The Boys : A Memoir of Hollywood and Family(63)
The Tanner parents were played by Steve Forrest, a handsome actor who later starred in the 1970s TV series S. W.A.T., and Vera Miles, who had played Clint’s mother in the Gentle Giant movie. The four of us were coleads, but my story was the through line: Virgil transforms from a city boy into a capable rancher who has the guts to shoot Ab Cross dead at the movie’s climax, right when Ab is about to kill Virgil’s father.
It was a coming-of-age story for my character and a coming-of-age summer for me. We shot the movie in July and August of 1969 on location just outside the town of Jackson Hole, Wyoming. In a circumstance that was by now familiar, Dad was given a supporting role, as one of Ab’s henchmen, and was hired in an official capacity as a dialogue coach for Clint and me. Quickly earning the trust of the movie’s higher-ups, he also became an informal script consultant, drawing upon his ranching background and knowledge of the western frontier to correct certain turns of phrase that the writers got wrong.
Mom came along for the duration, too. We had all been together in Miami for Gentle Ben, but Mom and I were only visitors to Dad and Clint’s show. This time, the entire family was in on the same adventure. Along with the rest of the cast and crew, we stayed in town in a two-story motel called the Grand Vu.
The director was Robert Totten, who was to become a significant figure in our lives. Totten was a Sam Peckinpah–like figure whose career didn’t turn out as well as Peckinpah’s. Like Peckinpah, who earned his stripes as a director on the TV western The Rifleman, Totten established himself directing episodes of Gunsmoke. He, too, aspired to create muscular, unsentimental neo-western movies, but he never quite turned that corner. He was too self-destructive, too prone to rage and heavy drinking.
He was only thirty-two when we met him, though, still full of promise. Totten was bearded, short, and stout, built like a fireplug. And a little intimidating. But that was part of why I liked him—he was the first director not to treat me with kid gloves. The second day of shooting, we filmed a scene where I unloaded some chickens in cages from our horse-drawn wagon. I wore a tweed traveling suit, and I noticed that some chicken poop had gotten on one of my cuffs and left a smear.
We were about to roll camera when I raised my hand to get Totten’s attention. “Do we need to do something about this?” I asked, displaying my cuff.
Totten had no patience for my query. “What are you, a city boy?” he said. “You got a little chicken shit on your arm. Get over it!” Then he shouted, “Roll!”
This was more than a little moment—he issued a challenge to me to toughen up and get on with my work like a man. And I dug it. I was taken by Totten’s swagger and the buzz that he clearly got from filmmaking. He had been a working director since his early twenties, which impressed the hell out of me. Suddenly, my mental timeline for when I would direct my first feature was compressed from decades to years. When Totten learned of my aspirations, he softened—a little—and took me under his wing, explaining the ways he positioned his cameras and composed his shots, and telling me how he varied his directorial approach from actor to actor, depending upon their psychological makeup and the needs of a scene.
Totten was a good draftsman and occasionally sketched out his scenes in advance. For example, the movie has a big tornado sequence. He drew his vision of it on a large pad, plotting the series of shots he needed while discussing his ideas with the cameraman. I watched and listened, rapt. This was the first time I truly absorbed a director’s explanation of the options at his disposal and the choices he was making. The only other director I had seen so deeply engaged in the cinematic process was Vincente Minnelli, when we made The Courtship of Eddie’s Father. But that was way back in 1962, when I was eight years old, too young to appreciate what I was witnessing. To teenage me, Totten was a film guru.
Also, I was struck by his wife, Sandy, who was petite, pretty, friendly, elegant, and—file this away for future reference—had beautiful red hair.
CLINT
We were all enamored of Bob Totten. He called me Putt-Putt, because whenever the movie required me to run across the fields and corrals, I ran with determination but not a lot of speed. He said that I reminded him of a little scooter that putt-putts along the road.
As someone who has made a lot of B-grade movies, I can tell you that no director actually sets out to make one. Even if the budget is tiny and it’s a slasher flick, the filmmaker believes from the get-go that he is making the ultimate, most top-shelf slasher flick. Totten was like that with The Wild Country. He was dealt the hand of directing a Disney B western, but he was going to shape it into an important piece of cinema.
It didn’t quite work out that way, but it’s a decent film with some strong performances. Ab Cross was played by Morgan Woodward, a serial Hollywood bad guy whose menacing presence on-screen belied how gentle he was in real life. The scary-looking but benevolent trapper who befriends the Tanners was played by Jack Elam, one of the foremost character actors in the western genre. If you look him up, you’ll recognize him—he had a long face, bushy eyebrows, and a wonky eye that was his signature. Someone had stabbed it with a pencil was he was a kid.
Totten and Dad formed a bond, because they shared a pioneer work ethic and were most at home in westerns. Whenever I looked at Dad as an actor, I thought cowboy, horseman, farmer more than private detective. The western was already in decline by the time we did The Wild Country, but he and Totten were interested in seeing where they could take the genre.