June 16, 2025 • 21 mins
Host Doug Hess chats with Veteran Screenwriter Kirk Ellis about his book "Ride Lonesome". It's the story of the 1959 Western film. Available on Amazon and where books are sold. Forgotten hollywood is on Facebook.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Let's go.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
Bye Forgotten Hollywood.
Speaker 1 (00:08):
We don't forget Forgotten Hollywood.
Speaker 3 (00:14):
You'll remember Forgotten Hollywood where we came from, Forgotten Hollwood.
Speaker 4 (00:29):
Hello everyone, and welcome to Forgotten Hollywood, your podcasts and
memories of yesteryear. My name is Doug Hes and if
you're tuning into Forgotten Hollywood for the first time, what
I do on this podcast is take you on a
journey back in time and share with you pieces of
Hollywood that you may or may not know about. And
today we have a very special guest with us today,
Kirk Ellis, and he is here to talk about his
(00:50):
book Ride Lonesome, which is published by the University of
New Mexico Press.
Speaker 5 (00:56):
Welcome to Forgotten Hollywood.
Speaker 1 (00:59):
What pleasure to be Thanks for having me.
Speaker 4 (01:01):
Well, thank you for spending some time or taking some
time out of your busy schedule to be here with
us today.
Speaker 5 (01:06):
We really appreciate that.
Speaker 4 (01:08):
And really the first question is or I will ask
you to kind of give a brief overview for our audience,
what is this book about.
Speaker 2 (01:16):
So the book came about as a result of the
University of New Mexico Press talking to a number of authors,
some in New Mexico, but also across the country, asking
us if we had to write a book about a
Western that we consider to be seminal to the genre,
even if it wasn't well known.
Speaker 1 (01:34):
What would we pick?
Speaker 2 (01:35):
And so my book was one of the two first
out of the gate when it was published in March
twenty twenty three, and I picked the movie Ryd Lonesome,
which for me is the greatest of a series of
collaborations between the director Bud Bendeker, the writer for Kennedy,
and the actor Randolph Scott. It was a part of
a series of films that became be known unofficially as
(01:59):
the Renowned go named after Randolph Scott and Harry Joe Brown,
his producer, Renowned, and they started in nineteen fifty six
and in nineteen sixty and there were six films that
are normally considered part of that cycle, beginning with another
trific film, Seven Men for Now with Randolf Scott Lee Marvin,
(02:20):
But Ryd Lonesome for me, was the film that in
terms of the esthetic that Betteker and Kennedy sought to
bring to the Western, because these movies are very much
a link between the sort of classical era of john
Ford and even Anthony Man moving into the more nihilistic
westerns of the late sixties and early seventies. It's a
(02:44):
remarkably spare film. It runs seventy three minutes. There's not
a wasted frame in it, not a wasted word of dialogue.
It's beautifully measured and timed, and it's for me. It's
the ultimate a time engage Western because as it's four
people traveling in this blighted, sun blasted landscape that you
(03:07):
never they never seem to get meywhere, but they're always
in pursuit of somebody, or somebody's in pursuit of them.
It's it's really a terrific piece of work. And these
Westerns are still not as well known in America as
they have been for decades. In France. They were first
really discovered by Kakia to Cinema, the great French cinematographic magazine.
(03:32):
Andrea Bozan and the great critic called it, called Ride
Lonesome a perfect film, and that was true of so
many of the of the bedeker Westerns because they were small,
they were made on low budgets, they flew under the radar,
they played second bills, and you know in inner city
movie theaters and in drive ins. But for me and
(03:57):
I'm part of a Western group here in Santa Fe,
New Mexico that meets once a month where we bring
to the group a little seen westerns. We've all discovered,
or all film storians of one sort or another, we've
discovered that the so called B pictures age really really well,
(04:18):
even better than their so called A counterparts, because they
were able to be a bit more subversive than you
could in the mid with the major studio releases. And
one of the things that ryd Lonsoon has going forward,
it's got one of the strongest female parts in a
Western from the nineteen fifties when women in those westerns
(04:39):
didn't always have a lot to do. And she's played
by Karen Steele, who had one of those torpedo figures
like Jane Mansfield and was also the mistress of the
director at the time. She and Bud had a very
tumultuous relationship, which I think factors into the fierceness of
her performance.
Speaker 5 (04:59):
Absolute you hit on a couple of things.
Speaker 4 (05:04):
One is that's really why I started this podcast over
four years ago, is to really talk about some of
these forgotten films that are great out there that maybe
we've seen years ago and we've literally just forgot about them,
or we've never actually discovered them at all, because nobody
talks about them. They're not on the circuit, if you will,
(05:24):
on streaming or turn a classics movie, and they do
a great job, but they can't hit every film ever
made out there, and you get end up getting rights
and all that good stuff. And I understand that, and
that's not a critic to them, but that's why we
started this podcast, is to kind of share with people
some of those hidden gems that are out there. The
second thing that you said that I thought was interesting
(05:46):
is I agree with you some of these be what
they refer to as B movies, are just as good
as the A movies, if you will, and if you're
looking at them now, in my opinion, sometimes you don't
even wreck it realized that they were a B movie
at the time, because, like you said, they've aged kind
of so well in that process.
Speaker 2 (06:07):
Yeah, because you remember, you're talking about a time in
the you're still in the Cold War era, in the
McCarthy era, and you have the production code which came
in in nineteen thirty four, so films couldn't be as
bold and daring as they were in that four year
period coming out of silence in the sound. But because
of these movies really didn't cost a lot and the
(06:30):
studios weren't monitoring them closely, particularly a film like RD Lonesome,
which were shot entirely interiors xteriors, everything on location up
in Loan Pod, which is not an easy drive today
from Los Angeles suburbank. So Buddenburg working with a lot
of autonomy, but you could slip into these movies things
(06:55):
that you simply couldn't.
Speaker 1 (06:57):
Do in a ind in a Western. One of one
of the things, for instance, was racism.
Speaker 2 (07:03):
You can do much more nuanced versions of the so
called Nian Wars, and these be pictures Budd's films and
two of the films you did with Burt, and Burt
wrote four of these so called renowned films is that
they are ahistorical. They don't really you don't even know
what air at there in.
Speaker 1 (07:24):
You know they're in the past.
Speaker 2 (07:25):
There the costumes indicata Western, but there's no sense of
history going on. It's it's this real, truly. I think
that's why the French left him. It's this truly existential,
uh sort of arena where people are defined by the
actions that they take. And that's it boils the genre
down to these pure archetypes. And what as you know
(07:52):
from having seen the film or read the book, you
know that that but and Burt together really created this
notion of the hero and the so called villain as
equals that the antagonist wasn't necessarily a bad man. In fact,
he was the sort of flip side of the hero
if the hero had taken a different path. That really
(08:14):
led to this sort of anti heroic figure that you
see in the Sergio Leoni films and the so called
revisionist westerns that start coming down on the late sixties
and early seventies. But it really starts with Budd and
Burt and the renewned films.
Speaker 4 (08:30):
And you know, and to kind of piggyback what you
were seeing there in a way is I always thought
these b movies also allowed people to try things that
they wouldn't necessarily be able to try in the ay.
Speaker 5 (08:44):
And this is my personal opinion, the.
Speaker 4 (08:46):
Directors were a little bit more relaxed because they didn't
I mean, if they didn't get it right, who cared?
Because they were probably going to see this movie first
before they had the feature film, and people really didn't
come to see that b movie.
Speaker 5 (09:00):
They really came for the feature film.
Speaker 4 (09:02):
So there wasn't as much writing on it, and I
think there was a lot more and I'm going to
use the word relaxed loosely, but the pressure wasn't there
like it was on the feature film.
Speaker 2 (09:12):
And I think that also though that the low budgets
and the tight shooting schedules. Yes, right, Lonesome had a
thirteen day shooting schedule. Wow, that's in a budget of
three hundred and fifty thousand dollars.
Speaker 1 (09:27):
Some of the.
Speaker 2 (09:27):
Shooting schedules for their non films were even shorter than that.
But you can, once you know that that's your limitation,
you can be incredibly creative with that within that type frame.
And this is the whole Roger Corning school that proved
that roughly roughly the same era.
Speaker 1 (09:47):
So in this movie too.
Speaker 2 (09:50):
This movie and the film that followed, Kamaniti Station, are
buds only two films in CinemaScope. Now, CinemaScope was not
a process for cheap movies or you know, poverty row films.
It required a lot of visual sophistication. And one of
the things that I quote in the book from Martin Scorsese,
(10:14):
who's a big fan of these films, is that you
think there was sinemoscope, you get you get something that's.
Speaker 1 (10:20):
Even grand, it's even more epic.
Speaker 2 (10:22):
But Bud found a way in these films to make
that wide screen really claustrophobic because everything is in negative
space and he doesn't fill the frame like an opera
with all these extras and all this production design. And
you can learn a lot from the austerity of those movies.
Speaker 4 (10:47):
No, And I think you bring up another excellent point,
is I love it when I hear some of these
well known directors today that we think of that are
going back to the roots, if you will a little
bit and love those movies. That's so beneficial because one,
it brings some of these forgotten films back to life
in terms of that, but it also kind of goes
(11:09):
a little deeper for me, I think is that they're
just not looking at one class of films. They're looking
at everything out there, and they're taken a little bit
from here and a little bit from here, and it
kind of makes them who they are today. Is my thoughts.
Speaker 2 (11:25):
No, I think that's I think that's true, and I
think the concern that all of us have worked in
the industry for a long time. I was before I
wrote this book. I've been a writer and producer for
historical dramas for the last thirty years, and I was
a film journalist before that. And I think that even
when I was coming up through the ranks in the eighties,
we were in danger of losing our film culture because
(11:48):
the people, you know, all these directors, you know, Bud
was Bud was a bullfighter, he was in here, he
were working in the editing room at Fox, and so
they lived lives. They didn't just sort of, you know,
watch films and video stores. But the film country, I
think now is coming back again. It's things like Turner
(12:08):
Classic Movies, Criterion, Channel movie. You're getting to see this
and you're you start to understand how much great work
is out there that we don't know. Everybody can can
you know, list off the top of their head ten
great movies starting with Goall with the Wind, all all
big productions, but there are countless thousands of films like
(12:30):
these are known films that are now being rediscovered, and
it's really important that we educate ourselves about these other
genres and these other ways of doing things.
Speaker 1 (12:43):
I was lucky because.
Speaker 2 (12:45):
One of the reasons I gravitated to this as a
subject for the book is the fact that when I
was an undergraduate in USC cinema in the late seventies
and early eighties, Bud was one of my mentors, and
so is Burt. I did the first retrospective of Bud's
work in America.
Speaker 1 (13:04):
Uh.
Speaker 2 (13:04):
It was a It wasn't by any means comprehensive, because
you couldn't always obtain the prince. We did bring everything
from his first film to his last film, and a
dozen or so in between. And after college we continued
that relationship on projects he was trying to bring in
to the marketplace as a sort of second career. Unfortunately,
(13:25):
none of those ever got off the ground. But when
you're in the when you were in the company of
somebody like Bud, who was truly one of the rare mavericks,
and so was Burt. They both they both died.
Speaker 1 (13:37):
In the early nineties, but and I miss I miss
him terribly.
Speaker 2 (13:41):
But they they taught you to have the courage of
your convictions, and it was we're going to do things
this way, or we're not going to do them at all,
and the renowned films. Bud struggled against the studio system
for a long time. Uh, and he never hit it
(14:01):
as a sort of a list director. But when he
got together with Bird and Randy Scott to do these films,
and they could spend four years making these six films,
all off the lot, all a long way away, and
cut them in camera so that there was very little
footage for a producer to go, well, wait a minute,
(14:24):
we're gonna take this.
Speaker 1 (14:25):
We're gonna cut it in a different way. It was
you had to make decisions.
Speaker 2 (14:30):
And if I have a problem with the way films
are made now, it's I look at a movie like
Ride Lonsoen seventy minutes, it's exactly the right length. And
every film that's coming out of the studio system now,
particularly in America, the minimum is two and a half
hours long. Yeah, and it feels, you know, there's no
sense of that economy storytelling. That's what makes films like
(14:52):
Rid Lonsoen and It's companion films so great to experience.
Speaker 5 (14:57):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (14:57):
No, I think you've hit a lot of great ex
on points in there, and longer is not necessarily better,
does not make the film better or getting your money's worth.
Sometimes I think you kind of get cheated because it's
too long, and you lose interest in terms of that.
And you know the flip side of that is, you know,
at one point I was really anti the streaming system,
(15:20):
but now I've kind of softened my stance a little
bit because I'm able to rediscover some films that I
didn't know was out there, or I knew it was
out there but couldn't see because well, you know who
knew you know where you could even buy it on
a DVD or whatever. Now you can almost google anything
and it's like, oh, it's on this streaming platform, go
(15:41):
out and watch it. So I've kind of evolved just
a little bit on that. But Kurt, let me ask
you this. During their writing and the research of this book,
anything surprised you.
Speaker 2 (15:52):
So, as I said, I know him Bud for a
long time, right, Yeah, he was. He was one of
the great tellers of anecdotes that I've ever met. He
was one of those truly larger than life characters.
Speaker 1 (16:05):
Here.
Speaker 2 (16:05):
When he came into a room, he sucked in all.
There there was no oxygen left for anybody else, but
he could tell tall tales and you would sort of
like shake your head and go, I'm not.
Speaker 1 (16:17):
Sure about that.
Speaker 2 (16:18):
So he would always talk about how when he was
doing these films with Bert and Randol Scott, he rode
a horse to the set up in Loan Pine from
the hotel that the Dale Hotel, to the set and
I thought, well, maybe that's true, maybe not. Yeah, So
I did a location trip toward the end of the
(16:38):
writing of the book because I wanted to see the
locations there.
Speaker 1 (16:43):
And sure enough, you.
Speaker 2 (16:45):
Could ride a horse from the hotel on Loan Pines
one and only main street to the Alabama Hills and
you could and gotten off the horse and you know,
started your day. So that was really true about this.
So a lot of these stories turned out to be
not just a director embellishing his reputation or his legend,
(17:10):
but very much in the way of confirming that reality.
I think that, and I won't spoil that if anybody
wants to read the book, but always talked about an
alternate ending to right Linsen because the Parnell Roberts, who
plays the antagonist in this whose sidekick is a nineteen
(17:34):
year old James Coburn in his film debut, were so
good and they were so engaging that they could have
had a different faith than they have in the film itself.
But always talked about the studio wanting this alternate ending. Well,
you know he wanted to shoot it. He put him off.
(17:54):
Then the last day of production rolled around and you know,
it just got too dark. We couldn't do it. So
you don't have to go with the ending that we
decided to use. All nonsense never happened. That I have
here in the office I'm talking to you from. I
have Burt Kennedy's original shooting script of the movie and
it's exactly what they shot on those thirteen days. So
(18:18):
there was an example of a tall tale that I
was able to truly contractend.
Speaker 5 (18:25):
Oh that's great, that's great.
Speaker 4 (18:27):
Well, Kirk, I know we're getting here close to the
end of time, but maybe just talk a little bit
about some of the takeaways that you hope that somebody's
watching this film for the first time kind of takes
away from this film.
Speaker 2 (18:42):
All of us who have written books for the so
called Real West series for you and Impress are always
on the fence about should revise people to see the
movie first, or should they read the book and then
see the movie. And I think the most gratifying thing
for me is that people who have seen the film, well,
watch it before they read the book, and they'll appreciate
(19:04):
because the book goes in a great detail about how
the film unfolds. Here it starts with who the creators were,
their sort of backstories. Then we go into the film
itself and all the details you might miss. But other people,
other people who never heard of these films, read the
book sort of had not with any but no experience.
They go, well, you know, now I'm going to watch
Write Loansome and they'll get the newly reissued Criterion renowned
(19:29):
series and watch. That's great because because you want your
book to take people back to the original work.
Speaker 4 (19:36):
Absolutely absolutely well, Kirk, I can't thank you enough for
coming on and spending a few minutes with us today,
and to our listeners, please go out and get a
copy of Ride Lonesome by Kirk Ellis. And I also
wanted to thank the University of New Mexico Press. You
can go out to their website, which is you n
(19:57):
mpress dot com. You can order the book there Obviously
you can order the book wherever you get your books
as well, but you're not going to be disappointed if
you get a copy of this book.
Speaker 5 (20:07):
But I also go out and see the movie as well.
Speaker 4 (20:09):
As Kirk mentioned, you're not going to be disappointed in
that and that it kind of helps us with our
forgotten Hollywood in films. Kirk, again, thank you so much
for coming on spending some time with us today, and
thank you.
Speaker 1 (20:22):
For doing what you do.
Speaker 2 (20:23):
This part of Hollywood is not forgotten as long as
people like you are telling the story.
Speaker 4 (20:28):
I really appreciate it. But what I do is just
really small. If it wasn't for authors like yourself and
other historians. You guys are the ones doing all the
major work. I get the easy part, just asking a
few questions.
Speaker 1 (20:42):
Well, I really enjoyed the time. Thanks so much.
Speaker 4 (20:45):
Well, thank you, and thank you for listening to this
episode of Forgotten Hollywood. You search for Doug Hester Forgot
in Hollywood. You can also find me on Twitter, Instagram
at hes Doug fourteen. If you listen to this podcast
on iTunes another podcast service, please subscribe, rate and review
this episode. Tune the nixt time for the latest episode
of forgot on Hollywood. Thank you for listening and we
will see you then.
Let's go.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
Bye Forgotten Hollywood.
Speaker 1 (00:08):
We don't forget Forgotten Hollywood.
Speaker 3 (00:14):
You'll remember Forgotten Hollywood where we came from, Forgotten Hollwood.
Speaker 4 (00:29):
Hello everyone, and welcome to Forgotten Hollywood, your podcasts and
memories of yesteryear. My name is Doug Hes and if
you're tuning into Forgotten Hollywood for the first time, what
I do on this podcast is take you on a
journey back in time and share with you pieces of
Hollywood that you may or may not know about. And
today we have a very special guest with us today,
Kirk Ellis, and he is here to talk about his
(00:50):
book Ride Lonesome, which is published by the University of
New Mexico Press.
Speaker 5 (00:56):
Welcome to Forgotten Hollywood.
Speaker 1 (00:59):
What pleasure to be Thanks for having me.
Speaker 4 (01:01):
Well, thank you for spending some time or taking some
time out of your busy schedule to be here with
us today.
Speaker 5 (01:06):
We really appreciate that.
Speaker 4 (01:08):
And really the first question is or I will ask
you to kind of give a brief overview for our audience,
what is this book about.
Speaker 2 (01:16):
So the book came about as a result of the
University of New Mexico Press talking to a number of authors,
some in New Mexico, but also across the country, asking
us if we had to write a book about a
Western that we consider to be seminal to the genre,
even if it wasn't well known.
Speaker 1 (01:34):
What would we pick?
Speaker 2 (01:35):
And so my book was one of the two first
out of the gate when it was published in March
twenty twenty three, and I picked the movie Ryd Lonesome,
which for me is the greatest of a series of
collaborations between the director Bud Bendeker, the writer for Kennedy,
and the actor Randolph Scott. It was a part of
a series of films that became be known unofficially as
(01:59):
the Renowned go named after Randolph Scott and Harry Joe Brown,
his producer, Renowned, and they started in nineteen fifty six
and in nineteen sixty and there were six films that
are normally considered part of that cycle, beginning with another
trific film, Seven Men for Now with Randolf Scott Lee Marvin,
(02:20):
But Ryd Lonesome for me, was the film that in
terms of the esthetic that Betteker and Kennedy sought to
bring to the Western, because these movies are very much
a link between the sort of classical era of john
Ford and even Anthony Man moving into the more nihilistic
westerns of the late sixties and early seventies. It's a
(02:44):
remarkably spare film. It runs seventy three minutes. There's not
a wasted frame in it, not a wasted word of dialogue.
It's beautifully measured and timed, and it's for me. It's
the ultimate a time engage Western because as it's four
people traveling in this blighted, sun blasted landscape that you
(03:07):
never they never seem to get meywhere, but they're always
in pursuit of somebody, or somebody's in pursuit of them.
It's it's really a terrific piece of work. And these
Westerns are still not as well known in America as
they have been for decades. In France. They were first
really discovered by Kakia to Cinema, the great French cinematographic magazine.
(03:32):
Andrea Bozan and the great critic called it, called Ride
Lonesome a perfect film, and that was true of so
many of the of the bedeker Westerns because they were small,
they were made on low budgets, they flew under the radar,
they played second bills, and you know in inner city
movie theaters and in drive ins. But for me and
(03:57):
I'm part of a Western group here in Santa Fe,
New Mexico that meets once a month where we bring
to the group a little seen westerns. We've all discovered,
or all film storians of one sort or another, we've
discovered that the so called B pictures age really really well,
(04:18):
even better than their so called A counterparts, because they
were able to be a bit more subversive than you
could in the mid with the major studio releases. And
one of the things that ryd Lonsoon has going forward,
it's got one of the strongest female parts in a
Western from the nineteen fifties when women in those westerns
(04:39):
didn't always have a lot to do. And she's played
by Karen Steele, who had one of those torpedo figures
like Jane Mansfield and was also the mistress of the
director at the time. She and Bud had a very
tumultuous relationship, which I think factors into the fierceness of
her performance.
Speaker 5 (04:59):
Absolute you hit on a couple of things.
Speaker 4 (05:04):
One is that's really why I started this podcast over
four years ago, is to really talk about some of
these forgotten films that are great out there that maybe
we've seen years ago and we've literally just forgot about them,
or we've never actually discovered them at all, because nobody
talks about them. They're not on the circuit, if you will,
(05:24):
on streaming or turn a classics movie, and they do
a great job, but they can't hit every film ever
made out there, and you get end up getting rights
and all that good stuff. And I understand that, and
that's not a critic to them, but that's why we
started this podcast, is to kind of share with people
some of those hidden gems that are out there. The
second thing that you said that I thought was interesting
(05:46):
is I agree with you some of these be what
they refer to as B movies, are just as good
as the A movies, if you will, and if you're
looking at them now, in my opinion, sometimes you don't
even wreck it realized that they were a B movie
at the time, because, like you said, they've aged kind
of so well in that process.
Speaker 2 (06:07):
Yeah, because you remember, you're talking about a time in
the you're still in the Cold War era, in the
McCarthy era, and you have the production code which came
in in nineteen thirty four, so films couldn't be as
bold and daring as they were in that four year
period coming out of silence in the sound. But because
of these movies really didn't cost a lot and the
(06:30):
studios weren't monitoring them closely, particularly a film like RD Lonesome,
which were shot entirely interiors xteriors, everything on location up
in Loan Pod, which is not an easy drive today
from Los Angeles suburbank. So Buddenburg working with a lot
of autonomy, but you could slip into these movies things
(06:55):
that you simply couldn't.
Speaker 1 (06:57):
Do in a ind in a Western. One of one
of the things, for instance, was racism.
Speaker 2 (07:03):
You can do much more nuanced versions of the so
called Nian Wars, and these be pictures Budd's films and
two of the films you did with Burt, and Burt
wrote four of these so called renowned films is that
they are ahistorical. They don't really you don't even know
what air at there in.
Speaker 1 (07:24):
You know they're in the past.
Speaker 2 (07:25):
There the costumes indicata Western, but there's no sense of
history going on. It's it's this real, truly. I think
that's why the French left him. It's this truly existential,
uh sort of arena where people are defined by the
actions that they take. And that's it boils the genre
down to these pure archetypes. And what as you know
(07:52):
from having seen the film or read the book, you
know that that but and Burt together really created this
notion of the hero and the so called villain as
equals that the antagonist wasn't necessarily a bad man. In fact,
he was the sort of flip side of the hero
if the hero had taken a different path. That really
(08:14):
led to this sort of anti heroic figure that you
see in the Sergio Leoni films and the so called
revisionist westerns that start coming down on the late sixties
and early seventies. But it really starts with Budd and
Burt and the renewned films.
Speaker 4 (08:30):
And you know, and to kind of piggyback what you
were seeing there in a way is I always thought
these b movies also allowed people to try things that
they wouldn't necessarily be able to try in the ay.
Speaker 5 (08:44):
And this is my personal opinion, the.
Speaker 4 (08:46):
Directors were a little bit more relaxed because they didn't
I mean, if they didn't get it right, who cared?
Because they were probably going to see this movie first
before they had the feature film, and people really didn't
come to see that b movie.
Speaker 5 (09:00):
They really came for the feature film.
Speaker 4 (09:02):
So there wasn't as much writing on it, and I
think there was a lot more and I'm going to
use the word relaxed loosely, but the pressure wasn't there
like it was on the feature film.
Speaker 2 (09:12):
And I think that also though that the low budgets
and the tight shooting schedules. Yes, right, Lonesome had a
thirteen day shooting schedule. Wow, that's in a budget of
three hundred and fifty thousand dollars.
Speaker 1 (09:27):
Some of the.
Speaker 2 (09:27):
Shooting schedules for their non films were even shorter than that.
But you can, once you know that that's your limitation,
you can be incredibly creative with that within that type frame.
And this is the whole Roger Corning school that proved
that roughly roughly the same era.
Speaker 1 (09:47):
So in this movie too.
Speaker 2 (09:50):
This movie and the film that followed, Kamaniti Station, are
buds only two films in CinemaScope. Now, CinemaScope was not
a process for cheap movies or you know, poverty row films.
It required a lot of visual sophistication. And one of
the things that I quote in the book from Martin Scorsese,
(10:14):
who's a big fan of these films, is that you
think there was sinemoscope, you get you get something that's.
Speaker 1 (10:20):
Even grand, it's even more epic.
Speaker 2 (10:22):
But Bud found a way in these films to make
that wide screen really claustrophobic because everything is in negative
space and he doesn't fill the frame like an opera
with all these extras and all this production design. And
you can learn a lot from the austerity of those movies.
Speaker 4 (10:47):
No, And I think you bring up another excellent point,
is I love it when I hear some of these
well known directors today that we think of that are
going back to the roots, if you will a little
bit and love those movies. That's so beneficial because one,
it brings some of these forgotten films back to life
in terms of that, but it also kind of goes
(11:09):
a little deeper for me, I think is that they're
just not looking at one class of films. They're looking
at everything out there, and they're taken a little bit
from here and a little bit from here, and it
kind of makes them who they are today. Is my thoughts.
Speaker 2 (11:25):
No, I think that's I think that's true, and I
think the concern that all of us have worked in
the industry for a long time. I was before I
wrote this book. I've been a writer and producer for
historical dramas for the last thirty years, and I was
a film journalist before that. And I think that even
when I was coming up through the ranks in the eighties,
we were in danger of losing our film culture because
(11:48):
the people, you know, all these directors, you know, Bud
was Bud was a bullfighter, he was in here, he
were working in the editing room at Fox, and so
they lived lives. They didn't just sort of, you know,
watch films and video stores. But the film country, I
think now is coming back again. It's things like Turner
(12:08):
Classic Movies, Criterion, Channel movie. You're getting to see this
and you're you start to understand how much great work
is out there that we don't know. Everybody can can
you know, list off the top of their head ten
great movies starting with Goall with the Wind, all all
big productions, but there are countless thousands of films like
(12:30):
these are known films that are now being rediscovered, and
it's really important that we educate ourselves about these other
genres and these other ways of doing things.
Speaker 1 (12:43):
I was lucky because.
Speaker 2 (12:45):
One of the reasons I gravitated to this as a
subject for the book is the fact that when I
was an undergraduate in USC cinema in the late seventies
and early eighties, Bud was one of my mentors, and
so is Burt. I did the first retrospective of Bud's
work in America.
Speaker 1 (13:04):
Uh.
Speaker 2 (13:04):
It was a It wasn't by any means comprehensive, because
you couldn't always obtain the prince. We did bring everything
from his first film to his last film, and a
dozen or so in between. And after college we continued
that relationship on projects he was trying to bring in
to the marketplace as a sort of second career. Unfortunately,
(13:25):
none of those ever got off the ground. But when
you're in the when you were in the company of
somebody like Bud, who was truly one of the rare mavericks,
and so was Burt. They both they both died.
Speaker 1 (13:37):
In the early nineties, but and I miss I miss
him terribly.
Speaker 2 (13:41):
But they they taught you to have the courage of
your convictions, and it was we're going to do things
this way, or we're not going to do them at all,
and the renowned films. Bud struggled against the studio system
for a long time. Uh, and he never hit it
(14:01):
as a sort of a list director. But when he
got together with Bird and Randy Scott to do these films,
and they could spend four years making these six films,
all off the lot, all a long way away, and
cut them in camera so that there was very little
footage for a producer to go, well, wait a minute,
(14:24):
we're gonna take this.
Speaker 1 (14:25):
We're gonna cut it in a different way. It was
you had to make decisions.
Speaker 2 (14:30):
And if I have a problem with the way films
are made now, it's I look at a movie like
Ride Lonsoen seventy minutes, it's exactly the right length. And
every film that's coming out of the studio system now,
particularly in America, the minimum is two and a half
hours long. Yeah, and it feels, you know, there's no
sense of that economy storytelling. That's what makes films like
(14:52):
Rid Lonsoen and It's companion films so great to experience.
Speaker 5 (14:57):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (14:57):
No, I think you've hit a lot of great ex
on points in there, and longer is not necessarily better,
does not make the film better or getting your money's worth.
Sometimes I think you kind of get cheated because it's
too long, and you lose interest in terms of that.
And you know the flip side of that is, you know,
at one point I was really anti the streaming system,
(15:20):
but now I've kind of softened my stance a little
bit because I'm able to rediscover some films that I
didn't know was out there, or I knew it was
out there but couldn't see because well, you know who
knew you know where you could even buy it on
a DVD or whatever. Now you can almost google anything
and it's like, oh, it's on this streaming platform, go
(15:41):
out and watch it. So I've kind of evolved just
a little bit on that. But Kurt, let me ask
you this. During their writing and the research of this book,
anything surprised you.
Speaker 2 (15:52):
So, as I said, I know him Bud for a
long time, right, Yeah, he was. He was one of
the great tellers of anecdotes that I've ever met. He
was one of those truly larger than life characters.
Speaker 1 (16:05):
Here.
Speaker 2 (16:05):
When he came into a room, he sucked in all.
There there was no oxygen left for anybody else, but
he could tell tall tales and you would sort of
like shake your head and go, I'm not.
Speaker 1 (16:17):
Sure about that.
Speaker 2 (16:18):
So he would always talk about how when he was
doing these films with Bert and Randol Scott, he rode
a horse to the set up in Loan Pine from
the hotel that the Dale Hotel, to the set and
I thought, well, maybe that's true, maybe not. Yeah, So
I did a location trip toward the end of the
(16:38):
writing of the book because I wanted to see the
locations there.
Speaker 1 (16:43):
And sure enough, you.
Speaker 2 (16:45):
Could ride a horse from the hotel on Loan Pines
one and only main street to the Alabama Hills and
you could and gotten off the horse and you know,
started your day. So that was really true about this.
So a lot of these stories turned out to be
not just a director embellishing his reputation or his legend,
(17:10):
but very much in the way of confirming that reality.
I think that, and I won't spoil that if anybody
wants to read the book, but always talked about an
alternate ending to right Linsen because the Parnell Roberts, who
plays the antagonist in this whose sidekick is a nineteen
(17:34):
year old James Coburn in his film debut, were so
good and they were so engaging that they could have
had a different faith than they have in the film itself.
But always talked about the studio wanting this alternate ending. Well,
you know he wanted to shoot it. He put him off.
(17:54):
Then the last day of production rolled around and you know,
it just got too dark. We couldn't do it. So
you don't have to go with the ending that we
decided to use. All nonsense never happened. That I have
here in the office I'm talking to you from. I
have Burt Kennedy's original shooting script of the movie and
it's exactly what they shot on those thirteen days. So
(18:18):
there was an example of a tall tale that I
was able to truly contractend.
Speaker 5 (18:25):
Oh that's great, that's great.
Speaker 4 (18:27):
Well, Kirk, I know we're getting here close to the
end of time, but maybe just talk a little bit
about some of the takeaways that you hope that somebody's
watching this film for the first time kind of takes
away from this film.
Speaker 2 (18:42):
All of us who have written books for the so
called Real West series for you and Impress are always
on the fence about should revise people to see the
movie first, or should they read the book and then
see the movie. And I think the most gratifying thing
for me is that people who have seen the film, well,
watch it before they read the book, and they'll appreciate
(19:04):
because the book goes in a great detail about how
the film unfolds. Here it starts with who the creators were,
their sort of backstories. Then we go into the film
itself and all the details you might miss. But other people,
other people who never heard of these films, read the
book sort of had not with any but no experience.
They go, well, you know, now I'm going to watch
Write Loansome and they'll get the newly reissued Criterion renowned
(19:29):
series and watch. That's great because because you want your
book to take people back to the original work.
Speaker 4 (19:36):
Absolutely absolutely well, Kirk, I can't thank you enough for
coming on and spending a few minutes with us today,
and to our listeners, please go out and get a
copy of Ride Lonesome by Kirk Ellis. And I also
wanted to thank the University of New Mexico Press. You
can go out to their website, which is you n
(19:57):
mpress dot com. You can order the book there Obviously
you can order the book wherever you get your books
as well, but you're not going to be disappointed if
you get a copy of this book.
Speaker 5 (20:07):
But I also go out and see the movie as well.
Speaker 4 (20:09):
As Kirk mentioned, you're not going to be disappointed in
that and that it kind of helps us with our
forgotten Hollywood in films. Kirk, again, thank you so much
for coming on spending some time with us today, and
thank you.
Speaker 1 (20:22):
For doing what you do.
Speaker 2 (20:23):
This part of Hollywood is not forgotten as long as
people like you are telling the story.
Speaker 4 (20:28):
I really appreciate it. But what I do is just
really small. If it wasn't for authors like yourself and
other historians. You guys are the ones doing all the
major work. I get the easy part, just asking a
few questions.
Speaker 1 (20:42):
Well, I really enjoyed the time. Thanks so much.
Speaker 4 (20:45):
Well, thank you, and thank you for listening to this
episode of Forgotten Hollywood. You search for Doug Hester Forgot
in Hollywood. You can also find me on Twitter, Instagram
at hes Doug fourteen. If you listen to this podcast
on iTunes another podcast service, please subscribe, rate and review
this episode. Tune the nixt time for the latest episode
of forgot on Hollywood. Thank you for listening and we
will see you then.
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