Another Wild New Movie-Making Adventure

     When Phill and I returned from the Cannes TV market in May of 1981, we were met with a stunning surprise. During the three week period that we were in France and Germany, the Osmond Family and their long-time lawyer, Dick Callister, who was also the President of their production company, had parted ways. I never really discovered what had caused such a huge rift in their relationship, I just knew that the man who signed my checks had left the studio, opened new offices, and had named the new company Comworld. It was, of course, a personal economic necessity to follow him. 

      There had been discussions of what projects were owned by Dick and his investors and which were still held by the family. Because I hadn’t been party to any of those discussions, I just had to go with the flow.

     But, I was now the Executive VP for Special Projects of a brand-new organization.   

     

     My first special project was such great fun. Working with football legend and Heisman Trophy Winner, Tom Harmon and with superstar Minnesota Vikings Hall of Fame Quarterback Fran Tarkenton, we put together a terrific little video called “How to Play Quarterback”. We shot it at UCLA in Los Angeles and it was a real hoot to work on.  

   

      It took another couple of weeks before a firm direction for this new company had been determined, and needless to say, I was excited! I was going back into the movie-making business.

And, of course, that meant that I got yet another new business card.

      That happened because an old friend of mine from my days in Burbank dropped by my office sometime in the middle of June. Lyman Dayton had been very successful in writing, producing and directing several family-friendly films such as the now-classic Where the Red Fern Grows, Seven Alone, Against a Crooked Sky, Pony Express Rider, Baker’s Hawk and several other low-budget family films that did very well. He had, sadly, lost the rights to all of his films due to some unscrupulous maneuverings by some pretty awful people but, after all that, he still had a deep desire to write and direct good family films. So, he knocked on my door.  

     He had written a wonderful script that he titled The Return which was really the biblical story of Joseph but set in the old west and wondered if we (Comworld) would be interested in producing it. (He was going to submit it to the Osmonds but had no idea of the very recent split-up). He had written a really great story. Josiah’s father loved him better than his brothers (sound like Rueben, Simeon, Levi and the rest?) and had given him the gift of a beautiful white horse (the coat of many colors). Josiah was tricked by his brothers so that he was put into a Mexican prison (sold into slavery in Egypt) that had a commandant (Potiphar) would had a beautiful wife (Potiphar’s wife) who tempted Josiah (he resisted). He eventually escaped and made it back home to his father who had given him up for dead (just like the old patriarch Jacob in the Book of Genesis) and he also forgave his brothers (just as Joseph of old had forgiven his brothers too). I mean it was dead-on the story right out of the Bible. 

     Perfect, yes?

     I took the script to Dick. He loved it. So did his principal investor, Bart Hewlett, mainly because it was going to cost only 1.1 million to produce. But, it turned out that Bart had a bigger bucket of money so I pitched the idea of going after some other film scripts to see if we couldn’t create an attractive package for other investors to join in as well.

     After some quick searching, I found two other wonderful films and two terrific directors attached to them. Chuck Braverman, who had optioned Don Enright’s exciting murder mystery script “Hit and Run” was a long-time Hollywood guy that I had met while I was at Disney. 

     Also, I contacted writer-director Tom McLoughlin, who had written a very scary and very special-effect driven story that we wound up calling “One Dark Night”. He had come to me back when we first started looking for material with the Osmonds. A real plus on this was that the soon-to-be world-famous special effect guy, Tom Burman, who had previously done the effects for “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” would create the creepiest corpses you had ever seen up to that time in films.

     Was I in heaven or what?!?! I was, at long last, back in the movie-making business that I had originally come to Utah three long years ago to do...and now I couldn’t wait to get started.

     We started shooting “The Return” on August 17, 1981 over in Silverton and Telluride, Colorado. We would start “Hit and Run” in New York City in mid-September and “One Dark Night” two weeks later in Los Angeles. The only constraint I had in now being an independent film company guy, believe it or not, was the I.R.S.

     What!?! The Internal Revenue Service!?!?

     Yes. There was a rule that all three projects had to be completed and shown to the public within the calendar year in which they were produced in order for the investors to get the tax benefit of their investment. If that didn’t happen, our new little venture was going to be a giant failure.

     Impossible!

     To prep, cast, rehearse, shoot, develop film, edit, compose and record music for 3 full-length feature films and get them distributed and shown to a public audience before the end of the year was absolute madness!

     But, that was my assignment and I had best not blow it, right?

     I had the most fun on the first film. Who wouldn’t? Outdoors in the spectacular high mountains of my home state of Colorado, riding horses, choreographing knife fights, shooting guns and even getting to direct some of the second-unit action sequences of the film, all in addition to doing my main job as producer. 

     Working with Lyman was a true joy and we became life-long friends (and eventually became business partners making other movies together which I’ll tell you about in a future posting).

     The creepy/scary movie was also a very, very cool experience. Watching Tom Burman create his special effect dead and decaying bodies was great fun. The NYC mystery film was also fun to do. Each of these projects were so completely different and each of them were teaching me something new and extremely valuable which I knew I would be using somewhere downstream in my career...wherever that might be heading.  

     So…back to my dilemma of screening each of these films before New Year’s Eve. 

     Given how movies are actually made, this was never going to happen. Not in a million years. Everything that happens post-filming takes painstaking work and hours upon hours of effort by an entirely different kind of team from that which you would find on a movie set…editors, composers, sound designers, film colorists, lab technicians, publicists, advertisers and film distributors. The only film that would be even close to being ready for release in a movie theater was “The Return” which we had changed to a more easily marketable title, The Avenging. 

     The other two films would never, ever make it in time.

     What’s a young movie producer to do?

     Phill Catherall came up with a wonderfully creative alternative. We would approach our international group of television network and station connections that we had developed and to whom we had sold our Osmond product during the past three years. The I.R.S. didn’t care where or how the films would be distributed to the public - they just had to be presented in front of a paying audience. Or, they could be broadcast over television. 

     Whoa! There’s an idea.

     What we would up doing was truly genius (all credit to Phill) and, most importantly, it met the I.R.S. requirements for making investors happy.

     We found a little itty-bitty TV station on the little itty-bitty island of Bermuda that was willing to help us. 

     We offered them three movies, but the idea that we sold them on, and, amazingly, that they bought into, was a cooked-up and very creative program that we called “Movie Preview Night”. In other words, UNFINISHED films that would be broadcast over their airwaves letting their audiences see films that weren’t quite ready for the theaters but for which they would get a true “Sneak Preview”. The Avenging was the only fully completed film, which we started really early in the morning (about 1AM) on December 31^th. It ran until about 3AM when we started rolling the other two unfinished films - without music tracks and without sound effects. I sat with the technical director for the station and created sounds “live” over the air and even spoke a couple of lines for characters for which we had not yet dubbed into the soundtrack. I mean it was a truly WILD night! I’m still not sure that anybody actually saw these un-done films, especially on New Year’s Eve in Bermuda!

     But, by 7AM on December 31^st…we made it. The I.R.S. requirement had been met. Investors were deliriously happy and my boss was over-the-top pleased.

     And, the best part is that Sherry and I got to welcome in the New Year in Bermuda.

     During the production of “The Return/Avenging” we were able to land the cover of On Location, the film and videotape production magazine, and the feature article had a special section on location filming in Colorado...and, we were it! 

     Not too shabby, huh? I thought you would enjoy reading this article as it gives you a deeper look into how I spent my summer in the Colorado Rockies. Enjoy.

“Western Feature Based on Biblical Story Lenses in Colorado Mountains” by Peter Shelton. 

 “We’re bucking the Hollywood notion that a western can’t be successful,” intoned Lyman Dayton, screenwriter and director for The Movie Making Company’s low-budget/big look period piece, “The Return,” shot entirely on location this summer in the mountains of southwestern Colorado and northern New Mexico. “You have a chance,” said Dayton, rebounding nicely from the industry-wide bad dream brought on by “Heaven’s Gate,” “if you can make a nice looking picture that stays within budget, and which has a real hero and a story.”

The idea for “The Return” (tentatively slated for a January 1982 release) came to Dayton while he was laid up after knee surgery in January of this year. It’s basically the Old Testament tale of Joseph and the coat of many colors set in the raw frontier of Idaho in the 1880s. Jacob Anderson (Efram Zimbalist Jr.) is the patriarch empire-builder whose two older sons Jared and Eli (Cam Clarke and Matt Stetson) resent the special treatment given the favored Josiah (Michael Horse) whose mother was a Shoshoni Indian. Josiah is groomed to take over the ranch – in fact, we first meet him as he steps off the train, home from four years at Harvard, but he is framed by the malicious Indian agent Bowden (Taylor Lacher), with the tacit approval of the brothers, and carted off to prison in Mexico as a horse thief.

The Biblical Joseph was sold into slavery in Egypt and thereafter imprisoned for refusing the advances of Potipher’s wife. Josiah’s fate appears to be similarly sealed when he puts off the wife of the Mexican governor, but here the parallels to the book of Genesis end. Josiah manages a clever escape and heads north to right the many wrongs done him and the Shoshoni in general.

“So many recent westerns have been about anti-heroes,” says Dayton, whose credits include “Where the Red Fern Grows.” “Seven Alone.” “Against a Crooked Sky,” and “Baker’s Hawk.” “We wanted to be a movie with a real hero. Josiah is a man of powerful principle. His character doesn’t give in to the mores of anyone else or to the mores of another society for that matter.”

Michael Horse, in his second feature after starring as Tonto in “The Legend of the Lone Ranger,” plays Josiah with an intensity seething just below the surface. “I’m still a spiritual man,” says the 31-year-old former silversmith and professional fiddle player whose parents are Anglo and Apache. (Horse is careful to be specific, noting his mother has Zuni, Mescalaro and Yaqi ancestry within the Apache nation.) “I still believe in my religion, still go home when I’m needed. I don’t “Ugh” for nobody.”

Horse and Efram Zimbalist Jr. are the name players in what producer Mike Wuergler refers to as a “medium-low-budget“ film. Wuergler, who recently left the Osmond’s organization in Utah to form The Movie Making Co., believes in “putting every dollar on the screen” and predicts that “The Return” will look like a 10 to 20 million dollar picture.”

To get this “big look” (according to Dayton there will also be a “big score,” as yet unassigned to go with the “big look”). “The Return” was shot in Panavision in some of the most spectacular mountains of the West. The first two days shooting were at the train depot in Silverton, a tiny (pop. 800) mining and tourist town 9300 feet up in the San Juan range of Colorado. Silverton and neighboring Durango are connected by one of the nation’s two remaining narrow gauge railways (the other is in Chama, N.M. and was used in “The Lone Ranger”.) This one is true to the period, having first ascended the roadless Animas River canyon into Silverton in the summer of 1882.

Next, the small but experienced crews, recruited mainly in Denver and Salt Lake, moved to the old Mario Zadra ranch on the Dallas Divide between Silverton and the mining town turned ski resort of Telluride for scenes at the Indian agents’ house. Three tepees were set up in the meadow below a 100-year-old ramshackle dwelling. The cottonwoods whispered in the dry brilliant air, and 14,000-foot Mr. Sneffels presided in the background.

“Colorado had the natural locations,” beamed Dayton, who is known as a man with a penchant for dramatic scenery. The director and producer Wuergler “think alike” and served as their own location scouts. Wuergler is a Colorado native, and he feels that by making this picture here he is “paying back some of my dues” to a magic place. “It was a happy accident,” he recalls, “to find a script where the magic of the mountains plays an integral part. And then, we had our Jacob, the early empire-builder, and we had to find mountains to match our man. Silverton was a natural because of the train, and I’ve always thought Telluride would be a spectacular place to make a film.”

(The last feature shot in Telluride was Richard Lester’s “Butch and Sundance: The Early Days” back in the winter of 1978. Before that you have to go back to “True Grit” in 1968. “How the West Was Won” and “The Unsinkable Molly Brown” in the early 1960s and “Tribute to a Bad Man” and “The Sheepman,” starring Glen Ford, in the late 1950s. Most recent filming in the area had focused on winter sports like powder skiing and the ABC-TV “American Sportsman” segment on ice climbing 360-foot-high Bridal veil Falls.)

Wuergler suggested Dayton come take a look at Telluride, and the director was instantly smitten. The region’s proximity to Santa Fe (six hour drive), where the old Mexico scenes were to be shot, was an additional bonus. The duo scouted the specific sites, assembled cast and crew and were ready to go barely six weeks after the formation of The Movie Making Co.

“It’s a very difficult thing to do everything on location,” says Wuergler, though there is no complaint in his statement. “You have to be crafty and creative to get the look you want. You have to move the technology and the people, house and feed everybody, deal with all the unknowns. The secret to our success in our pre-planning.”

Take the art direction. Dayton hired Hollywood interior designer Gordon Larson, with whom he had worked on a picture in British Columbia, because of Larson’s encyclopedic knowledge of period furniture and design. “My budget didn’t permit bringing interiors along, and we don’t have a city to run to and get stuff from,” Larson said on the set one day. “So we’ve had to make do.” And that they did. Larson and his crew of five, including assistant art director Sarah Liles from Denver, started knocking on people’s doors, hitting up local museums and antique stores to get what they needed. Clair Hicks, one of the wranglers on the job (he provided 20 horses plus buggies and wagons) and his wife Myrna helped procure so many props and pieces of furniture, Liles said, “They could have done the whole movie themselves.”

“The locations were easy,” declared Larson. Exterior changes were minimal because so many of the buildings were authentic 1880s. “And these magnificent mountains…”

The valleys and forests were particularly lush this August after heavy rains the first half of the summer. “Boy, I’ll tell ya,” quipped assistant director Jack Clinton, “the greensman did a heck of a job. He’d be up for an academy award.”

Ever the master of his environment, art director Larson wanted “the art department to get full credit for burning off the fog at the precise moment” the train pulled in on day one of shooting in Silverton. The only thing Larson seemed to have trouble with on location was breathing. High elevations wreaked havoc with the California joggers.

One important element in the picture looked as if it might be beyond everyone’s control: the stolen white stallion.

A truly magnificent animal was required and found through the efforts of wrangler Paul Staheli and his uncle Lee. The horse’s name is Lord Roayas. 

He’s a pure bred Arabian stallion, 11-years-old, born and raised on the P.K. Wrigley ranch on Catalina Island off the Southern California coast. Lee Stahli brought him up to the set in Silverton from his home in Scottsdale, Ariz., and the horse promptly went bananas at the sight and sound of the steam locomotive. Staheli was not worried. “I think you’ll find in you look back in history, in the horse and buggy days, when a train first came to town, all the horses left.”

Producer Wuergler asked the wranglers if the horse was going to be trouble when a “dead” Indian was slung over his back. Having appraised Michael Horse’s riding skills, Lee Stahli answered, “If Mike wasn’t such a good hand, he might be trouble.” Away from the locomotive, Lord Roayas proved to be spirited but manageable, a real high-energy asset to the film. 

Wuergler has had a long and successful career in show business. He produced the second round of Mickey Mouse Clubs for Disney, has acted on and off Broadway, did a stand-up comic routine preceding We Five concerts and even hosted a Denver teen TV show (“I was a chunky Dick Clark”) in the early 1960s. His mother taught him that show business was two words – “show” and “business” and Mike has taken it to heart. 

Even with the tight purse strings, Wuergler put together first class equipment and crew for “The Return.” (A lot of the credit must go, he says, to the respect commanded by Denver-based production manager Donna Phelan.)

Personnel and services on the shoot included:

Up and coming director of photography Reed Smoot of L.A.; Stunt coordinator Dan Koko by way of the Hubie Kerns Stunt Workshop in L.A. Koko’s credits include “1941” “Lady in Red” and a Merv Griffin show stunt where he fell 18 stories off Caesar’s Palace onto an air pad. Hubie Kerns, himself a stuntman for 40 years was assistant director on “The Return”; Lighting was by Lighting Services Inc. of Denver and The Brickyard out of Salt Lake City. They brought the latest HMI lights, a Fisher camera dolley and a Fisher boom; Sound was by freelancers Garrett Collenberger and Elizabeth Moore from Boulder, Colo., who used a Sennheiser microphone on the Fisher boom for most of the scenes and recorded on two Nagra IV.2 recorders; there was a state-of-the-art crane car for moving shots provided by Camera Support Systems of Denver and Minneapolis; editor and post-production manager was Shawn Walsch; dailies were by Deluxe General in LA.

A final word from Lyman Dayton, son of a Wyoming rancher, whose baby this picture really is. “As far as I know, this is the only western being done. I’ve read in several places that the western is dead.”

From the looks of “The Return” on location, that sentiment couldn’t be further from the truth.