Old Paint was no John Ford classic, but it did the job as a school assignment and furthered my education as a director. The staging and framing paid homage both to Ford and the muddy neo-westerns of Peter Fonda and Robert Altman, whose The Hired Hand and McCabe and Mrs. Miller had recently come out. I learned how to use natural light and make the best of my locations, which included not only Piru but some wilderness areas near Thousand Oaks. I prepared shot lists, became more adept at camera placement, figured out how to use the editing room, and gave better direction to the actors. And, for the first time, I presented human drama with something approaching authenticity, capturing bittersweet moments of love and grief.
CLINT
Shooting on 16 mm was a step up for Ron, but I had a couple of issues re: committing to Old Paint. First, it was just a school project for him, and I was going to be giving up a weekend of prime Wiffle Ball action with my buddies to drive up to friggin’ Lake Piru to work on it. Second, my role was small and I was still required to whip up a bucket of graveside tears.
I started to object. That’s when Mom got on my case. “You’re going to do it, Clint,” she snapped. “You’re going to help your brother out.” Dad was usually the family disciplinarian, but Mom had her own ways of appealing to the better angels of my nature. So I caved and followed my marching orders, giving the scene my full attention, sobbing like a baby when Ron called “Action!” Glycerin? We don’t need no stinking glycerin!
It was clear to me by then that Ron’s zeal to make films was more than a teenage obsession. I never really had his drive to direct. I was in love with acting and recognized that directors could never sneak off to their dressing rooms for a nap, then as now a nice perk of the trade. Acting was what I intended to keep doing as I grew up. That, or pursue my dream of becoming a big-city sportswriter. But Ron’s passion for directing was obvious. So much so that it was causing Mom quite a bit of concern.
RON
While Mom was supportive of my filmmaking projects, she didn’t love that I was all in on directing. It was strange, a little like when I fell for Cheryl: Are you sure you’re ready to make such a big commitment at such a young age?
I didn’t grasp how much this worried her until I bought my next camera. I was ready to move on from my Bauer Super 8 to a GAF Anscomatic, a camera that offered an 8:1 zoom ratio and two camera speeds, which would enable me to film in slow motion, just like Peckinpah and Penn in their signature films The Wild Bunch and Bonnie and Clyde. I believed that this added versatility would allow me to experiment more and make better films. When I idly mentioned my plans to buy the GAF at the dinner table, Mom became upset. “You have a perfectly good camera,” she said with surprising vehemence. “Don’t waste your money!”
Money was not the issue, though, and Mom knew this. I was making around $2,000 a week on The Smith Family. I could easily afford the $179 purchase price of the GAF, which I did indeed buy. Mom was nervous that I was rocking the boat. I had already proven myself as an actor. Ironically, given the ups and downs that she had witnessed firsthand in my career and Dad’s, she considered acting a safer bet. Or at the very least a known quantity. Acting was what the Howards did. Directing seemed like a risky thing to take on.
But I was seriously considering giving up acting forever. Though The Smith Family kept me gainfully employed, the slump that preceded it still stung, as did another humiliation. In the same period in which I auditioned for that show, my agent received a script for a TV movie entitled The Homecoming: A Christmas Story. Its author was one of Gentle Ben’s former writers, Earl Hamner Jr., and the teleplay was based on his childhood memories of growing up as part of a large family in Virginia’s mountain country during the Great Depression. Hamner’s proxy, and the oldest of the family’s children, was named John-Boy Walton.
John-Boy seemed like a perfect fit for me. I had proven my country-boy bona fides in The Andy Griffith Show. I had made a minidocumentary about the Depression. I was just the right age. But I had not even been invited to read for the part.
This did not deter me. It so happened that my audition for The Smith Family was taking place in the same building where The Homecoming’s auditions were—just down the hallway, in fact. I saw the name of the film’s producer, Robert L. Jacks, on the door. I paced back and forth, thinking about the stories Dad had told me of knocking on casting directors’ doors in New York, and of the life-changing moment when he walked in on the MGM casting session for The Journey, which led to my first acting role. I girded myself to make like Rance Howard and just go for it.