For a relative innocent like me, this was another source of confusion. There were components of the 1960s cultural revolution that appealed to me, like rock music, the unapologetically transgressive films of Sam Peckinpah and Mike Nichols, and the antiwar movement. But was this part and parcel of a wider revolution that was killing people? I was also aware that the movie we were making was throwback entertainment, bearing little to no relation to 1969 cultural mores, despite Bob Totten’s maverick intentions. Where did I fit into the new cultural wave? It was a lot to process.
No matter what, I was pleased with the performances that Clint and I turned in. Especially Clint’s. His character, Andrew, carries the emotional weight of the film, dealing with the fallout as his family’s unity is pushed to the breaking point by one setback after another: a tornado, Ab Cross’s harassment, a fire. When Vera Miles fights with Steve Forrest in one scene, threatening to move back to Pittsburgh, Clint performs the most convincing childhood breakdown I’ve ever seen. He cries tears of fear and heartbreak as he witnesses the worst thing a kid his age can witness: his parents screaming at each other, apparently coming apart.
CLINT
Someone on The Wild Country set said that I was a little Method actor. That’s the first time that I ever heard the term. I asked Dad what it meant, and he described it as “getting so inside the character that you really become him in the moment.” One of Dad’s great gifts was his ability to distill the Actors Studio approach into something that Ron and I could grasp and execute. But I looked at it the other way around—the character became me. Was this a child’s egocentric view of himself as the center of the world? Sure. But it was an approach that worked. I believed that I was more interesting than any character that someone might write, so I viewed the script as a set of parameters and circumstances dictating how I, Clint, might behave.
The resident Indian sage in The Wild Country was named Two Dog, played by Frank de Kova, an Italian American character actor whose dark skin and broad features earned him a long career playing Indians and Mexicans. This sort of casting would never happen now—the role would certainly and rightfully be given to a Native American—but that is not a rap on de Kova, who was a sweet person. He had played a Mexican colonel in Viva Zapata!, which starred Marlon Brando. On the set, Frank tousled my hair and said, “Clint, you remind me of Brando.” I had no idea who Brando was at that point, but today I would happily accept the compliment.
Hanging with Jack Elam and Frank de Kova proved crucial to me, in that I saw something of myself in them. It was the first time that I understood that I was not the same kind of actor that Ron was. He was more of a leading man, bearing a certain weight of responsibility to carry a film. I was not. I was a character actor. In Elam, de Kova, and a hilarious old-timer in the film named Dub Taylor, I recognized my tribe, my peeps. I was not going to be the Steve Forrest of any given picture but the Jack Elam. This epiphany granted me permission to be more fearless, more off-the-wall—the actor I became as an adult.
Disney flew us home from Jackson Hole on the late Walt’s personal airplane, a Grumman Gulfstream I that was known as The Mouse. The interior was beautifully done in mahogany wood and leather. We Howards had so much luggage from the multiweek location shoot that we loaded down that fancy plane like we were the Joad family. Walt’s own wings! This was living large.
I was proud of the work I did in The Wild Country and displeased that I didn’t get my due in the opening credits. The movie came out more than a year after we wrapped, in December 1970. Disney held an advance screening for the press in a big theater on its Burbank campus, and our whole family was there as the lights went down. Steve Forrest got first billing. Fine. Then the names of Ron—still “Ronny” then—and Jack Elam shared a screen. Fine. Then Frank de Kova and Morgan Woodward. Hmm. Then Vera Miles got her own title card. Fair enough, but still: Where was Clint? And then, at last, came my name . . . in small type, sharing a title card with four other actors’ names. What the hell? I was a colead! I was a more mature kid than I had been when making the movie—when you’re young, the difference between eleven and ten is not insignificant—but that didn’t stop me from bursting into tears at my mistreatment. I felt like I had been shit on.