My first theatrical agent was a go getter. Her name was Paula Cedar, and she’d come out of William Morris NYC office and opened her boutique agency in Beverly Hills. Being very efficient she was on top of the pulse of new talent and what was casting in Hollywood. I had casting directors complain about her, how she was always calling and on their backs, about what they were casting. I even had Michael Chinich at Universal complain to my face that she’d called a dozen times about me getting to audition for a one line role in Louis Malle’s ‘Crackers’, which I got, so there’s proof her method works.

She’d call around weekly to the studios’ casting departments to see what they might be casting that didn’t come out in the Breakdowns, the service that tells agents, managers and actors what is being cast, and what types they are searching for.

Paula called Warner brothers Pictures casting, and asked what they were casting that week that may not be in the Breakdowns, and Phyliss Huffman in Marion Dougherty’s office said she had a young male support role in the new Clint Eastwood western that they had planned to cast from their own talent files. Paula asked for a description of the role in case she had someone to fit the bill on her roster…a description came, and she thought of, and suggested me.

As the story goes, Sean Penn’s very talented little brother was at a Malibu party, where he met Clint, and he told him that he wanted to work with Clint. Clint sent Chris the Pale Rider script, offering him the role of Eddy Conway. Chris threw it back, saying he didn’t want to play a good guy, that he’d prefer to play a bad guy. So Clint moved him to the role of Josh LaHood, a character that attempts to rape Megan Wheeler (played by Sydney Penny) and tries to strong arm Preacher (Clint Eastwood) into leaving town. Thus the actor cast as Teddy Conway (Chuck LaFont) was moved to the role of Eddy Conway, leaving a last minute cast hole of Teddy. Paula opened the door for me to come in, and Phyliss likely knew my work from the episode of Scarecrow and Mrs King I guest starred in from the previous year. And other castings had known me from auditions for Honky Tonk Man and Ladyhawke.

I knew that when I auditioned I needed to cry on cue. Having studied various techniques of acting, I wasn’t going to leave anything to chance. I had a lock of my beloved grandmother’s hair in my pocket (she’d encourage me to go for my dream of becoming an actor, when my parents were telling me not to), I had done my Meisner ‘Fantasy Charging ’homework, and I also used exercises from ‘the Method’ with sense memory and emotional recall. I was going to cry on cue come hell or high water. 

The audition was conducted by producer Fritz Manes, who put me on tape to send to Clint, who was already in Idaho in preproduction. And the audition went well, I cried on cue, without anything but the script’s words driving the tears on cue.

A few days later I was on a plane headed for ketches, Sun Valley, Idaho to play cowboy with a fantastically talented cast in director/actor Clint Eastwood’s return to westerns, ‘Pale Rider’.

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When I got to see the ‘new town’ set, I realized that the art director on the film had made a wonderful choice by building practical built structures on the top of a mountain. So wherever cinematographer, Bruce Surtees set his camera, he have either the Salmon River, White Cloud or Sawtooth Mountains as breathtaking background. The only downside of this was the weather. The buildings were strong, so they didn’t fall down, but we were at the mercy of exposure to extreme tempratures due to the location, and with the wind chill, the temperature was often -10 degrees. Mercifully, production brought in heat cannons that the cast would huddle around in-between takes.   

 

I chose to make Teddy a bit of a want wit. He wore a belt and suspenders, and fished with no bait, nor had much going on in his head. I had his legs go out from underneath him when he got excited…when I checked with Clint on this, he said he liked it, but none of the three or four times I did it stayed in the film. 

 

I made fast friends with Doug McGrath (original casting for Spider was Rip Torn, but for some reason he couldn’t do the shoot0, and Doug was superlative as Spider, and a very fine human being. often offering me advice as an actor, making a living was hard and he encouraged me to hold on to my pennies, because he knew jobs were few and far between.

And Chuck LaFont, who played brother Eddy, was a treat to work with. He had a fine stage acting background, and we together conspired what our characters did to bring life to them on screen. We both added colors by making them a bit more simple minded, and thus very emotive during the action of the film.

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I had mutual friends with Academy Award nominated for ‘Diary of a Mad Housewife’ actress, Carrie Snodgress, and we hit it off right from the start. I often would decompress from the day’s shoot with Carrie, and a few times I had to talk her off the edge from quitting the movie. She saw her character, Sarah Wheeler, as a more aggressive protector of her child and her man, played by Michael Moriarty.

She felt that she’d fight to keep them out of trouble, and she wanted to show that through he action, but she kept getting shut down by Clint and Michael, and she was furious. I would buy rounds of fruity cocktails that would help her unwind, and let her vent, and she’d calm down, and decide to give it another day.  

 

Michael Moriarty was a very kind man to me. Always a good listener (which I later learned is why Clint cast him over many other ‘name’ actors for the role of Hull Barret), always with a good word of encouragement, and a heavenly father blessing after each meeting we had, I thought him a wonderful spirit. 

During the rehearsals of Michael’s first fight scene in town, apparently some of the actors were fooling around, and Michael ended up breaking three fingers on his left hand. He quit the film, and it took Clint several days to get him back on set. Michael was understandably upset, not only because of the unprofessional fooling around during a rehearsal that needed to be choreographed, but he had been commissioned to compose a symphony and the breakage of his fingers would severely handicap him.

I understand that Clint got him a Melodica mouth organ, so Michael could still compose in his dressing room, using his one good hand. If viewers look at his hands when Hull Barret returns from town, you will easily see that bandages on the broken fingers.

 

There weren’t many other injuries during the shoot that I recall, except a major one when Clint was riding his beautiful horse through the snow covered forest, he apparently stepped in a gofer hole, and fell on top of Clint, who suffered a broken collar bone. Thus Clint in pain while acting and directing in often freezing weather.  

 

I presented to Clint a French postcard with his image from High Plains Drifter on’t to sign for my niece. He was surprised to see it, and asked where to find it, I told him, and gave it to him, and had him sign another. 

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I brought my first wife in for a visit during the shoot, and her first day, we had lunch with Clint, and the day before he’d fired the caterer. The lunch my ex-wife, Clint and I enjoyed together, prepared by the new caterer was steak and lobster, which was cooked perfectly, on the top of a mountain, while it was snowing. I offered to Clint, “Nice weather”, to which he said, “I didn’t expect it to be snowing in October”. I stuck my foot in my mouth a few times with Clint. 

 

We had production shut down for three days due to a blizzard, wherein much partying took place.

I knew we had my biggest emotional scene with Spider’s visit to town with his giant gold discovery in hand, and luckily my heaviest emotional stuff had a few days of other coverage to shoot first.

 

And this brings me to the one time I got into the director’s face…Clint learned from Don Siegel, director of Dirty Harry, who learned from famous western director John Ford, to roll the camera on rehearsals. Which often made for more natural performances, and sometimes would save on film, in that if you got what you needed in the rehearsal, you din’t need to even do a take. This came into play during the scene where Daddy (Spider) gets drunk and goes into town with us boys. It took us three days to get the whole scene, and the first day there was snow on the ground, and it was sunny out. The second day it was grey and a blizzard was blowing, and the third day the sun was out, the snow had all melted, so production had to bring in the artificial oil based snow makers. You can see the different weather in the the scene in the cuts from us boys screaming “Daddy!” on the porch of Blankenship’s Mercantile, and when it cuts back to Daddy in the street, and then, after Daddy is shot between the eyes, when we run to him, and cry over his dead body, the snow is picked up by the wind in large chucks and blown away. Anyway, on the third day, when we discussed Eddy and Teddy getting from the mercantile to Daddy’s body in the street, we’d agreed to blocking, with Chuck going to Daddy’s head, and when we did the rehearsal with camera rolling, Chuck went to my agreed upon spot, and I had to switch directions, and take Chuck’s spot at Daddy’s head, but I slipped on the oil based fake snow, almost kicking poor Doug in the head. I didn’t break, and kept the scene and emotions going in spite of the missed blocking. When I heard Clint call cut and say “Let’s move on”, I got into his face, explaining how Chuck didn’t hit his mark, and how I had almost kicked Doug’s head, etc., and Clint said, “No, it looked good, we’ll just cut from your face.”, which meant, I had the close up. I wasn’t going to argue with that.  

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In Spring of 1985, I climbed the Pale Rider billboard on the Sunset Strip (I was pretty excited to be co starring with Clint Eastwood in his return to Westerns).