As someone who has made a lot of B-grade movies, I can tell you that no director actually sets out to make one. Even if the budget is tiny and it’s a slasher flick, the filmmaker believes from the get-go that he is making the ultimate, most top-shelf slasher flick. Totten was like that with The Wild Country. He was dealt the hand of directing a Disney B western, but he was going to shape it into an important piece of cinema.
It didn’t quite work out that way, but it’s a decent film with some strong performances. Ab Cross was played by Morgan Woodward, a serial Hollywood bad guy whose menacing presence on-screen belied how gentle he was in real life. The scary-looking but benevolent trapper who befriends the Tanners was played by Jack Elam, one of the foremost character actors in the western genre. If you look him up, you’ll recognize him—he had a long face, bushy eyebrows, and a wonky eye that was his signature. Someone had stabbed it with a pencil was he was a kid.
Totten and Dad formed a bond, because they shared a pioneer work ethic and were most at home in westerns. Whenever I looked at Dad as an actor, I thought cowboy, horseman, farmer more than private detective. The western was already in decline by the time we did The Wild Country, but he and Totten were interested in seeing where they could take the genre.
The production was a real manly man’s environment. Totten brought over a lot of wranglers and stuntmen from Gunsmoke. Elam was a serious gambler and he usually had a card game going near the dressing rooms. With a whiskey in his hand, he taught Ron and me how to play liar’s poker and hearts. He gave us instructions that he took very seriously, such as, “Always bring the amount of money to a card game that you’re prepared to lose.”
The town of Jackson Hole was filled with pool halls and cowboy bars. The crew guys sometimes reported to work the next morning with busted lips and black eyes, all in a good night’s fun. It really was more like the Wild West than the affluent resort area it is today. For Ron and me, Jackson Hole meant liberation. Mom and Dad allowed us to do stuff in town by ourselves. So we spent our per diem money on silver dollars that we bought in tourist shops and bottle rockets that we set off in the open fields where we were making the movie.
The Wild Country’s crew was an idiosyncratic mix of cowboys and hippies, bound together by a love of the great outdoors. In the latter category was an animal trainer named Dan Haggerty, before he became famous as an actor in his ’70s TV show The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams. I spent a lot of time with him since the character I played, Andrew, had a menagerie of animals: a mare, a hawk, and some chickens, all of whom he named Ralph. Haggerty had a sidekick trainer, a fellow hippie named Bullet—just Bullet—and they had big beards and wore moccasins that looked homemade. I just thought these guys were really friggin’ cool.
Maybe it was the serendipity of having already worked with animals and good ol’ boys on Gentle Ben, but I had never felt happier than I did making The Wild Country. It was summer, so there was no studio school, no breaks for studying. And I was really in the pocket acting-wise, with my family around me. Ron and I had spent tons of time together at home, but never like this, as colleagues on a movie set. Our closeness only made our collaboration easier. And whenever I looked up, I saw Dad palling around with Totten and Mom chatting it up with Vera Miles. It was idyllic.
RON
That was a summer of sexual awakening for me, too. I met a cute local girl named Dion and went on a couple of dates with her. The rodeo was in town, and we went together, watching with amusement as some Wild Country crew members recklessly volunteered and were thrown like rag dolls off a bucking bull.
I was woefully inexperienced with girls. I’d briefly had a girlfriend in eighth grade, but our “dates” were basically playdates sprinkled with pathetically tentative attempts at kissing. I had also been on a kind-of date with Donna Butterworth, the girl singer who had appeared with me on The Danny Kaye Show. Donna and I did a Disney TV movie together called A Boy Called Nuthin’， and we junketed together to Disneyland for a promotional appearance when I was fourteen and she was twelve. I sensed an opportunity on that trip and leaned in for a kiss. Donna was amenable, but she had already started smoking, and her lips tasted of cigarettes. I was traumatized by my mom’s struggles with smoking and the damage it had done to her health. So that romance never took.