R. W. Howard was determined not to let up. I used any excuse I could to make more films. For a school assignment about the Great Depression, I persuaded my history teacher to let me make a documentary rather than write a paper. This was my first talkie, albeit a primitive one. First, I recorded some audio interviews with adults who had lived through the Depression: Mom, Dad, Hoke Howell, Mr. Alley, and a few other people. Then I checked out some history books from the Burbank Public Library to scan them for good photos. I bought some diopter lenses, which allowed me to zoom in on faces and details and then widen out to reveal further visual information in the photo—basically, I was executing a crude, artless version of what later became known, justifiably, as “the Ken Burns effect.” Then, for the presentation, I carefully synced the audio to the video, using a projector and a tape player. My history teacher so liked the result that he had me show my film to all five of his classes that day. That was another huge lift for me.
Next, I made a more “proper” narrative film, though the sound was still limited to voice-over audio. Once again, I concocted a movie to get out of doing a written assignment, this time for psychology class, where I would interview a subject about his or her life. I cooked up a completely phony story—let’s call it what it was, a lie—that I told my teacher about an almost-one-hundred-year-old man at the senior home run by the Motion Picture & Television Fund. I explained he had been a real cowboy before getting into the movie industry during the silent era. What a subject for a school film!
Thereby granted permission to go forth and begin filming, I borrowed a 16 mm camera from the cinematographer on The Smith Family. Working with his fancy Canon Scoopic 16 mm rig was a huge step up for me. It allowed for more tricks, such as dissolves from one scene to another, and a soundtrack, albeit sound added in postproduction, not while I was filming. The film stock cost me a bundle, too, five times as much as 8 mm. Being under eighteen, I still didn’t have ready access to my childhood earnings, so I tightened my belt and spent less on date nights and gasoline. Fortunately, one four-dollar fill-up was all that my fuel-efficient VDub needed to get me around greater Burbank for a month.
The nonexistent nonagenarian was not to feature in my film, at least not on-screen. I would dramatize a sad story he had told me about a beautiful young woman he had been forced to leave behind. The old man would appear on the audio track, singing a baleful version of the traditional cowboy song “I Ride an Old Paint” that he had customized to describe his plight.
You’ll remember that my dad had once dreamed of being a singing cowboy but couldn’t sing. Well, now he got his chance. His singing voice still wasn’t up to professional standards, but my bespoke version of “I Ride an Old Paint,” sung by Rance Howard in a hushed, wheezy baritone and accompanied by my pal Noel Salvatore’s accordion, sounded credibly like the musical lament of an ancient guy at death’s door.
My dad had a good friend named Bob Jones, an actor turned assistant director, who lived out in Agoura Hills and was willing to loan me his two horses. Another of Dad’s friends, a character actor named Bill Conklin, agreed to appear in my movie, now called Old Paint, as the stationmaster at my Old West depot. I scouted locations and found an abandoned train station in Piru, about an hour’s drive northwest of us, that had the right look.
In the film, the cowboy, played by Dad, is seen riding one of his horses while leading his second one on a rope. As the sad music plays, the cowboy rides through a series of rural landscapes. In an open field, he comes across a mother and son （Mom and Clint） with their heads bowed in front of a newly dug grave. The cowboy saddles up his second horse for the farmer’s widow and the boy. He escorts them to the depot, where they will catch a train and start a new life. He then returns to his lonesome wanderings. As night falls, he sits at his campfire and fishes out from his saddlebag a cameo locket with a silhouette of his lady love from long ago.
There’s a dissolve from the locket to an image of a beautiful young woman—Cheryl—crying as she waves goodbye to her man （me, as the young cowboy） as he departs on horseback. Then we return to the campfire and the film’s present day, where the cowboy broods over the flames as we hear him singing on the soundtrack, “Shoulda had more sense than to leave her so.”