The Boys : A Memoir of Hollywood and Family(61)

My acting career was still going great guns. I found a welcoming home on the westerns that survived into the turn of the decade, such as Gunsmoke, The Virginian, and Lancer. And I was getting sitcom work, too. One night, in fact, I was on two of them the same evening—as the jerk who tormented Johnny Whitaker in an episode of Family Affair on CBS and as Felix Unger’s would-be protégé in an episode of The Odd Couple on ABC. The premise was that Felix had joined the Big Brothers program and I was the kid he was assigned to mentor. The complication, true to life, was that I preferred to hang out with his roommate, the sportswriter Oscar Madison.

Dad was so thrilled by my double occupancy in prime time that Thursday that he took out an ad in the trades with a big photo of my chubby-cheeked mug:


CLINT HOWARD

Guest stars . . .

as a Bully on

“Family Affair”

TONIGHT

7:30 CBS

&

then swing

back to a nice

Likable Kid

with a

problem on

“Odd Couple”

TONIGHT

9:30 ABC



The name of my agent, Marguerite Ogg, was helpfully offered at the bottom of the ad. The trade magazines were a serious force, read by every decision maker in our industry, so this was a big deal. And Dad’s strategy worked. I kept getting parts in good TV shows: Marcus Welby, M.D., Night Gallery, Nanny and the Professor, The Streets of San Francisco. Puberty had not yet hit me, and no doors were slamming in my face.

But it was only a matter of time before I would go through the same thing that Ron did.





RON


One saving grace of this unsettling period is that it coincided with a great era in filmmaking. I was able to catch a new wave of American directors asserting itself. Mike Nichols’s The Graduate, Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde, William Friedkin’s The Boys in the Band, Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H—I took ’em all in with Dad. From a storytelling perspective, movies worked differently than TV. Whereas The Andy Griffith Show earned its viewers’ interest and built long-term loyalty through simple stories and deep, cumulative character development, these films were rigorously planned to transport their audience in a single immersive viewing.

Dad was permissive about what I watched. Some of these movies were explicit in their depictions of violence and sexuality. Andy Griffith was mildly scandalized when, in our show’s later years, I told him that I had seen Bonnie and Clyde with my father one weekend. But Dad thought that my viewing such pictures would be useful in my maturation process as an actor, aspiring filmmaker, and young man. I wasn’t one of those kids who cringed at watching a sex scene while seated next to his father. I knew what movies were, art created through illusion. And Dad knew that I knew. These excursions to the movies became a nice way for us to hang out and talk about life in general, not just storytelling and filmmaking.

I also got into the great antihero movies of the time, such as Sergio Leone’s The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly and Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch. And I loved the exploitation flicks that Roger Corman churned out by the bushel through his New World Pictures production company. Dad and Hoke Howell actually wrote a script tailored to Corman’s sensibilities called Arkansas Wipeout, in which a pair of country-boy moonshiners outwitted some stuck-up city sophisticates. Corman didn’t go for it, but this shows you how aligned Dad and I were in our tastes.

I lost myself in movies and became an ever more dedicated student of them. In that prestreaming, precable, pre-VCR era, I was a particularly avid watcher of Million Dollar Movie, a syndicated program that over the course of a week ran the same vintage movie over and over, like a repertory cinema house. This allowed me to study King Kong (the 1933 original), Damn Yankees, and The Time Machine the way that Egyptologists study hieroglyphs, decoding them and breaking them down into their component parts.

It was on my third viewing of Henry Levin’s 1959 movie Journey to the Center of the Earth that I first stumbled upon an exercise I still use today. I had left the living room with the TV’s sound turned low, and when I returned for the “exciting conclusion” that the program’s announcer always promised, I came upon my favorite action sequence, in which the protagonists encounter a convincingly real-looking dimetrodon dinosaur. I had long wondered how the filmmakers pulled this off. With the sound down, I could more easily decode the techniques and effects at work. I noticed that the monstrous dinosaur was actually an iguana of some kind with a spine sail glued to its back. I figured out that the ruins of Atlantis were really carefully rendered matte paintings. I identified the camera setups that the filmmakers used to stage the sequence and make the audience believe every second of it. Thereafter, I lowered the sound whenever there was a scene that I wanted to study closely.

With my own money, I bought a Bauer Super 8 camera, intent on putting my newly accumulated filmmaking knowledge to use. I would make a Peckinpah-style splatter pic with a few Old West nods to Leone and a killer title: Cards, Cads, Guns, Gore, and Death.

The plot of this two-minute silent masterpiece-in-the-making was simple. Three cowboys are playing poker in a dusty saloon. One takes exception to the other’s winning hand and shoots the winner dead. Then the third guy shoots the shooter dead. A fourth guy, the sheriff, comes upon the scene and shoots the third guy from behind, killing him. Then he shakes his head in disgust, lamenting the waste of it all. The end.