Every movie tells a story, right?
And Hollywood people tell stories about their movies.
If you are a fan of Casablanca, you know that Humphrey Bogart had to stand on a box for his scenes with Ingrid Bergmann, because she was two inches taller than he was, or that they started filming with only half of the script finished and no idea of how the movie would end. If you are a super-fan, you know that Humphrey Bogart adlibbed “Here’s lookin’ at you kid” and dubbed in Rick’s famous last line, “Louie, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship,” after Casablanca was already in the can.
For forty years after the disasters filming the awful Winter Carnival in 1939, Budd Schulberg and Maurice Rapf entertained on demand with stories of how F. Scott Fitzgerald was too drunk to write the script.
From the tabloid-ready trysts of Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor in back-lot Cinecittà trailers during the filming of Cleopatra to Dennis Hopper’s lurid accounts of the drugs consumed by everyone during the filming of Easy Rider, for every film there’s at least one story. Usually more.
Twenty years ago DVD’s arrived with the technology to make multiple versions of films available on each disc. By including directors’ commentary on a separate audio track, how-the-movie-was-made accounts and gossip about movie people added to the stories attached barnacle-like to films.
The movie version of Larry McMurtry’s 1961 novel, Horseman, Pass By, changed the novel in many ways. The title itself suffered various permutations from the original, a line from a Yeats poem. First it was Wild Desire, then Hud Bannon Against the World, settling finally with a thud on the Hud. The twenty-seven-year-old novelist’s naughty suggestion, Coitus on Horseback, was nixed by the grownups at Paramount.
During the second month of filming Hud in the hamlet of Claude just south of Amarillo, McMurtry was invited by the studio to come visit. He shared barbecue lunches on location with the director Martin Ritt, Paul Newman, Patricia Neal, and the film crew.
The day he arrived there had been trouble all morning filming the dead heifer scene. The episode had to be included because it revealed the Paul Newman character’s impetuous, head-strong personality. The scene was one of the few things that hadn’t been changed from the novel and was going to appear at a dramatic moment near the beginning of the movie.
The dead cow was easy, and its performance should have got an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor.
The problem was the live buzzards, and thereby hangs a tale.
Here’s McMurtry’s story of the uncooperative vultures:
“Later I managed to get a version of the buzzard story from some extras, who thought it hilarious. There was to be a scene in which a number of buzzards sit around waiting for the people to leave so they can consume a dead heifer. Newman roars up in in his wild way shoots one of the buzzards, whereupon the others fly away. The first difficulty turned out to be getting the buzzards. There are no professional buzzard-trappers in the Panhandle, and the few birds that showed up of their own accord were skittery and unphotogenic. It was necessary to arrange for someone in the vicinity of Laredo, roughly a thousand miles away, to round up a dozen buzzards and fly them by jet to Amarillo. The plan was to wire the buzzards to a dead tree until they had been photographed; then when Newman shot the gun they could be released electronically and photographed again as they soared into the blue Panhandle sky.
“In outline it was a good plan, but it quite failed to take into account the mentality of buzzards. As soon as they were wired to the tree they all began to try and fly away. The wires prevented that, of course, but did not prevent them from falling off the limbs, where they dangled upside down, wings flapping, nether parts exposed. It is hard to imagine anything less likely to beguile a movie-going audience than a tree full of dangling buzzards. Everyone agreed it was unaesthetic. The buzzards were righted, but they tried again, and with each try their humiliation deepened. Finally they abandoned their efforts to fly away and resigned themselves to life on their tree. Their resignation was so complete that when the scene was readied and the time came for them to fly, they refused. They had had enough of ignominy; better to remain on the limb indefinitely. Buzzards are not without patience. Profanity, fire-crackers, and even a shotgun full of rock salt failed to move them. I’m told that in desperation, a bird man was flown in from L.A. to teach the sulky bastards how to fly. The whole experience left everyone touchy. A day or so later, looking at the pictures again, I noticed a further provocative detail. The dead heifer that figured so prominently in the scene was quite clearly a steer. When I pointed this out to the still photographers they just shrugged. A steer was close enough; after all, they were both essentially cows. In essence, it’s a cow, one said moodily. No one wanted those buzzards back.”
Laredo readers will be wondering who the local buzzard connection was.
Me, too.
Was it Snake Johnson?
Source: Larry McMurtry, “Here’s HUD in Your Eye,” In A Narrow Grave: Essays on Texas (1971), 9-11.
