Cindy, Charlie, and Rick were the actors I ended up hanging around with the most. And Jeff Bridges a little, too, because he was seeing Candy Clark and occasionally came to visit. Harrison and Paul were the cast hellions. They treated that Holiday Inn like it was the Sunset Marquis and they were Led Zeppelin, trashing their rooms and generally raising a ruckus. One Saturday, when we had time off, they were drinking beers and pitching their empty bottles out the window, watching them crash in the parking lot. Then they tossed an unopened beer, which exploded on the blacktop in a gusher, which made them double over in laughter. I was concerned that the shattering bottles were getting just a little too close to my still-new VW Bug.
“Harrison, Paul,” I said, “you can have your fun, but I have to go downstairs and move my car. Can you hold your fire while I do that?”
“Sure, Ronny, sure. Go ahead,” said Harrison.
As soon as I got to the parking lot, a bottle exploded at my feet. Harrison and Paul poked their heads out the window. “Dance, Opie, dance!” Paul shouted. Then more bottles came flying in my direction, accompanied by the sounds of nefarious cackling from above. I somehow managed to pull away in my Bug before they did any damage.
That incident was the only Opie-shaming that I experienced, though I did occasionally endure some razzing because, at that point, I was the sole cast member who was recognizable to the public, and the locals liked to approach me for autographs. But this teasing was all in the spirit of fun, as was Rick Dreyfuss’s penchant for calling me Ope, which rhymed with hope. For example, when he and I were trying out some improvised dialogue on each other, at George’s urging, I noted that I had never worked this way before. Rick smiled his mischievous smile. “You ain’t in Mayberry anymore, Ope!” he said.
I SURE WASN’T. And it was exhilarating. I could just feel the generational shift taking place. We were all in our teens and twenties. Even George was only twenty-eight. The people involved in the production behind the scenes were mostly San Francisco–based, like George. They had long hair. They wore beads and bandannas around their necks. Some of them were women. I had to that point been exposed to nothing but old-line, hard-boiled, Anglo-Saxon male Hollywood. This was freer than anything that I had ever experienced. There were no executives milling around, as was the norm on the sets of The Music Man and The Andy Griffith Show. There wasn’t a traditional hierarchical pecking order because George didn’t operate that way. There was order, but it was communal order. And a collective belief that we were making art more than we were a product.
George boldly ignored the orthodoxies of traditional filmmaking. We had no makeup team or individual dressing rooms. We all got changed into our wardrobes inside a single Winnebago motor home that someone had driven to Petaluma for the shoot. The female actors applied their own makeup. The male actors didn’t wear any. George shot most of the movie in continuity, as it plays on the screen, because he knew that we would look progressively more exhausted and undone after six weeks of night shooting, and he wanted us to come by our sunrise dishevelment naturally, in vérité fashion.
At least I wasn’t melting under burning lights the way I had in The Music Man. George didn’t even give us traditional marks to hit. He used extremely low light levels because he wanted to capture the slightly dangerous late-night feel of a boulevard teeming with teens on the prowl for action and trouble. We had two young cinematographers on the film, Jan D’Alquen and Ron Eveslage, but George was also relying upon the guidance of Haskell Wexler. I don’t know how he managed it, but Haskell essentially commuted nightly to us from L.A., arriving in time for our shoots and flying home first thing in the morning to do his regular job.
The camera team liked me because I was experienced and knew where to stand so that my face could catch a little light. I could look through their cameras’ viewfinders, see what kind of shot they were after, and get myself into the right place in the frame. But George didn’t particularly care about this sort of thing. He was all about spontaneity and honesty.
I was so rules-bound that this took some getting used to. At one point, my confusion got the better of me. We were shooting at Mel’s Drive-In in San Francisco. Take after take, the only direction that George gave was “Action!,” “Cut!,” and “Terrific.”