BRUCE DERN IN ‘SIEGE AT RHYKER’S STATION’ - FIRST WESTERN MOVIE SET WITH COVID PRECAUTIONS, PLUS KENNY ROGERS BIO, LAST OF THE P.R.C. WESTERNS, ‘COMEBACK TRAIL’ TRAILER, AND MORE!

 

Bruce Dern, Michael Welch, Cam Gigandet

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 directing Caia Coley

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.

Cash Parrott keeps firing!

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 Mike Feifer

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.

Bruce Dern

(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.

David DeLuise waiting for "Action!" The power

lines will not be in frame.

(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 18^TH!

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

 

‘HOMESMAN’ SPECIAL – INTERVIEWS WITH TOMMY LEE JONES, HILARY SWANK, MILES SWARTHOUT!

THE HOMESMAN Press Conference

On Monday, November 10^th, myself and at least a dozen other press types were ushered into the 8^th floor ballroom of the Beverly Hilton to attend a press conference with HOMESMAN star Hilary Swank, and star and writer and producer and director Tommy Lee Jones.   Also on hand were several members of Swank’s family, including her proud father whom, Hilary told us, had neither read the book nor seen the movie yet.  We all agreed not to give anything crucial away.

Well, with that many reporters, you never get to ask all the questions you’d like, but most of the questions were interesting, and the answers were revealing – as you’ll see.  Although I didn’t get to talk to him about it, Tommy Lee Jones is a very accomplished director of Westerns, having helmed three – more than any other Harvard man.  In addition to THE HOMESMAN, he directed the modern-day THE THREE BURIALS OF MELQUIADES ESTRADA and the period THE GOOD OLD BOYS.  With GOOD OLD BOYS he co-wrote the teleplay with J.T. Allen, adapting the great Elmer Kelton’s celebrated novel.  It earned a Best Supporting Actress Emmy nomination for Tommy Lee’s COAL MINER’S DAUGHTER co-star Sissy Spacek.  Similarly, with THE HOMESMAN, Tommy Lee co-wrote the screenplay with Kieran Fitzgerald and Wesley A. Oliver, adapting the classic novel by Glendon Swarthout.   

Q: The cinematography that you and (cinematographer) Rodrigo Prieto have created is a story unto itself.  What were your considerations in the visual design that you created?

TOMMY LEE: Well, it was a journey eastward, and the destination had to look a lot different than the origin.  And I got really tired of trying to figure out how we were going to make Galisteo, New Mexico look like bosky woods.  We thought of everything, and all manner of computer-generated imaging, and phony trees, and it didn’t work.  And we were very lucky to find Lumpkin, Georgia, where a man with a considerable amount of discretionary income tried to buy every 19^th century home in Georgia and Alabama.   He made a little town.  It was perfectly suited to our purposes – we were very, very lucky to find that facility, because of the contrast between Nebraska and Iowa.  We wanted the end of the journey to have a very different look and feel from the beginning of the journey.  Pretty simple.

Q: How did you achieve the striking authenticity in the look of Nebraska in the 1800s?

TOMMY LEE:  The first thing I should do is mention an itinerant photographer who traveled around Nebraska in the mid 19^th Century, making his living taking photographs of people and their houses.  He had a motif usually; he had a pretty wide lens, and he would feature 100% of the house, which is very useful to us in providing architectural details when we began to build these houses ourselves.  And the people lead very isolated lives; photography was not a part of their lives.  If they had a chance to have their picture taken, that was a big deal.  The whole family would get out in front of the house with their best clothes on.  And if they had a good crop of watermelons that year, they’d put a table, put watermelons on the table and cut one in half.  If they had a piano or a melodeon, they’d bring it out of the house and get that in the picture.  Granddad would be in the middle, and they’d all be there, posing with their guns – anything they were proud of.  Wonderful record of costumes, hair, make-up – very useful to us. 

HILARY:  I just want to add that my aunt, who is sitting right behind (the reporter), and my family over here, they’re from Iowa.  I was born in Nebraska; I come from a generation of farmers, too.  My dad gave me accounts of our history, where our family goes to the early 1700s in Iowa, and there is one account that is shockingly similar to the story (of THE HOMESMAN), but I only read it three days ago, that my jaw dropped.  And I just thought – wow!  (To Tommy Lee) I couldn’t wait to tell you that.  One of the things was, Indians shot one of my ancestors, John Swank, nineteen times, but he was against a rock, and he stayed upright, and they fled because they thought he was a spirit, because he didn’t fall over.

DUMB Q: But he was dead, right?

HILARY:  No, he was a spirit.  And he’s in this room right now. 

Q: Hilary, you’re playing a character with so many layers of emotion, and you’re both showcasing them and holding them back.  What toll does it take on you, physically and emotionally to play such a character?    

HILARY: The things that Mary Bee was working through are not dissimilar to what we all work through in our lives.  We all struggle to find how to be the best people we can be, and try to find love along the way.  And that’s why to me it’s not just a period piece; it really parallels everyday life for a lot of people.  And I relish the opportunity that I get to play these real slices of life, because even though it’s not based on a true story, in a lot of ways, as I was talking about in my account of my family’s history, it is real life stuff, and getting to do it alongside someone as esteemed as Tommy Lee, who has been doing it for so long, is such an honor as an artist.  To me, Mary Bee is a woman who has manners and morals and values, and she wants to do the right thing for the sake of doing the right thing.  And we, in my opinion, have really lost touch with that as a society today.  So there’s so many reasons why I love her, and so many reasons why I relate to her.  Because, I’m an independent woman myself, who people would probably call bossy.  I have a real clear idea of how I see the world, and how I want to live, and I want to see my dreams realized; I want to continue down my path.  And so finding a man to walk shoulder to shoulder with me can be challenging.  I think women today have that challenge.  There’s a lot of reasons why I love her, and love the vulnerability of her.

Q: Hilary, can you talk about working with Tommy Lee as an actor, and working with him as a director?

HILARY:  I’m not just saying it because he’s here, but he truly is extraordinary.  Tommy Lee, he comes alive in a different way when he’s in that element of doing what he loves.  With me it’s hard enough just figuring out my character, let alone wearing all the hats he wore as the co-writer and the director and the actor -- being at helm of all of those thing.  I have to tell you that I didn’t want this to be over.   I wanted it to continue going on.  TV’s not my medium, only because I like to play a character and let it go, and find the next character.   But if this could have gone into TV series I’d have been really happy.  Because I really enjoyed it in every level as an artist, and all the things I was able to sponge up from this veteran, being under his guidance.  Also when your director is also acting with you, there’s a shorthand; he knows how to say something in a few words, to get his point across.

Q: I am Japanese, and in Japan, everyone knows you as ‘Alien Jones’.  (Note: Tommy Lee Jones has for some years starred in a very popular series of commercials for a canned coffee drink called BOSS, from Suntory.  He plays an extraterrestrial studying Earth and humans, and is usually baffled or disappointed by everything he finds except for BOSS.  This link will take you to a ton of the ads on Youtube: http://youtu.be/39MILG4txBk )  You are really funny in that TV ad, but in movies, you are kind of grumpy-ish. Which is the real you?

TOMMY LEE: I’m not sure that I understand your question.  You’re asking about a dichotomy that I don’t see.  I really love doing those commercials in Japan.  I’m leaving in three weeks to make some new ones.  It’s the most successful campaign in the history of Japanese advertising. 

HILARY: (Clarifying the reporter’s question) Is it easier to be funny in those, or serious in your movies?

Q: (To Hilary) Thank you for translating.

TOMMY LEE:  I don’t know; comedy is deadly serious business.  It’s scary.  I love being an actor; I’m always happy to have a job. 

HILARY:  I think what’s great is that he can do both.  Because when people talk to me about Tommy Lee, they say, ‘He’s so serious and intense.’ Yet, maybe that’s what he wants to portray at that moment; you don’t have to show all the facets of yourself at one time.  And that’s the great thing about being an actor; you get to share all the different sides we have in us.  But I don’t think everyone can show all those sides, so it bespeaks of his talent that he can show all those sides and do it so well.   

TOMMY LEE: Hilary, I want you to go with me for the rest of this –

HILARY: (agreeing) Deal!

TOMMY LEE:  Deal.  Because only you can both ask and then answer the questions.  I’m sticking with you.

Q: Mr. Jones, how do you feel your experience as an actor prepared you to be a filmmaker, and how does it inform your work as a director and a writer.  And what did you learn from your last experience as a director that you were able to bring onto this film? 

TOMMY LEE: (to Hilary) What did he say? (after the laugh) My education as a filmmaker has been entirely practical.  I started working professionally in the film business in 1970.  And I’ve been at it steadily since; and I’ve paid a lot of attention.  I’ve worked with some very good directors, and some very bad ones, and I’ve learned a great deal from both.  From the bad, untalented people, you learn what not to do.  And when you work with highly talented people, you want to emulate them.  So as I said, my education has been practical, or on-the-job training.  And every day is a bigger, broader, brighter day than the day before.

Q:  And did you learn anything from the last film that you directed.

TOMMY LEE:  It gets easier to budget my time, hour by hour.  I suppose that’s a learning process.

HILARY:  You learned not to give me a horse between takes because –

TOMMY LEE: Because you’ll leave!

HILARY:  They started with a horse-wrangler, but he became a Hilary wrangler.       

TOMMY LEE:  I don’t want to talk about you as if you’re not here.  She didn’t know a lot about riding horses or driving a team of mules, or plowing with a double-shovel.  She worked at it until she could make a very convincing picture of all of those.  And between takes, or when we did a turn-around – shooting this way, and then it takes a little while to turn the camera and look the other way –

HILARY: --  I was like Yee-haw!

TOMMY LEE:  It got so I had to send a wrangler with a radio on his belt, to make sure she didn’t fall off in an arroyo somewhere, or have a wreck, or not know when to come back.

Q: So you learned to keep Hilary Swank on a short leash?

TOMMY LEE: No, I turned her completely loose, but I sent somebody with a radio.

Q: Hilary, your character has such a defining moment – I know your father hasn’t seen it yet, so no spoilers – but I wonder, when you read the script, did that change your opinion of her, and how you played her?

HILARY:  It made me realize just how truly human she was, and how vulnerable.  I say she goes where angels fear to tread.  And with all these valiant attributes to her, there’s still that underlying need for love, and she’s human.  And it made me realize I loved her all the more, not because of the choice she made, but because it’s relatable.

Q:  There were several scenes where Hilary sang.  Did you know that she sang, and was that a factor in her casting – (to Hilary) – because you sing so beautifully.

TOMMY LEE:  No.  The important thing is Mary Bee’s loneliness, and her hunger for some kind of culture.  There’s a very telling moment in the early part of the movie, when she’s playing this scenes so beautifully with John Lithgow.  She looks out the window through this beautiful light, and in this abstracted way says, “I don’t think I can live much longer without real music.”  And that becomes telling.  That’s more important -- we didn’t have any musical auditions.  The important thing was Hilary’s sensitivity to Mary Bee’s character.

Q: Hilary, you were singing live for all those shots.

HILARY:  Tommy Lee didn’t want to cut a lot.  He said ‘I’m not going to cut around this.  I’ll do two different set-ups of this, but I really want it all in one.’  I take great pride in the opportunities I get, and I didn’t want to let him down.  So I tried my hardest, but I didn’t know how I was going to sound like.

TOMMY LEE:  I think you sang that song six times, to get that scene.  The essential thing about that scene was a dolly track that moved 180 degrees from this profile, to head-on, to that profile.  We did that in two different sizes, medium and close, going in both directions.  What saved us from editing was thorough shooting.  Originally there were three verses to that song, but the movie doesn’t have time to stop and listen to all three of them.  So it was edited to one third of its length, one verse and part of a chorus.  It’s a beautiful scene.  But what makes it work is that 180 degree dolly track.  The camera’s always moving; there’s always something happening.  As the camera moves, the candle gets behind her head and backlights her hair beautifully.  You can’t take your eyes off of her in that scene.

Q: What were the elements of the story that motivated you to devote so much creativity and time to making this happen?  And how easy was it to zoom in on Hilary as the right actress to play this role?

TOMMY LEE: There’s two questions.  The answer to the first one is that the book offered us the chance to make a screenplay with some originality to it.  And of course, our lives as filmmakers are a never-ending search for originality, desperately crawling for originality.  Not always readily available.  We worried about Hilary for probably two or three seconds.  We met, and it was immediately obvious to me and to Michael Fitzgerald that Hilary was absolutely perfect.  Of course I had seen all of her films before meeting her.  But I knew immediately that if we could talk her into playing Mary Bee Cuddy, half of our job would be done.

HILARY: I actually read the script and emailed Tommy Lee, and he sat down with me.  So there was no talking me into it.

Q:  Is it a whole different challenge to you to direct the actors and actresses who do a whole lot of talking, and the three actresses who do practically no talking at all?

TOMMY LEE:  No sir.  Talking is just one of the things that actors do.  Movement is another one.  There are a lot of moving parts to the job of acting.  But really, directing someone who doesn’t talk as opposed to someone who does; not a lot of difference.  What you want is to get the feelings right.  Sometimes words help.  Sometimes they don’t.

HILARY: Most of the time you’re trying to figure out what’s happening between the lines, because that’s really the reality, other than what you’re saying.

MILES SWARTHOUT INTERVIEW

This interview took place before an eager audience during this April’s Santa Clarita Cowboy Festival, at Melody Ranch, at the huge OutWest Buckaroo Bookstore (run by the same fine folks whose ad and link are found at the top of this page!).    

HENRY: It gives me great pleasure to introduce Miles Swarthout, a very talented author whose writing about 90% of you have appreciated, even though you haven’t read it.  Because he’s a screenwriter.  This is the man who wrote the screenplay for THE SHOOTIST, John Wayne’s final film, and one of his finest.  And in scripting THE SHOOTIST, he had the rare challenge not only of adapting a great novel, but a great novel that his own father, Glendon Swarthout, had written.  Glendon wrote sixteen novels, and several became movies, including 7^TH CAVALRY, starring Randolph Scott; THEY CAME TO CORDURA, starring Gary Cooper; BLESS THE BEASTS AND CHILDREN, WHERE THE BOYS ARE, and premiering this May at the Cannes Film Festival, THE HOMESMAN, directed by and starring Tommy Lee Jones, and starring Hilary Swank and Meryl Streep.  Welcome, Miles.  Can you tell us a little about THE HOMESMAN?

MILES: THE HOMESMAN was a novel that my dad wrote, and came out in 1988.  That year it swept the Western genre  awards, winning The Wrangler Award, from the Western Heritage Association, affiliated with the National Cowboy Hall of Fame in Oklahoma City, and the WWA Spur Award for the Best Western Novel of 1988.  Paul Newman was the original director who bought the film rights to THE HOMESMAN.  I worked on the original drafts, adaptations for Paul Newman.  But Paul jumped around studios; the Writer Guild Strike intervened in 1988 for about six months, and several other screenwriters later on got attached to the project doing different drafts.  Paul became too old to play the title role any more, as the rugged frontiersman, and had different stars attached to play the lead role.  It just didn’t happen.  He sold the rights back to SONY PICTURES/COLUMBIA, when he had Bruce Willis attached to play the homesman, but it fell into what’s called ‘development Hell.’  Nothing happened to it for a number of years – they couldn’t get it financed.  Paul Newman died of cancer a few years after that.  But Tommy Lee Jones was looking around to direct and star in another Western, and he had the same talent agency (as Paul Newman), Creative Artists, that remembered this book that Paul Newman had tried a number of times to get made with different stars.  Tommy got the financing from his buddy, the French director Luc Besson, who has his own films studio outside of Paris, and his own film distribution company.  Luc also financed Tommy Lee’s last western that he directed in 2005, THE THREE BURIALS OF MELQUIADES ESTRADA.  That was a contemporary western shot down in Texas.  That won a couple of awards at Cannes in 2005.  Creative Artists helped Tommy put together the cast for THE HOMESMAN.  It’s fantastic: Hilary Swank, the two-time Oscar winner is Tommy’s co-star.  Tommy Lee Jones is an Oscar winner for THE FUGITIVE with Harrison Ford, Best Supporting Actor.  And they’ve got Meryl Streep in the movie – she’s got a cameo role.  And Streep’s youngest daughter, her name is Grace Gummer; she has a bigger part in the film.  John Lithgow, two-time Oscar nominee is in it.  James Spader, who’s in the NBC hit THE BLACK LIST is in the film.  They’ve got an Oscar-nominated cinematographer, and a two-time Oscar-nominated composer, Marco Beltrami, has done the music.  

HENRY:  Speaking of the cast, I understand that Barry Corbin is in the film.  Hasn’t he worked with Tommy Lee Jones before?

MILES: He was in NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN, playing Tommy Lee’s father in that. 

HENRY:  The premise of THE HOMESMAN is a little outrageous.  Could you give us a summary of it?

MILES:  The Homesman is a claim jumper.  It’s set in the 1850s, the Great Plains state of Nebraska.  He’s a claim jumper, and some of the local residents take offense that he’s sitting on one of their buddy’s claims, while their buddy has gone back east to find a wife.  They blast him out of this sod home that he’s roosting in, and almost hang him, and a spinster woman, Hilary Swank, comes along.  She decides to let him go, because she’s just been chosen by a lottery system by the community, in this small frontier farming town on the Great Plains, to drive back east four women who have gone insane after this very hard winter.  They’ve gone crazy, and they can’t take care of them in this remote area, so someone has to drive them across the Missouri River, the Big Muddy, and back to civilization.

HENRY: Have you run into any complaints about sexism – why do the women go crazy, and not the men?

MILES: Historically some of the men went crazy, too.  They became raving alcoholics; they couldn’t keep them in the local jails.  If they were disruptive and making people angry or uncomfortable, somebody’d just shoot them, but they wouldn’t do that to a woman.  This is a very unusual story, a female-oriented Western, a mismatched couple running this wagon east with some women who have gone insane. 

HENRY: Let’s talk about THE SHOOTIST.  What was it like to adapt a novel to a screenplay with a man, not just the author, but your father, looking over your shoulder?

MILES: Well, that was my first screenplay adaptation, and you’re talking with the creative genius who made up the story in the first place, so he’s got a lot of good input.  My dad did not write screenplays.  He worked on the very first one for six months at Columbia Pictures, his best-selling novel, THEY CAME TO CORDURA.  He was out in Hollywood, and he got job offers after that, to work for Burt Lancaster’s company Hecht, Hill and Lancaster, but he turned them down.  He said no, I’m going back to Michigan State in East Lansing, to teach honors English.  And I’m going to write other books, and I don’t want people telling me how to make changes and how to write stuff.  So he gambled, and that turned out very well for him.  His second novel was WHERE THE BOYS ARE, 1960, and it was a big hit for MGM, with Connie Francis singing the theme.  But your question was about adapting THE SHOOTIST.  And of course I showed him drafts, and we discussed stuff.  I did get a screen credit on that.  They did make a lot of changes.  Don Siegel, the director, had another writer that he’d worked with before, a guy named Scott Hale, who was making changes on the set constantly, for Jimmy Stewart and John Wayne, and big stars with big egos who wanted things adjusted and changed.  So he wrote just enough of the rewritten script to get screen credit on the film.  But luckily, it turned out, even though it was a very difficult shoot, in Carson City, Nebraska, and on the backlot at Warner Brothers Studio in Burbank.  They had a lot of problems; Wayne came down with the flu and an ear infection.  And he was in the hospital for a couple of weeks.  They shut down filming, and he came back and got sick again, and they put him back in the hospital.  They didn’t know if he was going to live, and if they could even finish the movie.  So a lot of stuff had to be adjusted.  It was the last film he ever made.  His health deteriorated after that, and about two years later, John Wayne died.  But the movie, even though he was feuding all the time of the filming with this tough director, Don Siegel, turned out very well.  They had a great supporting cast.  John Wayne was playing a gunfighter who was dying of cancer in the film.  It was prostate cancer in the film.  But Wayne had lost one lung a couple of years ago to lung cancer, and he knew at the time of shooting THE SHOOTIST that his cancer had come out of remission, and he didn’t tell the doctors and he didn’t tell the filmmakers.  So he was obviously in some pain while making this movie.  He’s playing a gunfighter dying of cancer, and he’s got cancer at the same time: talk about a movie that was hand-tailored for a famous actor as his last film.  It just turned out very well.

HENRY:  It certainly did.  As you said, your father did not write for the screen, but by the time he wrote THE SHOOTIST, he was well aware that he had a real good chance of having his novels filmed.  He’d had several movies already done very successfully.  Do you think he had a movie in mind as he was writing the book?  Do you think he thought of John Wayne?

MILES:  No, he didn’t think of John Wayne.  The original guy that the two producers, Bill Self and Mike Frankovich wanted to play the Shootist, was George C. Scott.  And George C. Scott read the book and screenplay and said, “I’d love to do this.  Don’t change one word of the script.”  We thought that sounds great.  But the producers took it around to all the studios with George C. Scott attached as the shootist.  And all the studios went, ‘No, General Patton can’t be a cowboy.’  He’d already won his Oscar playing Patton, and they wouldn’t bankroll it.  But Wayne at the same time had heard about this story, and he started lobbying for the role, because he was the right age, and with Wayne attached as the shootist, they got half of the eight million dollar budget from Paramount Pictures, for the North American rights.  And they got the other half of the money from the famous Italian producer Dino de Laurentiis.  He made that big monkey movie with Jessica Lange – KING KONG, and a whole bunch of other movie.  Dino didn’t speak English very well, so he couldn’t read it; they had to tell him the story.  And he said, “John Wayne, cowboy?  Ya, he be good.”  The Duke was cast, and then a whole bunch of really good ‘name’ supporting actors – Jimmy Stewart, Lauren Bacall, Ron Howard, Hugh O’Brien, all worked at lower than their normal salaries to be in this, because word had gotten around that Wayne’s health was pretty shaky, and it might be his last picture.  Hollywood supports its own – particularly its legends like John Wayne.  So that’s how they got a great cast, and the rest is film history.   It’s now considered to be one of his five best Westerns.  It’s past the test of time.   

HENRY:  I was just reading where Harry Carey Jr. was saying that while John Wayne got his Oscar for TRUE GRIT, and deserved it, he deserved it even more for THE SHOOTIST. 

‘THE SHOOTIST’ SPOILER ALERT!

HENRY: The book is a very tight 158 pages, but still, no book reaches the screen without edits.  What sort of changes needed to be made, to make it into a movie? 

MILES:  You have to cut out some of the characters.  You have to trim it to get about a 120 page script – about a page a minutes.  The ending of the novel is different than the ending of the movie.  John Wayne dictated the ending of the movie, and there was a lot of controversy over this.  In the ending of the movie, John Wayne has this big shootout in this fancy saloon.  And he shoots Hugh O’Brien, and he shoots Richard Boone – who was a late addition.  That was a different character than the character in the book.  And John Wayne, after shooting these guys, and being wounded, and already knowing he’s dying of cancer – sort of committing suicide – the bartender comes out with a shotgun and shoots him – blows him in the back.  So he’s dying, when Ron Howard comes into the saloon, the bartender is reloading.  Ron takes Wayne’s Remington .44, and shoots the bartender, and kills the guy who shot John Wayne.  And then, as dictated by the Duke, Ron throws the gun away.  This is a kid, the Shootist is his hero, and he wants to be a gunfighter, too.  But now that he’s killed a man, he throws the gun away, renounces violence, and goes home with his mother, played by Lauren Bacall.  The problem with this ending is there’s no possible sequel.  Hollywood loves sequels.  In the book, John Wayne is dying.  The kid doesn’t shoot the bartender, but John Wayne asks Ron Howard to kill him, ‘Finish me off.’  And the Ron Howard character says ‘okay,’ and he shoots him – it’s a mercy killing, and Wayne asked for it.  And they had already made a deal in advance that Ron gets his two Remington .44 pistols.  He takes them, and walks outside of the saloon – it’s a great ending passage.  And people are asking if they can buy the guns, and what happened in there.  The Shootist has killed all the hard-cases in El Paso, and suddenly, the kid is the one who killed The Shootist.  And that’s the sequel –

HENRY: If I ever heard one!  Somebody should write it!

MILES:  (laugh) My new novel is called THE LAST SHOOTIST, and it’s coming out in October from Forge Books-MacMillan in New York City.  And it’s the next six months in this kid’s life.  The Shootist is dead, but this kid has got John Wayne’s matched pistols, and he’s got to flee 1901 El Paso, because the sheriff is after him.  The sheriff wants those guns because they’re very valuable.  The kid’s on the run, and he goes through various adventures in New Mexico with a wannabe novelist, and then on to Bisbee, Arizona, which was a copper-mining boom-town at that time.  The character of the Shootist, my dad loosely based on John Wesley Hardin, who killed 44 men, and was a real gun-spinner.  Hardin in real life had a special vest made up with leather pockets, so that he could cross-draw his guns.  They tried to do that for John Wayne in the movie, made a special vest for him, but Wayne was overweight and too big, and couldn’t get the guns out easily from under his overcoat, so they had to go back to the six-guns in holsters on his waist. But I’ve changed that in my sequel.  The kid is eighteen years old and has terrific hand-eye coordination, and he is the last Shootist.  If you like the original, hopefully you’ll like my sequel.         

HENRY: Speaking of your novels, I notice you have another, THE SERGEANT’S LADY. 

MILES:  That was my first novel.  That was based on an extension of one of my dad’s short stories for the old Saturday Evening Post, and that won a Spur back in 2004 as the Best First Western Novel of the Year, from the Western Writers of America.

THE LAST SHOOTIST is now available, and if you’d like a preview, go HERE, to Miles Swarthout’s site, where you can read the end of THE SHOOTIST and the start of THE LAST SHOOTIST.

WED. COWBOY LUNCH A TRIBUTE TO AUDIE MURPHY AT THE AUTRY!

Every third Wednesday of the month, Rob Word presents ‘A Word on Westerns’ at the café at the Autry.  A delicious repast will be followed by a discussion of the most decorated American soldier of the Second World War, who went on to be a popular Western movie star.  I don’t know who the guests will be, but Rob always gets great speakers.  It’s a free event, but you buy your own lunch, and it always is packed, so if you want a seat inside, get there early!  Lunch is officially at 12:30.  Enjoy!

HAPPY BIRTHDAY CLU GULAGER!

Happy 86^th birthday to the great Clu Gulager, who most of us Rounders remember best as Sheriff Emmett Ryker on THE VIRGINIAN, but who also starred as Billy the Kid on THE TALL MAN, and in dozens of movies and TV episodes in all imaginable genres.  I particularly enjoy him in THE LAST PICTURE SHOW, and in THE KILLERS, where he matter-of-factly introduces himself and partner Lee Marvin to Angie Dickinson, while Lee Marvin is shoving her out of a window.  As a Cherokee, and as a working cowboy before he became an actor, he brings an authenticity to Western roles as few actors can.  He’s also one of the most interesting, entertaining and insightful people I’ve ever had the pleasure of talking to.   

GLEN A. LARSON DIES – CREATED ‘ALIAS SMITH AND JONES’

Peter Duel and Ben Murphy

Writer, producer and composer Glen A. Larson is best remembered for series he created in the   1980s, including KNIGHT RIDER, BATTLESTAR GALACTICA, and MAGNUM P.I., but in 1971 he created the Western adventure comedy ALIAS SMITH AND JONES.  Starring Peter Duel as Hannibal Heyes and Ben Murphy as Kid Curry, notorious train-robbers, they were offered pardons if they could keep their noses clean for a year, and they adopted Smith and Jones as cover names.  

THAT’S A WRAP!

‘HELL ON WHEELS’ SPOILER ALERT!

Kasha Kropinski as Ruth

Hey, I didn’t mention that HELL ON WHEELS has been renewed for one last season, and will be jumping to fourteen episodes, one more than this year, and four more than all the others.  Last night’s show was excellent, but I’m a bit heart-broken at losing Ruth.  We all know she should have ended up with Cullen, but I guess we’re lucky she lasted this long.  I remember my sister and I as kids watching BONANZA or THE BIG VALLEY.  If any of the sons got serious with a woman, we’d place bets on whether she was a con-woman, or if she’d be dead by the end of the hour – it was always one or the other.  But losing Ruth and Elam in one season is pretty cruel.  Have a great week anyway!

Happy Trails,

Henry

All Original Contents Copyright November 2014 by Henry C. Parke – All Rights Reserved