So, while Ron had this storm of worry going on in his head—personally, I always figured that there was no way that the U.S. would ever put a gun in Opie’s hands—I was feeling good about myself and loving life as an actor. The Red Pony felt like a step into a new, more mature phase for Clint Howard.
The Red Pony was not without its challenges. There was the buzzard-killing scene, which remains the stuff of nightmares and residual guilt. And for the purposes of period authenticity, I had to perform the entire movie without wearing shoes. A born suburbanite, I devoted several weeks to some pretty painful foot prep. This involved several spray bottles of Tuf-Skin antiblister spray and daily walks through dirt. But the complexity of the role excited me. Dad did his usual dialogue preparation with me, and I was starting to spend more time on my own with the material, determining my own acting choices.
I couldn’t just ease into playing Jody. The character is nothing like me: an only child, a solitary dreamer. I didn’t possess these traits. In his isolated state, Jody spends a lot of time talking extensively with the pony of the title, the horse he is given to care for. Here, my experience working with Bruno on Gentle Ben served me well—Jody was more melancholy than Mark Wedloe, but I knew how to inhabit a kid who feels that animals understand him better than human beings do.
I had an intense scene with Hank Fonda on the first day of production, my character really tangling with his. I knew that Hank was friendly with Dad from way back in the Mister Roberts days and with Ron from The Smith Family. So I was surprised by how coolly Hank received me. We rehearsed our scene a few times. Hank never once uttered a word of small talk to me, never smiled or lent a fatherly hand. Were we off on the wrong foot? Was it something I said? I expressed this worry to Dad that evening. “That’s just the way Hank works, Clint,” he said. “It’s his way of giving Totten his best performance.” Jody’s dad was frosty toward him, ergo Hank didn’t turn on the warmth for me—not only on that day but over the course of the entire shoot.
But Totten, ordinarily so gruff, paid me a wonderful compliment. “I watched the dailies from yesterday,” he said the following morning. “You did good, Putt-Putt. You did good. You just keep playing Jody the way you’re playin’ him.”
At this, any anxieties I had about keeping up with Fonda and O’Hara melted away. Toward the end of the production, I performed a dramatic scene with Ben Johnson, the crusty old cowboy actor who had just won an Oscar for playing the pool-hall owner in Peter Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show. The big leagues, Ma! To this day, I am buoyed by that day’s work and the results I saw up on the screen.
The Red Pony received unanimously positive reviews and was nominated for eight Emmy Awards, winning two. It bummed me out not to be nominated for Best Supporting Actor. But that summer, I felt like I graduated from a kid actor to an adult one with nothing but success ahead of him.
RON
American Graffiti began filming precisely when I needed a boost in career confidence. I drove my Bug up the coast to San Rafael, where the cast and crew were staying in a Holiday Inn. San Rafael was supposed to stand in for Modesto, which George decided had become too modernized to plausibly resemble his hometown as he remembered it. But we ended up shooting mostly in the town of Petaluma, whose city council proved more willing to take on the disruptions of a film crew and a bunch of vintage cars cruising their main drag with cameras mounted on their hoods.
I immediately saw that there was something of a cultural divide between me and most of the cast. With the exception of Charlie Martin Smith, who was my age, the rest of the movie’s principals were significantly older than me and much more worldly-wise. Rick Dreyfuss, Paul Le Mat, Candy Clark, Harrison Ford, Bo Hopkins—these folks were anywhere from six to twelve years my senior. I initially took Cindy Williams to be my age because she looked so young, but I soon found out that she was a seasoned, womanly twenty-four.
She sensed, correctly, that her eighteen-year-old acting partner was inexperienced at kissing scenes and a bundle of nerves about performing them. “We can’t kiss for the first time on camera,” she said. “We better practice.” With the professionalism of Hollywood’s intimacy coordinators, who supervise and choreograph sexually explicit scenes for film and TV, Cindy taught me how to make out convincingly for the camera without overstepping. She was not interested in me romantically, nor was I in her. Cindy performed this service out of generosity, saving me from embarrassment and preemptively ensuring that our scenes did not end up on the cutting-room floor.