CLINT
Yep, big surprise. I reported for duty, the Robert De Niro to Ron’s Marty Scorsese. I played Card Player #3, the one who got shot in the back. My friend Scott Greene manned the bicycle pump. His brother, Steve, played the sheriff. The other two cardplayers were Hoke Howell’s sons, Scott and Stark.
Dad sometimes included me in his moviegoing outings with Ron. When we went to see The Wild Bunch, I witnessed in real time the idea for Ron’s splatter pic sparking in his brain—an expression of excitement came over his face. At home, I helped him work out the logistics of using the tubes and the pump. Then we scrounged up hats, bandannas, ponchos, and sunglasses so that the cardplayers looked convincingly outlawlike. But our attempts at authentic period costuming were compromised by budget constraints. We all wore white T-shirts because we needed cheap clothes that we could sacrifice to the ketchup-stain gods.
Cards, Cads, Guns, Gore, and Death is a good piece of guerrilla filmmaking. Ron’s opening shot is an impressive piece of camerawork. Starting close on a pile of poker chips, Ron then pulled back and followed the action from player to player. It’s like a kid version of the crane shot that opens Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil. And the splatters turned out really well. We nailed the “gore and death” part.
I sometimes grumbled about being in Ron’s little movie projects because I’d grown accustomed to getting paid to act and I wanted to play with my friends. Still, these were good times. I have since worked with a hundred adult directors who couldn’t hold a candle to the sixteen-year-old Ron Howard. I could see that he had the goods: a knowledge of camera angles, the discipline to light scenes correctly, a facility for directing his actors. In some regards, nothing has really changed. I’m still acting in Ron Howard movies, with a full understanding that he is the general and I am a private. I have my opinions on how I would do a scene, but ultimately, you do what the director says. That’s part of the discipline that Dad taught us.
It was during this time that Ron decided that he wanted to be called Ron instead of Ronny. Actually, he decided initially that his directorial name would be Ronn Howard, with two n’s.
However the hell he wanted to spell it, I respected his choice. Being called Opie all the time was one of the worst things he had to endure as a kid. I thought that “Ronn” looked weird in the credits, but he wanted to shed his little-kid image, so I fully supported him.
RON
I tried on a few different identities. One was Ronn Howard, and another was R. W. Howard. My middle name is William and “R. W.” to my young mind sounded directorial and authoritative, like D. W. Griffith. I was also worried that my Andy Griffith Show identity as Ronny Howard might work against me in terms of being taken seriously.
I had a lot of time to think about this. The four years between the conclusion of The Andy Griffith Show and my next big break, a part in American Graffiti, are a fraction of my life, but they seemed to go on forever at the time. I was experiencing an adolescent identity crisis that was typical in many respects but atypical in its somewhat public nature and its implications for my career. Fortunately, a job came along in this period that really helped me sort myself out. It’s not one that most people know about: a G-rated Disney picture called The Wild Country. But it meant a hell of a lot to me, not least because it marked the only time that Clint and I got to act together as brothers while playing brothers.
14
Wild Times in Jackson Hole
RON
The Wild Country was right in the Howard clan’s wheelhouse: a western intended for family viewing. In the 1880s, the Tanners, of Pittsburgh, seek a new start on a ranch in Wyoming. They are a father, a mother, and two boys, Andrew and Virgil—that would be Clint and me. When they finally arrive at their destination, the Tanners discover that they have been swindled into buying a dilapidated farmhouse that sits on arid land. To make matters worse, their water source is a river that flows first through the adjacent land of a rich, mean rancher named Ab Cross. It’s basically There Will Be Blood for kids.