Red Ryder, Deep In the Gut of Texas

By Lawrence Christon

Los Angeles Times

Sunday May 21, 1978

Fabens, Tex- There’s plenty of time to side in the shade outside Benton’s Diner, in who’s fetid interior cast and crew are at work in the filming of “When You Comin’ Back, Red Ryder?,” and suck up Lone Star beer and muse on the incongruity of the town’s name, Fabens. “It sounds like a Jewish dish,” said Paul Maslansky, a big bearded man whose knowledge of four languages has done nothing to ameliorate his New York accent. "I'll have a Fabens, please.' Or something you go to a Swiss clinic to have removed.”

Fabens is a small, pokey town 30 miles east of El Paso, with the hot, dusty, rather desolate aspect that formed the backdrops for “Hud” and “The Last Picture Show,” A forgotten place. “When You Comin’ Back Red Ryder?” is from the play of the same name by Mark Medoff (who has done the screenplay, his first), and is concerned with the terrorizing of a group of people in a sleepy diner by a diabolical Vietnam veteran whose disenchantment with the American way has taken on a pathological proportion.

Marjoe Gortner plays the vet, Candy Clark his flower child traveling companion, Lee Grant and Hal Linden an upper-middle-class couple, unhappily married, traveling through, Stephanie Faracy a fat young waitress named Angel, Pat Hingle the proprietor of an adjacent filling station and motel and Peter Firth a short order cook bitter in the restlessness to escape a dead end life. Milton Katselas directs. Maslansky is the line producer, Gortner is the principal producer and the $1.7 million is being put up by Melvin Simon Productions.

The time is 1968 and the place is New Mexico (the final scene will be shot this week at White Sands). But now that the greening of America has given way to the malling of America, our rural landscape is being metamorphosed from locales of specific character to those of sleekly efficient anonymity. It’s disquieting to step outside the Granada Royale Homeetel in El Paso, where the cast is staying, to see that once rugged Texas landscape looks a great deal like West Covina by the San Bernardino Freeway. And so, according to Gortner, it was necessary to go so far a field that a helicopter was needed to scout a Benton’s and its environs.

A movie can be made for a variety of reasons, not the least commendable of which is that someone felt it simply had to be made. The play ran at the East Side Playhouse Off-Broadway during the ’73-’74 season, (and here at the Westwood Playhouse in 1975 and at the Callboard in January). Although it has never been a popular success, it has tenacious life in regional and college theaters.

“The minute I saw it I thought it would make a great movie”, said Gortner, who is sporting long Botticelli curls and a scruffy beard for his anti-Establishment look. “But William Jasper Fisher, a wealthy businessman, had bought the rights as a gift for his wife. I don’t think he has had any serious interest in producing. But several others, like Robert Aldrich and Peter Guber, did. There was talk that John Huston wanted to direct. I knew I couldn’t bid against those guys.

“When the rights were about up for renewal, I literally got on a plane to Chicago to see Fisher. There was an outright purchase price of $50,000. Two friends advance the money, but I later pulled away from the money because there interest was strictly just commercial.

“I thought about opening the play up and what kind of writer I’d need. A regular screenwriter might feel competitive towards the script. Which is very well written, and make unnecessary changes, or at least fight it. I thought if Medoff could get into the ideas I had, it could work out. He agreed, and it did. Now you see more vividly these characters coming together from different walks of life. The piece is about the inability to move.

“What I didn’t like in the L.A. Production is that Teddy, the veteran was a bull in a china shop. My Teddy is a suicide. He’s looking for people to react. He’s beyond the norm now, over the abyss unafraid of the truth. When he says to Angel, “You’ll never get married,’ that’s a terrible moment, but it’s true. And the thing is, he feels for her. He feels for them all.”

Gortner is tall and rangy in the classic western mold. There is openness to him that suggests nothing of the ex-brat prodigy he might have become as an evangelist who was on the road from age 4 to 15. “My dad, has a congregation now in Escondido, wasn’t happy when I left the church. He thinks one day I’ll come back to God. But I really never had the faith. It’s just another form of theater.”

That night, at dinner with Candy Clark in an unusual restaurant called the Library and molded after one, (they are what gossips might call an item, but there affection is unobtrusive and no one’s making a big deal of it), Gortner spoke of meeting Melvin Simon: “In his car, going to lunch, he said, ‘Why don’t you take another $100,000 for yourself. You deserve it.’ If it is available, I’d rather put into the film,’ I said. “That’s good,’ he said. ‘That was my test. If you have said OK I’d have thrown you the hell out of my car. Now you can go make your movie.’” But that’s the way it is. Everybody’s taking a pay cut.”