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.

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