I was freer on set, especially on the days when The Andy Griffith Show was filming at the Forty Acres backlot, where we shot our exteriors. At home, I had a sleek banana-seat Sting-Ray bike but basically nowhere to ride it. Opie’s bike at Forty Acres was a heavier, more old-fashioned Schwinn model with bigger wheels and fatter tires, but I was allowed to pedal it to my heart’s content when I wasn’t needed in a scene.
Forty Acres had so much scenery to look at—literal TV and movie scenery. I rode by the railroad tracks from Gone with the Wind, the marketplace from The Ten Commandments, Tarzan’s jungle, the camp from Hogan’s Heroes. These sets and villages mesmerized me. They seemed to hold stories, secrets. Dad used to tell me tales of his lonely farm-boy childhood, and how, in his isolation, he was forced to dream up his own adventures, about knights in shining armor and heroic cowboys outdueling the black hats. In a way, my Forty Acres bike rides were my version of Dad’s childhood experience—they fired up my imagination.
I delighted even in the junky remnants of old movie productions: shredded cables, coiled-up lengths of rope, the spent carbon rods of the old-fashioned arc lights that the studios used long ago. In these inert things I picked up on the vibrations of decades of film and television history: something much bigger than me, something important. And something that I was now a part of.
I’ve never outgrown this habit of wandering. I did it when I was on Happy Days, pacing alone through the historic Paramount lot as I grappled with big decisions about my future as an actor and director. And I do it now. Whenever I have a creative meeting at a Hollywood studio, I make a point of stealing some time afterward to walk around the soundstages and what is left of those backlots. （Forty Acres was itself sold off and bulldozed in the 1970s. Today it houses office parks and light industry.）
On these walks, I find myself soaking up the ghosts and the atmosphere—and, if it’s a place where I have acted or directed, enjoying the personal memories that flood my mind. I think of the people who worked in these places, the conversations they had, the creative problems they solved, and the range of intense emotions that the talent and crew must have felt in these spaces. It’s soothing and settles my nerves. It reminds me of the calm and joy that Forty Acres brought me fifty-plus years ago.
CLINT
I was basically born into a world of lights, cameras, and boom mics, so I, too, am in my comfort zone on a set. Same with filming on location, for that matter. The first time I traveled was when I was six. I was cast as the guest lead in a 1965 episode of Bonanza entitled “All Ye His Saints.” This was no small thing. Bonanza was the top-ranked show on television that year.
Dad and I got to fly up to Lake Tahoe, where they filmed the Ponderosa Ranch scenes and other exteriors. I thought it was the coolest thing in the world that you could just step off a plane and play slot machines right there in the airport. Dad was conservative about betting and gambling, but he couldn’t resist—he put about a buck’s worth of nickels into the machine. No jackpots were hit. Dad just said, “Yeah, it’s true, you can’t win on these things,” and that was pretty much the only time I ever saw him gamble.
More importantly, this was my first time working with Dad intensively on dialogue preparation. I played a kid named Michael Thorpe whose rancher dad is accidentally wounded, potentially fatally, when his own gun goes off in a barn. Michael hears the doctor say “Only God can save him now,” and the rancher’s right hand, a sage Indian named Lijah, points to a mountain in the distance and tells the boy that God lives “high in the mountains, all alone.” Michael takes a mule from the barn while all the adults are sleeping and sets out for the mountain to seek out God and plead for his father’s life. He encounters a mysterious man who looks the part—wavy white hair, long white beard—but the man is actually a hateful, murderous fugitive, played by the character actor Leif Erickson. Little Joe and Hoss, played by Michael Landon and Dan Blocker, get on their horses to find and save Michael.
This was heady stuff for a six-year-old. In one scene, I had to say “I hate God!” when Lijah explained that everything that happened in life, including Michael’s father’s injuries, was a part of God’s plan. Beyond that, I simply had a ton of screen time and dialogue in this episode, which also required me to ride the mule and execute a clean dismount like a High Sierra kid who’d been around horses and mules his whole life. Dad was my tutor in that technique as well.