WESTERN HORSEMAN
July 1988

The grand old days of Hollywood westerns are gone, but there are still a few Hollywood people who are doing what they can to encourage the return of that genre. One such individual is actor Bruce Boxleitner, who recently starred with James Arness in a television remake of the 1946 classic Red River.

Like so many of the baby-boom generation, Bruce grew up watching a wide variety of television and movie westerns, in the '50s and '60s, and his childhood heroes were cowboys. Today, the opportunities to act in westerns are very limited, but Boxleitner keeps an eye out for them, and, when a western comes up, Bruce goes after it.

"I stay available to do westerns," he explains. "In fact, I've had to fight for the opportunity to do them because my agents and advisors don't want me to. They've said, 'If you do westerns, you'll get labeled as that type of actor, and you'll never do any work in this town.' "

Bruce says that many actors besides himself would like to do westerns, but the businessmen who finance movies aren't much interested in them. "All they care about is how much money is to be made. They are looking at computer sheets, and those readouts are telling them that cowboys don't have a lot of relevance for the younger people these days. Most kids want to see rock and roll, space stuff, or contemporary, high-action adventures. The major movie markets are in cities, and those people are too far removed from farm and ranch living for westerns to mean much to them.

"It is hard to get young people to go see westerns. And the businessmen who control the industry won't make them unless someone comes along and does one that is a financial success. If that happens, they'll all be making them. But if somebody doesn't keep making westerns, they will die."

Boxleitner believes there is an audience for westerns. "They may not be in New York, and they may not be in Los Angeles, but they're out there in between. The trouble is that we older people are not the ones watching television. The computers say that the kids are the audience, and if kids don't know about it, they can't relate to it.

"That's why we remade Red River. A lot of people are die-hards who don't like to see remakes. They love the old classic versions. I'm a big fan of the original Red River myself. But the kids of today never saw the classic version, and they never watch those great old westerns on the late movie. My own son is one of them. He told me, 'I don't watch those old movies. They're in black and white.'

"A good story is a good story, and it is always worth retelling to new audiences. Mutiny on the Bounty has been remade several times. Why not Red River? The young people today know who John Wayne was, because he has become a mythical figure. But they don't know about Montgomery Clift or Walter Brennan. They need to see movies made by contemporary people who they can identify with."

Bruce had such a strong desire to be in the remake of Red River, that, as soon as he heard about it, he doggedly pursued the Montgomery Clift role. "I harassed the people at CBS; I twisted arms; and I had my manager go after it for me. Westerns don't come around very often, and I wasn't going to let that kind of opportunity go by."

The television remake aired last April 10th, and it did well with audiences, scoring a respectable ninth place in the weekly television ratings. And, for a television western, it was very well done. The limits of television meant that it could not be produced as lavishly as the original, as Bruce relates: "The differences in the industry between 1946 and 1988 are enormous. Today, time is our enemy. In 1946, they shot the movie in four months. Our budget allowed us 21 days. In 1946, you could get 3,000 head of cattle. Today, we were lucky to get 300 head, and we had to use a lot of stock footage of bald-faced cattle, cattle that weren't even in this country during the time of the great trail drives, when this story took place.

"It is enormously expensive to use even 300 cattle in a movie. You have to be able to get them out where you are shooting, but you also have to be able to feed them every day. And, as the guys on our film found out, cows don't turn around like a car when the director says 'Cut.' If you mess up a scene, you have to spend a lot of time getting them back and starting over. No film budget these days can handle a long shooting schedule with all those cattle, so there was a great amount of pressure on the actors and crew to make every scene count. We were filming in Arizona in the winter, when the days were short. We were always fighting against the loss of daylight. You'd better not mess up. You've got horses, cattle, wagons, extras, big scenes, all depending on you do it right the first time.

"We were tired. We were jumping on each other. There were almost some gunfights between the actors. Cold weather, low morale, a lot of late nights and ragged nerves. We really had to tough it out, but the good camaraderie in that picture held us together, and I think it came across in the movie."

Boxleitner feels that there may never again be a successful western television series, unless it can somehow be set in contemporary times. "For period westerns to work, they will probably have to be done as a miniseries or move-of-the-week. But I don't think they will go away entirely, either. The cowboy is part of our heritage, and he always will be."

The ironic thing about westerns is that the great American hero is enjoying great popularity in much of the rest of the world, outside of the United States. Bruce relates, "Westerns are not appreciated much here, but I get fan mail like you wouldn't believe from Europe, Asia, and the South Pacific. Right now, Germans love Vesterns, and in Stockholm, Sweden, on Saturday nights, the entire town was shut down because everyone stayed home and watched The Family Macahan, their name for How the West Was Won, a miniseries I was in a few years ago. Europeans like westerns better than we do. That's why they made all those spaghetti westerns. It's a funny situation. It is our heritage, but they like it better than we do. It's like us doing knights-of-the-round-table stuff."

Because of the shortage of westerns, Boxleitner has worked more often in roles far removed from horses. He has starred in several television series and movies including East of Eden, Bare Essence, Angel in Green, and in the four-year television detective series, Scarecrow and Mrs. King, with Kate Jackson. But, during his stint in Hollywood, he has also happily managed to find his way into several television westerns, including all three of Kenny Rogers' Gambler specials, the 24 two-hour episodes of How the West Was Won, and a Louis L'Amour western for the Disney Channel called Down the Long HillsÑall of that besides the recent Red River.

Bruce's interest in westerns, cowboys, and horses began way back in his childhood, in Crystal Lake, Illinois. His grandfather was a dairy farmer, and Bruce spent a lot of time on the farm. "My dad had a team of big old Percherons, and we also had a big, mean pony named Topper who bucked me off a few times. He was the only horse I had any real experience with as a kid. But my fantasy life was always the western movies, and I always wanted to ride horses. I was a cowboy, but my best horse was a stick horse, and my herd was the bunch of cows I ran in at milking time."

When Bruce grew up and left home, his desire to be an actor led him away from rural life. He went to Chicago and studied acting, and later moved to New York City. There, he acted on and off Broadway. "I always wanted to be in pictures. That's why I came to Hollywood. But to be an actor, you have to learn to act, and New York is where you can learn it best. But the time was right in 1972, so I came to California."

Like so many other aspiring movie actors, Bruce lived hand-to-mouth for a time, working dinner theaters, summer stock, or anything else he could while he tried to get into motion pictures. Eventually, he started getting bit parts in television shows, one of which was as a farmer, plowing behind a mule, in an episode of Gunsmoke.

"I was terrible in it," says Bruce, "but the producer, John Mantley, remembered me, and when he did How the West Was Won, in 1976, he gave me a leading role. It was my first big break, and it was a western. That was a big thrill."

How the West Was Won employed Bruce for almost three years. There was a lot of horse action in it, and Bruce had the chance to spend a lot of time with the stuntmen and wranglers. He remembers, "Of course, they played every mean, dirty trick on me that they could. They love to mess with actors. They'd give me a rank horse, or one I couldn't move, or they'd teach me all the wrong things to doÑanything to make me look stupid. But it was all in good fun, and I stuck with it and began to learn a lot about horses and riding."

Two of the wranglers who worked on the show were Richard and Rose Lundin, excellent horse people who have enjoyed a long career in the movie industry. Bruce praises them for helping him. "They had a ranch out in Sand Canyon, and they let me ride there every day and gave me pointers."

The success of How the West Was Won enabled Bruce to move to an upscale horse-owners' community outside of Los Angeles. He was finally able to indulge his lifelong desire to live and enjoy a real western lifestyle, and to have horses of his own. The house he purchased was originally of a Mediterranean, but Bruce easily converted it to a comfortable hacienda, full of western furniture, western art, and other cowboy trappings.

Bruce's home is near the one-time old-west town of Calabasas, once a stage stop between Los Angeles and San Francisco. There were a lot of cattle ranches in the area; Bruce's home is located on an old Spanish land grant; and the town was really western, all facts genuinely appreciated by the actor. "This was once a wild and lawless place, one of the roughest wild-west towns that ever existed. There is still a tree down there that they used to hang rustlers from."

Today, the area is becoming more and more developed, but it is secluded enough to allow Bruce to do a lot of horseback riding on the many miles of trails in the nearby hills. Further, he has become fast friends with long-time movie stuntman Gene McLaughlin, a professional trick roper and a serious competitor and winner as a calf roper on the old-timer's rodeo circuit. Gene has taught many actors to be better horsemen, and he is presently coaching Bruce in team roping.

"Gene is one of the best," says Bruce, "and he's my guru, my mentor. He's an all-around cowboy, a hell of a stuntman, and one of the best horsemen around."

Bruce says that he started learning to rope while hanging out on the set with the wranglers. "Now I come down here to Gene's almost every day, when I'm not working. It gives me something to do. I can't just sit around and be an actor all day. It gets pretty boring. A lot of my actor friends do nothing but hang around town with other actors. I like to hang around with the cowboys."

At first, Bruce didn't think he'd be able to team rope, because he is naturally left-handed. But Gene taught him to rope right-handed, and he appreciates Bruce's enthusiasm and dedication. Says Gene, "There's nobody who works any harder at being a good roper than he does. I make him tie on when he ropes steers, because I don't want him to risk losing a finger. He'd like to be a professional cowboy, but his real career is acting, and he can't afford to be mutilated. But when he ropes, he's dead serious. On his good days, he'll rope ten out of ten, twenty out of twenty. I think that, by the end of the year, he'll be able to rope horns as good as anybody."

In recent years, celebrity rodeos have become quite popular as charity events in various parts of the country, and Bruce's roping skills have earned him invitations to those activities. He relates, however, that though they are a lot of fun, they can also be dangerous. "I went to a celebrity roping and cutting in Houston, and had a hell of a wreck. A lot of old hands were there, like Ben Johnson and Wilford Brimley, and I wanted to look good, but on the first day of the roping, my rope got caught on the barrier pin as I was leaving the box. I was tied hard and fast, and the rope ran all the way out and stretched, and, just as that pony was about to come all the way over on me, the rope broke. The hand of providence came down and popped it.

"That saved my life, but the rope came back at me like a steel cable and beat me black and blue. I lost the use of my right arm for a while. That was really disappointing, because it kept me out of the cutting. And I felt real humiliated, too. But Ben Johnson rode up and said, 'Well, you're a member of the club, now.' Every one of those experienced guys came up and told me a horror story about the same kind of wreck happening to them."

Today, Bruce owns four Quarter Horses. One is his roping horse, one his trail horse, and the other two are horses for his two young sons to ride. Bruce spends as much time as he can at his horse-related activities, and if he could, all his work-related activities would be with horses, too, working in westerns. "The great thing about being an actor is that it enabled me to move to Hollywood, and to get the chance to make westerns. All my heroes were horsemen or cowboys, and I always wanted to be doing that. The movies inspired the kind of life I wanted to live, and now I'm living it. I've always wanted to be involved with horses, and I will keep them around as long as I can afford to feed themÑeven if it means selling the house and living out there at the stable."

Thanks, Rose Marie!