I've never seen the movie.

HENRY PARKE: What an incredible string of Westerns you made in the early seventies, Monte Walsh, The Beguiled, The Grissom Gang -- sort of a Western, The Cowboys, Pocket Money, Culpepper Cattle Company, The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid. From 1970 to ‘73, you were in every Western worth seeing.

MATT CLARK: (laughs) I just got lucky.

HENRY PARKE: You were directed by every director worth remembering: Bill Fraker, Don Siegel, Robert Aldrich, Dick Richards, Sydney Pollock, John Huston, Sam Peckinpah -- it’s just astonishing.

MATT CLARK: Well, there were a lot of good ones. John Huston was my favorite. What a masterful person he was. And you want a couple of stories?

HENRY PARKE: You bet!

MATT CLARK: Well, no, I'm not going to give them to you, because I'm writing them in a memoir.

HENRY PARKE: I understand how that is.

Matt Clark in Back to the Future III

MATT CLARK: And you know who I loved, and thought would make a great (subject for a) Western, and I've never seen a good one about him? It was Quantrill. I don't know whether it would work today. His was kind of a gentleman, you know. When he went into Northfield, Minnesota, they didn't kill all the women. They shot a bunch of men up. I think Bloody Bill was with him, wasn't he?

HENRY PARKE: Oh yes

MATT CLARK: I just thought he was a genius and a good guy from everything I read. I must've read 10 books on him, but nobody ever has made a decent movie about him. Another thing they have never shown, which was part of the founding of the West, was the Mountain Meadows Massacre.

[Matt Clark suddenly launched into a 10-minute, detailed dissertation on the Mountain Meadows Massacre, the subject of the recent miniseries American Primeval. Although he hadn’t studied it in years, he easily recalled a very complex timeline of events, names of participants, distances between locales, outcomes and sentences.]

MATT CLARK: I thought that's an interesting story.

HENRY PARKE: Absolutely! Let's talk about Monte Walsh. Did you audition?

MATT CLARK: Yeah, I'm sure I auditioned. It wasn't like it is today. I guess there must be a hundred casting directors in LA. now. Back then there were like two or three that had any majors (studios), and one of them was Lynn Stallmaster, who cast all that stuff. When I first went out to California, I ran into Martin Sheen, who I had understudied in New York. He was with a touring company of The Subject Was Roses. And somebody wanted him to play a part in In the Heat of the Night. (Note: Matt would play that part, of Packy Harrison, in the film). This is a little sidebar; you don't have to print this. But for years I got residual checks that I guess they didn't have enough room to write In the Heat of the Night on. So it was In the Heat of the Nig.  This went on for years. Good God! Is this the way they printed checks that they send to Poitier? Anyway, that's when I met Lynn Stalmaster and he cast me for years, and he was still casting not too long ago.

HENRY PARKE: I met him a few years ago --  
MATT CLARK: He's 90, I think. He was such a gentleman, such a sweet guy, and he got me started. I wouldn't have been an actor without him. And why he liked me, I have no idea. I'm happy as I sit here in quarantine, and don't have a worry in the world. I have my S.A.G. pension and my Social Security. (Note: Lynn Stalmaster died in 2021 at 93.)
HENRY PARKE: Tell me why Monte Walsh was one of your favorites.

MATT CLARK: Just because it was a Western and I loved them, and I learned to ride in Westerns, which I really enjoy. I love when you were sent out on your horse, and you sat on your horse for an hour before the shot, and that they wave you in, they shoot it, and then you go back, sit on the horse again! The most fun I ever had in a Western was on The Cowboys, which I'm only in the credits of, but it took a long time to shoot. You remember in the opening they had a zoom, multiple lenses, multiple shots of cowboys working horses, bulldogging and everything. And everybody with me was a stunt man or a rodeo cowboy. So I got to hang around for almost three weeks with all these famous rodeo cowboys. The most famous was Casey Tibbs, who was my stunt double. There was a simple shot that I wanted to be in, because I could ride all right, which was riding with a group in and amongst a group of cattle crossing over and rounding, playing around with them and out, across a field. I wanted to do that shot, and the stunt coordinator wouldn't let me because he said it was too dangerous. I said, "come on, it's riding a horse!" He said, "No, I'm going to have Casey do it.” So Casey doubled for me, and in the shot, Casey's horse stepped in a gopher hole and went head-over-heels. And Casey was laid up for a bit with that. And I thought, wow, these stunt guys know what they're doing sometimes.

HENRY: I was just talking to your Monte Walsh co-star, Mitch Ryan, yesterday, and he said to say hello to you. (Note: Mitch Ryan died in March of 2022 at age 88.)

MATT CLARK: I talked to him three or four days ago and asked him whether or not you had contacted him.

Matt Clark in The Culpepper Cattle Company

HENRY: Good; we're all on the same page. What was Lee Marvin like to work with?

MATT CLARK: Lee Marvin became one of my best friends. We did a few things together, but I remember the first time I met him, he'd been always one of my favorite actors, in the classic sense of an actor alcoholic. But we just hit it off. When I came up, he was in a chair, telling a story and it was a funny story, kind of; not overly funny. But I was so impressed that I was actually standing next to and talking to Lee Marvin, that I kinda went, "Heh-heh-heh." And he stopped talking, he looked up at me and he said, “Well, that's a pretty guilty laugh.” And I got kinda sheepish. I said, “Yeah, I guess it was.” And I think we became friends right there ‘cause I wasn't bullshitting him, you know? We became fairly close after that. Here's something I'll tell you. Mitch (Ryan) and Billy Green Bush and I were all going to be doing a scene, and we were riding to the set together from Tucson. It was about an hour drive. So Lee Marvin gets in the car and he is drunker than Cooter Brown. It's like eight o'clock in the morning, and we start to talk about the scene that we're going to do. How should we do this? We're discussing what the scene's about. And Lee had some really good ideas. We talked about it for the hour. We finally get to the set, he steps out of the car, he's completely sober. He had the most incredible metabolism of anybody I ever saw. I've never seen anybody go drunk to sober so quick. And he turns to us and he says, “All right, we've talked about it. Forget all that crap, just do the damn scene.” And he walks away. And it was a real interesting lesson for an actor, which is, you examine, investigate the scene, you decide what you're going to do. And then once you've done all that, forget all that crap and just do the scene. I thought it was really a great, great acting lesson. So that was one thing I'll remember Lee for.

I don't know whether you remember the scene that Billy Green Bush and I are standing at the bar, we're kind of bad company. We're questionable, unlawful cowboys, if you will. We'd been fired, too. And then Mitch was also fired, so he had joined up with us, and we're in a bar. Leroy Johnson, the stunt man, comes in and he's playing the marshal. He comes in to arrest us for bank robbing. And the scene is, we are supposed to pull guns and shoot at him, but he's standing there with a gun on us. I said, “This doesn't make any damn sense. I'm not going to pull a gun and shoot somebody who’s got a pistol on me, and take a chance on being shot.” I wasn't going to do anything like the script called for, because we're supposed to shoot at him, dive, shoot at him, and then Mitch stands up and kills him. But I couldn't figure out how in the hell can we do that? (Note: Lee Marvin is not in the scene. He’s just giving advice.) So Lee said, “Matt, what if you have your right arm on the bar. Billy is lighting a cigarette, with his left gun obvious. But he reaches over and pulls his other gun out of his holster on the right-hand side, flips it, turns it and drops it into your palm, and the marshal can see your gun all the time. You're not going for your gun.” That's brilliant. That really shows a couple of bad guys that work together, you know? And I must say, if Lee did have alcohol problems, they never seemed to affect his work. Jesus, he got an Academy Award for it.

HENRY: For playing a drunk in Cat Ballou?

MATT CLARK: That's right. I never saw him that he wasn't completely professional. Never saw him screw up a line or come late to a shoot. I never saw him do anything like that. So that's one of my Lee stories.

HENRY: That scene you were just talking about is one of my absolute favorite scenes in the film. And you look so terrified, and him slipping that gun to you is so unexpected. Then it's a whole explosion of action. Your director on Monte Walsh was Bill Fraker, a great cameraman directing for the first time. What was he like to work with?

MATT CLARK: I like Bill a lot. I was a little disappointed that he didn't cover that transfer of the gun, ‘cause you really don't see it. I thought it was so important to show these guys are two really bad guys, but the film, as far as I'm concerned, it’s one of the most beautiful Westerns ever made. Just cinematically, it's shot so beautifully.

HENRY: When you were doing it, did you think it was going to become a classic?

MATT CLARK: I never thought of anything except acting, I mean, what I was doing. Just like Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, I knew that if I'm working with Peckinpah and (Bob) Dylan and all the rest of them that were in that film, I knew that I was headed for a really special experience. Or when I did Judge Roy Bean and was going to work with John Huston, I knew it was going to be extraordinary. Number one, Mitch (Ryan) and I had known each other for a long time, we knew each other in New York and we did a two-man scene at the Actor’s Studio once years ago. We went back a long way, so I was looking forward to seeing him again. But I was also looking forward to working with Lee who I guess still I think of as my number one actor. And after that, solving that question of how do you pull a gun on the sheriff who's got the drop on you, without it being just some crazy movie bullshit, I thought his solution was just great. And I thought, if he'd been interested in anything other than catching big blue Marlins and drinking, he could have been one of the best directors going.

HENRY: How about Jack Palance?

MATT CLARK: Jack was a character. We were in Bisbee, Arizona, which is a hard-rock mining town, and it's certainly not the most beautiful place I've ever been. We're in this bar, we're drinking, all these locals are saying, “Oh my God, Jack Palance!” These hard-rock miners are tough fuckers, and they're all talking with Jack. And they would look out and they'd say, “Jack, have you ever seen anything that beautiful?” And it's not really great. And Jack said, “Jesus, how do you people live here? That is awful! You think that's nice? Good God!” And they're getting ready to punch the shit out of him. He was a tough guy, but those people were not gonna be demeaned like that. And as soon as they started to get angry, he said, “I'm just joking with you guys.” He said, “No, it really is beautiful!” And they would be all, “Oh, Jack, Jack, Jack!” He would just spin them like that. He played with them that way. And I thought, you are a character. That's my big Jack Palance memory.

HENRY:  Of course, director Bill Fraker you worked with later in The Legend of the Lone Ranger.

MATT CLARK: Well, you know, that was interesting, and I don't know whether you want to use this or not, but they cast as The Lone Ranger, a guy that looked like a million dollars, Clinton Spilsbury. But he was nervous, you know. He'd never really had a lot of acting chops. And so he was scared. It was obvious that they didn't think much of him, but they kind of all kind of ganged up on him, I thought. And I said to Fraker, good God, this guy is already scared enough. You should be building his confidence rather than taking his confidence away. And I think that was the big problem with the picture, Clinton Spilsbury's performance as The Lone Ranger. Otherwise I think it would have been a better film. And I agree with you, it wasn't much of a movie.

HENRY: Is there anything else you want to share about Monte Walsh?

MATT CLARK: You know, I ordered the thing from Amazon. Sellick obviously redid it, but I made sure that I was ordering the Lee Marvin version. And they still sent me the Tom Sellick. I watched the opening of it, which wasn't bad; then I sent it back. I've done a couple of things with Tom, Magnum P.I.  He's a nice guy. But Monte Walsh was a special film and looking at it and realizing, God, I remember how beautiful this was, what fun it was.

HENRY: Was it a rough shoot physically?

MATT CLARK: Not for me at all. Another thing I remember was Bo Hopkins. Did you talk to Bo?

HENRY: I was thinking of it. His part is so small. I wasn't sure what to ask. (Note: For the record, I did subsequently interview Bo Hopkins about Monte Walsh.)

MATT CLARK: Oh, you should talk to him anyway. He always loves to talk and he's still in show business. You know, I think he did a movie last year. I'm so glad that I'm not one of those people waiting for my agent to call, but you know, I've had other things in my life. And I'm real happy to have had the joy and the luck that I had, to have done what I did at the time I did it. I can't imagine having had a better life. You know, we all enjoy being little boys and playing cowboys and Indians or let's pretend. And to be able to do that into your sixties is a pretty, pretty remarkable thing. Yes, indeed. At one point I directed a film in Ireland, Da. (Note: Martin Sheen stars as a Broadway playwright who returns to Ireland when his father, his ‘Da’, Bernard Hughes, dies, and encounters him as a spirit.) Did you see it?

HENRY: I saw it when it originally came out, but it's been a few years.

MATT CLARK: It only played for several weeks in five theaters around the country, but I have had so many people strangely enough to come up and tell me that it’s one of their favorite films. And it's mainly because of Barney Hughes's performance, which is extraordinary, and the script. And I was just given that as a great gift. But there's a character in it, Drum, who I thought of Lee (Marvin) playing ‘cause he could play any damn thing. And I asked him about it. I had done a movie, Pocket Money, with Lee and Paul Newman, and the script was by Terrence Malick, the guy that wrote and directed Badlands. Great filmmaker.

I just had a small part in that movie, where I play a prisoner in a jail in Mexico, and they play these two losers who go down to Mexico to bring back rodeo cattle. And they're stopped at the border, because the cattle have a disease, like the clap, like syphilis for cattle. But anyway, they played these two losers who bounce off of each other. I thought they were closer to who I had seen them, as people, than anything else I had seen them in. I thought it was a terrific movie. When I was playing that guy in the jail, Lee came up to me one day, I had been in wardrobe, and I had regular leather shoes, but I stepped on the back of the heels, to turn them into what are called jailhouse flippers. You just have to slip your feet in them to get around. And Lee looked down at me and he said, “You're a fucking rag actor.” And I thought he was insulting me. And he says, “I'm gonna tell you a secret. I do half of my performance in the wardrobe fitting.” So he meant it as a big compliment, you know: choose what you're going to wear as this character. Anyway, I went to ask him if he would play Drum, which would have been a real stretch for him, to play this snob Irishman; but I thought he'd have been just great. He said he would like to do it, it looked like it would be fun to do, but he said, “I can't do it. Because I have learned that it would just be counterproductive to the show, because people do not accept it. Once you're a star and you've established your personality, your star character, that's what people expect from you. And if they don't get that from you, they're pissed off and think that you have screwed them.” He said, “I'm afraid I'm already Lee Marvin. It’s who I am.” And unfortunately, when I was in Ireland is when he died. It’s a great lesson about films and how they work. And you don't see many people that have broken that rule. Daniel Day Lewis, they're very rare actors who are movie stars and big stars who can (play) completely different people. It's like Meryl Streep, these kinds of actor actors, who can get away with it, and they've done it from the get-go. They start out and they never do the same thing twice. So that's what's expected of them. Whoa, what are we going to get from Daniel Day Lewis this time? What are we going to get from Meryl Streep? And you can get anything from My Left Foot to There Will Be Blood. You get characters that diverse. But you don't find many stars that can do that. If you're looking at Paul Newman movies, he’s pretty much always Paul Newman, you know? Everybody is who they're set to be, and that's who the public expects them to be. That's why being a character actor was so much fun, because you're playing different characters all the time. You're not playing the same kind of thing each time.

HENRY: Speaking of which, I really enjoyed you in The Outlaw Josey Wales, where you got to play a nice guy for a change. There was a really interesting little world in that ghost town with you and Royal Danno, Sheb Wooley and all those people. How did you like working with Clint Eastwood?

Matt Clark and Royal Dano in

The Outlaw Josey Wales

MATT CLARK: I did three films with Eastwood. The first one, I don't remember that much. That's The Beguiled, when he was a prisoner in the Civil War. I do remember Josey Wales. And then I played in Honkytonk Man. I played his brother, I think. And the thing that I liked about him, because I thought that this is a profession, and you should act professionally. So you should really at least know your lines and be able to get through the scene. It's not that you have to do it the same way the next time, but you should be able to get through it and say your lines, so you have to be prepared enough to do that. And so many times you'll work with an actor, and I'm not talking about stars necessarily, but just other actors in the film. You'll be doing a scene and you’re all ready and you do your thing and they're doing theirs. And then they fuck the take up, and they say, okay, cut. Let's go again. And you have dumped; you've put it all out there. And you do that maybe 8 or 9 or 10 or 12 or 14 times when they can't get it right. And finally they get it where they get through, and they haven't absolutely stomped on their dick in the scene. The director said, that's it; move on. Meanwhile, you have just blown your wad 14 times in a row. So the thing I loved about Clint is that he doesn't mess around. I'm telling you, I think that if the camera doesn't fall over, you shoot it, that's a print, that's it. So you know that you’d better be ready to work, or he'll cut around you, cut you out of the Goddamn thing. So that's who he is as a director, and I really enjoy that about him. And while politically we're not maybe on the same page, I liked him as a person a lot. I think he's a good man.

HENRY: I've never gotten to speak to him, but he’s a great talent.

MATT CLARK: You better get moving, ‘cause he's gotta be ninety. (Note: at this writing, Clint Eastwood is 96.) Here's the thing I couldn't believe about him. He's a big guy, but he looks put together, not like a big fat guy. But in the scene (in Honkytonk Man) he was drunk, passed out, and we had to pick him up and carry him in the house. I remember trying to lift him, and it was like trying to lift 500 pounds. He was the heaviest, because he's so dense, I guess. And so he’s a strong guy, mentally, physically, artistically. So that's my Clint Eastwood. Give Bo Hopkins a call. Tell him Matt said that you should call him.

HENRY: I sure will. He actually,he gave me a good interview about a year and a half ago about making The Wild Bunch. (Note: Bo Hopkins died about 2 years after this interview. In 2020 he came out of retirement to play his last role, Pawpaw, for Ron Howard in Hillbilly Elegy.)

Matt's final role was as a prospector in

A  Million Ways to Die in the West

MATT CLARK: It's tough to be at that age. He doesn't work much, and he wants to. His drive for show business, his drive to be a star is so much stronger than mine ever was. I never had frankly much interest in it. I had a great life doing what I did. You know, the stars have to work all the time, and I could go to Europe for three months and work two weeks. A lot of people would like to have done it, I'm sure. Now there's so many, I don't know how you could keep track of all the actors today, with all these streaming services, you know? It’s overwhelming. Just so much shit being done all the time. When you either made feature films or you did television series for the three networks when I started, that was it, you know? There were damn few jobs. I know movie stars that can't quit and you've seen them do other things. You've seen them do commercials; they will do anything. You'll see a movie and you go, Holy Christ, this guy was a big star. What the hell? Why is he doing something like this? The reason I quit acting when I did, said “enough,” and walked away, and I wouldn't even let my ex-agent know when I was in town out of fear that they would send me out to act again. I had had it, because the only thing I was getting, the last few jobs, the parts were so not fun. Insignificant, either television crap or what movies I would get, there wouldn't be any significance to the characters. I’d play a judge, and that kind of shit. And all the parts for people over 60, that used to go to us character actors, that we would compete for, now they were being taken by stars who were too old to be leads in movies, but they can't give it up. They'll do commercials and they do things that you think, why would somebody like that do that? And I think it's just the nature of being an actor. There's something so addictive about it, and so different from anything else. Maybe it's like politicians: most of them don't know when to quit and can't quit. And I know one guy that I joke that he would do a Kotex commercial if he didn't have anything else going on.

HENRY: I remember when Ray Milland was doing The Thing with Two Heads, and an interviewer asked him, why? And he said, well, I did Love Story. That was the last one where I had a real acting part, and I proved I can still do it. And I just like to work, and I'll frankly do anything they will pay me to do.

MATT CLARK: Exactly. Fortunately I never had that disease. And I've worked all over the country and all over the world, and met so many wonderful people. And all I did was play cops and robbers and cowboys and Indians. And what a way to make a living, huh?

 

COWBOY – HISTORY AND HOLLYWOOD AT THE REAGAN!

Trigger, Buttermilk and Bullet waiting to

greet you at the Reagan Presidential Library

Here’s a True West article that hasn’t run on the page yet! We tried to squeeze this piece, about a terrific show at the Reagan Presidential Library, into the March/April issue, but that issue was just too packed! It’s running in the upcoming May/June issue, but the show is only going to be at the Reagan is only running until April 19^th! From there it’s moving to the Mulva Cultural Center in De Pere, Wisconsin. To give West-coasters the best chance to see it, True West took the unusual step of posting the article ahead of time, at their website. Here’s the link: https://www.truewestmagazine.com/article/cowboys-history-hollywood-at-the-reagan/

 

HAPPY PASSOVER!

Because this site obviously leans kinda Western, it’s worth noting at Passover that the very first Western movie star – actually the first movie star of any genre – was Jewish! Broncho Billy Anderson, born Maxwell Henry Aronson, was in The Great Train Robbery (1903), the first movie with a plot, and would produce and star in 148 silent Westerns. His studio, Essanay, was the phonetic spelling of S.N.A., and the A stood for Anderson. The link below is for Broncho Billy’s Sentence, and you may be surprised to find that Broncho Billy is definitely not a good guy at the story’s start. Enjoy!

RENDEZVOUS WITH A WRITER!

On the show coming up this Thursday, April 2^nd, Bobbi Jean Bell and Jim Bell and I will be joined by Peter Sherayko, author of Prove it Safe: Gun Safety For the Movies, and Manuela Schneider, author of Dr. Goodfellow: Bullets, Blood, and the Gunfighters’ Famous Surgeon. Here’s the link to follow the show, which airs at 6pm Western time.

 https://www.facebook.com/rendezvouswithawriter/ 

TRUE WEST – MARCH/APRIL 2026

As you can tell from the cover, the heart of this issue “The Mother Road”, aka Route 66. Please enjoy my article, T.R.’s Return, about premiering season 2 of INSP’s Teddy Roosevelt series, ELKHORN, in the actual town in North Dakota where the story takes place. And check out my review of Classic Flix’s Blu-Ray of 1958’s The Proud Rebel.  

 

MORE COMMENTARIES ON THE WAY!

Once again, filmmaker/novelist/film historian C. Courtney Joyner and I have tag-teamed on a couple of new Blu-Ray commentaries. 1971’s Red Sun is directed by Terence Young, and stars Charles Bronson, Toshiro Mifune, Alain Delon and Ursula Andress. 1959’s Last Train from Gun Hill is directed by John Sturges, and stars Kirk Douglas, Anthony Quinn, Carolyn Jones and Earl Holliman. I’ll update you when I find out when they will be available.

 

…AND THAT’S A WRAP!

 

Happy Trails,

Henry

 

All Original Contents Copyright March 2026 by Henry C. Parke – All Rights Reserved

Not to be used for training A.I.

FRONTIER CRUCIBLE – CHATS WITH THE STAR, DIRECTOR AND PRODUCER OF THE YEAR’S BEST WESTERN, PLUS INSP’S ‘WILD WEST CHRONICLES’ SEASON 5 STARTS WEDNESDAY MARCH 4, AND MORE!

 

‘WILD WEST CHRONICLES’ SEASON 5 STARTS MARCH 4!

Season 5 trailer

Bobbi Slaski as James Masterson, Jack Elliott as Bat

photo by MorningStar Entertainment
 

This Wednesday on INSP, Bat Masterson once-again holsters his gun and draws his fountain-pen for 5^th season of Wild West Chronicles. Lasting this long is no small achievement. As series Producer Gary Tarpinian puts it, “In an era in which getting a second season is tantamount to a small miracle, I have to pinch myself that we are really delivering a fifth season of this scripted, anthology series that presents the greatest true stories and characters of the Old West.” (Read my season one interview with series Producers Gary Tarpinian and Craig Miller HERE).

Lisa Eve as Little Britches, photo by Morgan Weistling

Brooke Lyne as Cattle Annie, photo by Morgan Weistling

For anyone unfamiliar with the series, they took the fact that Bat Masterson later in life became a New York newspaper reporter, chronicling the Old West, and used it as a jumping-off point. In each episode, Masterson, portrayed by Jack Elliott (read my interview with him HERE),   travels back to the West to interview witnesses or surviving participants in important, though not always famous, historical events. These are entertaining historical dramas, not docudramas with clunky reenactments and talking heads, and while writers have to invent dialogue, they hew as close to the knowable history as possible – sometimes to the writers’ disappointment. And while historical series endlessly recycle over-exposed legends like Wyatt Earp and Billy the Kid, Wild West Chronicles focuses on fascinating but less well-known figures. This season’s opener is about Bat’s less-famous brother James, and subsequent episodes are about Henry Garfias, Phoenix’s first City Marshall, and the two teenaged girls who ran off to join Bill Doolin’s gang.

Josh Feinman as Bill Doolin sure reminds me of Richard Boone

in Have Gun Will Travel, photo by Morgan Weistling

Jack Elliott’s portrayal of the cane-wielding lawman, whom he very-much resembles, produces a lot of fan-mail, often comparing him favorably to Gene Barry’s portrayal from the 1958 TV series.    

MAKING FRONTIER CRUCIBLE – PRODUCER, DIRECTOR & STAR

As I opined in my True West, Best of the West article in the January/February 2026 issue, Frontier Crucible is the best Western feature released in 2025. It’s available through Prime Video and AppleTV. The premise is simple: in 1870s Arizona, Maj. O’Rourke (William H. Macy) convinces Merrick Beckford (Myles Clohessy), a soldier-turned-cowboy, to cross Apache country, to attempt to deliver desperately-needed medicine to an isolated town. En route Beckford encounters survivors of an Apache attack: three unsavory men (Thomas Jane, Armie Hammer, Ryan Masson), a beautiful woman (Mary Stickley), and her wounded husband (Eli Brown).  Beckford can’t abandon them, he can’t trust them, and he can’t delay his mission. It’s based on the novel Desert Stake-Out by prolific pulp author Harry Whittington. ‘Based on’ is putting it mildly, as the following interviews will explain.

It's a tough, stripped-down, sophisticated, suspenseful, and very arid Western, with strong, smart characters in conflict, which recalls the collaborations of Delmer Daves and Glenn Ford, Anthony Mann and James Stewart, and especially Budd Boetticher and Randolph Scott.

In the past I’ve interviewed producer Dallas Sonnier, director Travis Mills, and star Thomas Jane on other Western films, and had the opportunity to interview all three on this collaboration.

DALLAS SONNIER – PRODUCER

Dallas Sonnier is a very busy guy, and has been for a long time. When we first spoke, it was in 2015, on the set of his and Craig Zahler’s grounding-breaking “Horror Western” Bone Tomahawk (you can read that article HERE.  ) That was Dallas’ 19^th feature. Since then he’s produced 20 more movies, including Brawl in Cell Block 99, Dragged Across Concrete, Terror on the Prairie, and a half-dozen TV series. His 2019 film VFW, starring Stephen Lang, Fred Williamson and Martin Kove, is a reworking of Rio Bravo, set in a Veterans of Foreign Wars post. When we spoke in October, and I asked if he was busy, he happily replied, “I'm having an embarrassment of riches right now. We've got Muzzle: City of Wolves, the Aaron Ekhart sequel, coming out in a couple of weeks. Then Frontier Crucible December 5^th, and we have The Pendragon Cycle coming out in January.” The Arthurian Pendragon miniseries, along with a number of his recent films, is produced with Ben Shapiro’s The Daily Wire +, and that’s where you need to go to stream it “We're in Los Angeles prepping a movie right now. And the John Rambo prequel is shooting in Thailand in the New Year. So it has just been absolutely bananas.”     

HENRY PARKE: I really enjoyed Terror on The Prairie without realizing it was your picture.

DALLAS SONNIER: In 2020 COVID hit, and I sold Fangoria (note: the horror movie magazine). I was getting attacked by a bunch of people internally and externally who were just so mad at me for being an outspoken conservative. Politics got crazy. And I don't even care about politics when it comes to movies; I just like making movies. So I get a phone call from The Daily Wire, Ben Shapiro's company. And I ended up selling them Run Hide Fight. I brought them Gina Carano to make the Terror movie. And we have a big King Arthur-style series; all kinds of great stuff.

HENRY PARKE: I’ll bet Daily Wire is very excited, that it's going to bring a lot of new people to them.

DALLAS SONNIER: Yes, absolutely. They need a big series, a great anchor series for them, like House of Cards was for Netflix, like Game of Thrones was for HBO.

HENRY PARKE: How did Frontier Crucible come about?

DALLAS SONNIER: S. Craig Zahler, he's a massive fan of the novelist, Harry Whittington. Probably six years ago, before COVID, he brought the book to me and he was like, this is perfect for your sort of modest budget; thoughtful, minimal locations, but great movie-star roles. You should totally convert the book to a script and shoot it. You don't need to change anything; it's all there. It's even the right length. Zahler is obviously a genius. And so I did it: I got the rights to the book, we converted it to a Final Draft file (note: screenplay software) and made the movie. There literally is no screenwriter on the movie. It's the craziest thing. I was in Budapest, then in Italy, working on the Pendragon series, and I had built up a friendship with Travis Mills over Terror on the Prairie and other movies that he helped me on. He just worked his ass off on Pendragon: he really was the ‘boots on the ground’ producer. He shot second unit, all kinds of great stuff.  <laugh> He acts in the series! And so I was like, “Yo, we gotta find a movie for you.” And at the same time, on the same set, we were really impressed by this young actor named Myles Clohessy. We just thought, this is Clint Eastwood in the ‘60s, in the Sergio Leone movies. I'm always trying to kill multiple birds with one stone, so I said, okay, I've got this project. I want to make Miles a movie star. I want to give Travis a real awesome script to direct: let's put all this together. Me and a buddy, Preston Poulter, put the money together. Then I brought on all my producers, Amanda (Presmyk) and Lily (Campbell) and David (Guglielmo) and Travis. And it was just awesome. We ended up making the movie in Prescott, Arizona. Of course, the beginning of the movie is in Monument Valley; and that's how it came together. It was just such an awesome, independently spirited movie.

HENRY PARKE: It's funny you were saying that Myles Clohessy is your new Clint Eastwood. I was thinking more Randolph Scott or Joel McCrea.

Myles Clohessey and Mary Stickley

DALLAS SONNIER: Well, yes. I mean, obviously in your world and my world, the world of the Ranown Westerns, and (Budd) Boetticher -- what an idol for us! The Randolph Scott sort of tale. Zahler and I talked about those movies a lot. Travis has seen all of them. He's a massive fan of the Boetticher films, so those were incredible influences on us.

HENRY PARKE: Mary Stickley, who's your female lead. I have not seen before, and I thought she was very strong.

DALLAS SONNIER: Yes. She was an absolute discovery by our casting director, David Guglielmo. And the real fear was she's got a thick Australian accent. We cast her over Zoom, and it was very unique. But we wanted someone who visually is so arresting that when Myles, as Beckford, sees her for the first time, his whole world is shook. You know, in our modern, stupid, over-feminized society, we've gotten so far away from feminine beauty; we really wanted someone who was physically beautiful, and we didn't want to apologize for that.

HENRY PARKE: Well, you sure found her, but she's also a really solid actress. Until I looked her up on IMDb, I would never have guessed that she was Australian.

DALLAS SONNIER: That was 90% of the prep work with her.

HENRY PARKE: I loved the manner of her dialogue. Not stilted exactly, but very formal.

DALLAS SONNIER: No, stilted is absolutely a positive word for us. It separates. The very specific cadence, the speech patterns, it lets you immerse yourself in a past time period, and you're not reminded of modern speech. That was a very specific design of ours.

HENRY PARKE: Right. And formal is perfectly appropriate for her entrance into this world, which she obviously does not belong in. I thought that was really effective. Were you at all concerned about her and Miles, being the two least known people in the film, carrying it?

Eli Brown and Mary Stickley

DALLAS SONNIER: That of course comes up all the time, especially when you're talking to agents and managers and casting; (you have) major movie stars in the other roles, and they're like, ‘Who's this guy? Who's this girl? I've never heard of her before.’ I have a unique approach to casting; I call it the reverse bell curve. I like to cast absolute unknowns or real movie stars. You either want to be able to bring a movie forward with a total discovery, like in the case of Isabel May in Run Hide Fight, for example: what a discovery! And then surround them with amazing movie stars. (Note: In 1883, Isabel May played Tim McGraw and Faith Hill’s daughter, Elsa Dutton, and walked away with the miniseries.) In Run Hide Fight, it was Thomas Jane and Radha Mitchell and Treat Williams. Or like Dragged Across Concrete, we got Mel Gibson and Vince Vaughn and Don Johnson; really stack the cast as much as possible. But even in Dragged Across Concrete, you know, Tory Kittles is the lead of the movie. So it's a fascinating approach. But yes, there was a lot of, oh my gosh, who? And I think it's great. I think Mary and Myles will both go on to be massive stars. And of course, David (Guglielmo) and Travis (Mills) deserve all the credit for casting Mary. And we all deserve all the credit for backing Miles and finding this starring role for him. So in the end, I think they're gonna be huge stars and we'll be real proud having made this movie with them so early in their careers.

HENRY PARKE: I loved Thomas Jane and Armie Hammer playing so against their usual roles.

DALLAS SONNIER: Thomas and I are very close friends. We got to know each other on Run Hide Fight. I could never do what he does, and vice versa, so we're really complimentary in that sense. He was my first phone call on this, and he was a huge Harry Whittington fan already. But you know, he normally would be playing the lead. To play the heavy, I think it was pretty fun for him. And he worked very closely with Travis, and Jeff Dawn, our amazing hair and makeup department head and partner on almost every movie at this point. They worked really hard on the mustache and the gaunt look. He brings a unique speech pattern to it, and that was all TJ's inner working and prep work. We knew we wanted Armie, so David dm’d a mutual friend of Armie, and said the producer of Bone Tomahawk has an offer for Armie. And the friend said, we love Bone Tomahawk! Send us the offer! In 48 hours we had the deal done, and we're thrilled to be his return to acting. Cancel culture is a horrible thing, and I'm proud to be at the forefront of fighting back against it. And I can't wait to work with him again.

HENRY PARKE: I'm assuming you had an unlimited budget and months to shoot.

DALLAS SONNIER: We did not <laugh>, we did not <laugh>. We shot the movie in basically four weeks, give or take, 20 days. We did all of the scenes in Prescott, Arizona, and at the very end we shot the William H. Macy scene up in Monument Valley. The tribal communities up there were so amazing to us. That's an unbelievable thing to do, for us Western fans, considering like The Searchers and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon and all. It's just unreal to be standing there, and then to add a movie camera. My gosh, what an amazing core memory.

William H. Macy with co-star, Monument Valley

HENRY PARKE:  What are the advantages of having a lean budget and a tight shooting schedule?

DALLAS SONNIER: There are, honestly none. <laugh>. Don't let anyone tell you that it made everyone come together. No, it's just miserable <laugh>. I'm teasing. It’s like the scene in The Alamo where Col. Travis draws the sword and the line in the sand and says, if you step across this line, you're in till the finish, till death, and if you wanna leave, leave now. When you have a very modest budget picture, and working with me is an acquired taste <laugh>. You draw that line in the sand, the people that come over the line and work with you on the movie are family for life. They're in the trenches with you, and they want to make something they can be really be proud of. And so that's it's really; budget and limitations are a dividing line to separate the wheat from the chaff, you know?

HENRY PARKE: Looking back on the film, I thought there was not a single interior.

DALLAS SONNIER: Yeah, <laugh>, there was in the book. The William H. Macy scene does take place in an office, and that's the one creative liberty. When we decided to shoot in Arizona, I said, guys, we gotta just move that scene to Monument Valley. Working with Macy was amazing. That scene was shot on the last day. We picked him up from the Phoenix Airport, drove him up to Monument Valley. He carries a ukulele with him everywhere he goes. So on the drive up, he was playing funny songs. And then on the set in between takes, he was singing for the cast and crew. I mean, what an amazing guy. He came in and just nailed the scene. Just working with an absolute acting legend in a setting that is so iconic for Westerns, and all the people we grew up loving and have such reverence for. It felt like we were amongst the gods, you know what I mean? It was just a wonderful feeling. And when it was all over that night, we went and had a drink together, and then we drove home the next morning, and that was it. And it was over <laugh>, and it's like, oh, man, I could have lived there <laugh>!

TRAVIS MILLS – DIRECTOR

William H. Macy and Travis Mills

I first met Ecuador-born, Arizona-based filmmaker Travis Mills when he was working with British Punk/Western filmmaker and film historian Alex Cox on Tombstone Rashomon in 2017. Mills made his mark on the film industry when he succeeded with his audacious self-challenge, directing 12 Westerns in 12 months.  Alex Cox, and his new Western, Dead Souls, will be the focus of the March Round-up.

Henry Parke: I was just talking to Alex Cox about when you were helping him with casting on Tombstone Rashomon.

Travis Mills: Yeah, it was back in 2016, and I did everything from producing to casting to scooping up the horse poop in the streets of Old Tucson.

Henry Parke: And now you've already directed more Western features than probably anyone else alive. Why did you want to do this one in particular?

Travis Mills: Well, I did the 12 Westerns in 12 months in 2020. Made a couple Westerns before and after that. And Dallas Sonnier, the producer of this one, showed me the script of Frontier Crucible back in 2021. One of the best westerns I've read: kind of a newer, violent version of The Tall T; wonderful characters, rich dialogue. When he first showed me the script, someone else would've directed it. He just wanted my help producing it because of my experience with Westerns. Then eventually I earned Dallas's trust and he said, “This is a project that you should really direct.” And I thought well, I'm gonna take everything that I've learned from these 15 other Westerns that I've made and put it into one film, and try to make the best Western that I've ever made with the most resources I've ever had.

Henry Parke: You did a hell of a job. It brings back the sort of Randolph Scott, Joel McCrea Westerns, but with a harder edge.

Travis Mills: That’s great to hear.

Henry Parke: Dallas told me that before Frontier Crucible, you were also a great help on Terror on The Prairie.

Travis Mills: Yeah, that was another one where I was the quote unquote Swiss Army knife. <laugh>. They brought me in to produce because I'd made all these Westerns. That was the first movie I made with Dallas. He says, this guy knows the genre, bring him to Montana. And they learned that I can do a lot of things; I performed the movie's biggest stunts. I played a character and even shot our B camera for three of the four weeks. So I did about everything you can do.

Henry Parke: Were you familiar with author Harry Whittington before this?

Travis Mills: I was not. I learned about him when I first read the script.

Henry Parke: What particularly appealed to you about the Frontier Crucible story?

Travis Mills: I think that a lot of modern westerns have lost the plot in terms of what really makes a Western. Everybody's focused on the aesthetics: the cowboy hats, the horses, the gunfights and all that. But they don't understand the thematic importance of the genre. The idea of moral codes, competing moral codes. And when you go back to the Budd Boetticher films -- The Tall T, Ride Lonesome -- that's what it's all about. You've got the hero who's got his moral code, you've got the villain who has his, those are clashing, and that's what it's all about. I thought this script did that well in a way that most modern Westerns don't. It had a hero who is sticking to his code the way that Randolph Scott would've. And you have a villain who isn't pure evil, he just has his understanding of the world and his code to stick by. And that's what makes it really interesting.

Henry Parke: With your 12 westerns in 12 months, you were working with actors who had not yet made their mark in the industry. Was this your first time directing stars? How did you like it?

Travis Mills: I directed a non-Western with stars in 2015, a movie with Tom Sizemore and Peter Bogdanovich called Durant Never Closes. And I haven't since. It was wonderful to work with Thomas Jane and Armie Hammer and William H. Macy. Thomas Jane is one of those actors that the collaboration is definitely iron sharpens iron. He's challenging me on what the scene is, I'm challenging him, and you get something better every time because of that. Armie Hammer, honestly, is my favorite actor that I've ever worked with. Wonderful guy, super sweet, very smart, adaptable to anything that I threw his way, would incorporate all of my ideas, and be up for trying anything. I would work with him again in a heartbeat. And of course, William H. Macy is a legend, and being able to shoot with him in Monument Valley was the ultimate honor.

Armie Hammer in his first Western since The Lone Ranger

Henry Parke: How did making a dozen westerns in a year help with Frontier Crucible?

Travis Mills: When you make a movie, inevitably you make mistakes. And I’ve always been one to say, I'm not gonna sit there and try to make one perfect film. I'm gonna be a working filmmaker, and learn from these mistakes as I go. And working in the genre so much. I got to see the weaknesses in writing and performances. How to work with horses, how to work with guns, how to shoot action sequences. I put myself through Western Bootcamp <laugh>, and just applied all of those things. Not to mention, when you make all those films, you meet the armorer that you wanna work with, the horse people you like, the wagon people you like. You develop not just a stock company of actors, but a stock company of crew that you can bring to Frontier Crucible. One of the reasons we shot in Arizona is because I told Dallas, this is where I have my base of resources.

Henry Parke: Speaking of Arizona, how did you like your locations?

Travis Mills: Unbelievable location. It does not sound hard to find a water-hole in the desert, but it's actually turns out that it's not an easy location to find. And some of our options were in National Forests, National Parks, with a lot of red tape to get permission. I lucked out finding our spot in Prescott, Arizona and Watson Lake. I was using Google Maps, looking at a different location, stumbled upon Watson Lake, scouted it in Prescott with the wonderful Film Commissioner, Samara Rice there. And if I had known about Prescot, and some of the locations around Prescott, years ago, I probably would've made all of my westerns there, because you can shoot scenes where it looks like you're in the middle of nowhere, but in fact, you're 10 minutes from Chick-fil-A. So it's the ideal place to be making a Western movie and not be out in the middle of nowhere.

Henry Parke: Were you concerned that your two leads will not be familiar faces to the audience?

Travis Mills: I think there's something wonderful about working with fresh faces. Because when we see people we've seen time and time again, they bring such a history with them, which can be a benefit. But also you're sitting there watching Brad Pitt or Tom Cruise or whoever, and thinking about who they are off-screen and all their other roles. Whereas here we have Myles Clohessey and Mary Stickley, and this is gonna be most audience members’ first time ever watching them. I think that they will see them as Merrick Beckford and Valerie, and be able to lose themselves in the performances. Myles does such a wonderful job of carrying the film. I know at an early test screening, people who were completely unfamiliar with him said he has very much a Clint Eastwood vibe, and that was wonderful to hear.

Henry Parke: Would you like a longer shooting schedule on your next feature, or do you prefer having a lean budget and a tight schedule?

Travis Mills: <laugh> I think every filmmaker would like a longer shooting schedule, but I pride myself in being able to shoot a script like this, which was a fairly long script, 120 pages, in 18 days. Again, that comes from my history in the micro-budget world and being very efficient with coverage and keeping things moving along. So sure, I will take more days of shooting anytime anyone will give it to me. But the bigger the crew, the harder it is to move quickly, because there’re lots of elements that you have to get in motion and keep in motion.

Henry Parke: Any favorite memories of the shoot?

Travis Mills: Two things. I can't say enough about how important prep is. I was fortunate to spend three weeks of prep with our director of photography, Maxime Alexandre. Wonderful man who I worked with in Europe before this. And those three weeks is what led to our success on the project. Because we were on location every single day talking through the shots. That time, being in the environment, soaking up the world, creating the visual style of the film, and then eating a lot of hamburgers, was probably my favorite memory. One other story. On our final day in Prescott, we filmed the entire fight scene that happens at the end, the climax of the movie, in one day. As usual, we were running out of light, and we got what is the final scene, the final two, three shots of the film and the last bit of light that could possibly be in the sky. And it's gorgeous. But those little moments where you realize, if we had moved a minute or two slower, then we might not have gotten it; this is nerve-wracking, but also there's a feeling of victory when you get it all in the can.

THOMAS JANE - ACTOR

Don't mess with Thomas Jane!
 

Thomas Jane needs, as they say, no introduction, having been a busy actor since the early ‘90s with roles in Face/Off, Boogie Nights, Thin Red Line, then a leading man in films as varied as The Velocity of Gary, Deep Blue Sea, The Punisher, and so many more.

Henry Parke: I really enjoyed your performance in Frontier Crucible, and it was such fun to see you play someone so unlike your usual heroic characters. How did you like playing someone so charming, but ultimately the bad guy?

Thomas Jane: This is, for me, an homage to all the wonderful character actors that worked throughout the fifties and sixties, that would come in and play these western archetypes that I so enjoyed as a youth. So it was really fun to slip into the role. The part is really well-written. Also I’m a big Harry Whittington fan. There's another book he wrote, Ticket to Hell, and I actually have adapted that into a screenplay, and I'm hoping that we can get that going one day. We have a little rights issue right now, but the combination of Whittington and the throwback Western story that this script follows were turn-ons for me.

Henry Parke: My favorite of your lines, because I thought it summed up your character so well, was, “As long as I'm alive, I'm going to explore every option.”

Thomas Jane: Yeah, that's pretty much the guy <laugh>.

Henry Parke: It was also interesting to see you playing a character older than yourself. The mustache really helped. How did you approach it?

Thomas Jane: The obstacle is my ego. Getting over the fact that I'm gonna age myself up on screen. And I did a great job! You know, people lived a rougher life. They aged quicker, they died quicker, and that was definitely part of the character. The hard-scrabble kind of guys that survived into older age had to be extremely tough. So part of wearing the mask of that character, that helped me get into the spirit of the thing, was aging myself up. Not only physically, but internally as well. I had a lot of fun playing the part.

Henry Parke: Was it a physically difficult shoot?

Thomas Jane: We shot in Arizona in October. The days warmed up, sometimes into the seventies, so the weather was perfect, the light was great. You get that fall sun that's lower in the sky. Shooting was a bit difficult for the night stuff; we were freezing our butts off out there, but that's just part of the gig. And I enjoyed the exterior of it all. You know, character-wise and just getting into the story, it really helps when you've got real rocks and dirt <laugh> under your feet. We didn't have sets to build. It was just a bunch of characters outdoors, which I also was attracted to. I like those kinds of stories, where it takes place over one period of time. I also like characters that don't change costumes. You can take a jacket off, you can take your hat off, but what you see is what you get. I'm always attracted to characters like that.

Henry Parke: Your director, Travis Mills, has probably directed more westerns than anyone else alive at the moment. What is he like to work with?

Thomas Jane: He certainly loves the genre, which is a prerequisite for doing a good Western: you gotta know the genre. And he knows it like the back of his hand. He gave me a couple of Westerns to watch, the names escape me, but there's one with Robert Ryan, terrific little Western. The homework on these things is always fun.

Henry Parke: With the actors clustered around the wagon for most of the film, it was very much an ensemble piece. You lock horns with Armie Hammer. How do you like working with him?

Thomas Jane: I gotta tell you, he's wonderfully astute. He is very well educated and has a spark of life that is very charismatic. He's a good dude. He's done a lot of work on himself, as we all should. I had a wonderful experience with Hammer.

Henry Parke: I was not familiar with Ryan Masson, who played your son, but I thought he was very effective and I really liked your relationship.

Thomas Jane: He was great, a young actor who fell right into it. I thought he was perfect for my son. I look forward to seeing more from that kid.

Henry Parke: Is it true that all of you did your own stunts?

Thomas Jane: We sure did. We had tussling and fighting and falling -- all the fun stuff that you get to do in a Western, and we're on hard ground. With the weather being crisp, you've got to limber up, and I didn't quite limber up enough one day, and I messed my shoulder up for quite a while. You always get little souvenirs from these type of things.

Henry Parke: Any favorite memories from the making of the film?

Thomas Jane: You know, I'm not a morning person; never have been. My clock is set in reverse, so that makes me allergic to sunrises. But on this film, you're getting there before dawn, and you're quitting when you run out of light. And the crisp Arizona air and the gorgeous surroundings woke me up every day. And that was a real joy, to participate in the lovely rhythm of the mornings, which I am not particularly used to. So that was a novel experience that I enjoyed very much.

Henry Parke: What keeps you coming back to the Western genre?

Thomas Jane: I have a love of the genre, and I'm just so happy that we're still making them. The Western has gone through fallow periods, but also rich periods. And I'd love to see a serious revival. What we need is a really strong Western; I haven't seen one since Unforgiven, to be honest. What we need is a great one, and then we'll have another period where we can spend a little bit more money making them. Most of them have become lower budget affairs, which is fine; we don't need a lot of money to make a great Western, which is also appealing. The essence of the Western is the conflict between the individual freedom of man versus the constraints and rules and laws of civilization. You can find that thread in most Westerns. That's a central theme that I'm attracted to, that I come back to over and over.

GOODBYE TO THE BOBBYS, DUVALL AND CARRADINE

We’ve recently lost two Western film legends, Robert Duvall at 95, and Robert Carradine at 71. Duvall I interviewed at some length, and he was fascinating man, and a great talent, and gave me wonderful, candid answers to my questions about his work. Below are links to the two articles I wrote about him for True West, the first an interview, the second a look at his Western film career. I’m currently writing a third, focusing on the making of Lonesome Dove.

The Godfather of Westerns

https://www.truewestmagazine.com/article/the-godfather-of-westerns-2/

Robert Duvall – A Western Career

https://www.truewestmagazine.com/article/robert-duvall-a-western-career/

Me and Bobby Carradine after a Lone Pine parade

I not only had the opportunity to interview Bobby Carradine, I got to spend time with him socially at luncheons and film festivals. He had a great sense of humor and simply could not have been a nicer guy, easy-going but out-going, always letting you know he was glad to see you. Below is a link to my True West interview with him which, like the Robert Duvall interview, is featured in my book, The Greatest Westerns Ever Made and the People Who Made Them. Also below is a link to my INSP article about The Cowboys 50^th anniversary, for which I interviewed Robert Carradine.

Robert Carradine – Born to the West

https://www.truewestmagazine.com/article/born-to-the-west/

50^th Anniversary of The Cowboys – Where Are They Now?

https://www.insp.com/stories/the-cowboys-1972-50th-anniversary-cast-where-are-they-now/

 

RENDEZVOUS WITH A WRITER

On my February appearance on the show, I joined hosts Bobbi Jean Bell and Jim Bell in discussing The Undiscovered Country with its author, the respected western historian and True West writer Paul Andrew Hutton. Here are the links.

To listen: https://www.podbean.com/media/share/pb-kwd42-1a41b82

To listen and see our happy, smiling faces: https://www.facebook.com/rendezvouswithawriter/videos/4397616237229104

MY RECENT INSP ARTICLES

Zane Grey and the Western Movie

https://www.insp.com/stories/zane-grey-and-the-western-movie/

Louis L’Amour and Zane Grey – Two Western Titans

https://www.insp.com/stories/louis-lamour-and-zane-grey-two-western-titans/

TRUE WEST MAGAZINE

Please check out our January/February Annual Best of the West Issue! Here’s the link to my article: https://www.truewestmagazine.com/article/western-movies-a-year-of-westerns-on-hold/

…AND THAT’S A WRAP!

Don’t forget that Season 5 of Old West Chronicles begins on INSP Wednesday night, March 4th! And Thursday night, March 5^th, join me and hosts Bobbi Jean Bell and Jim Bell for Rendezvous with a Writer on L.A. Talk Radio, where our guests will be True West President and Executive Editor Bob Boze Bell, and True West Editor at Large and Western Writers of America Vice President Stuart Rosebrook!

Happy Trails, Henry

All Original Contents Copyright February 2026 by Henry C. Parke – All Rights Reserved

Not to be used for training A.I.