Alias Smith & Jones: The Story of Two Pretty Good Bad Men

by Sandra K. Sagala

  With the crew scheduled to begin third season production with the Utah shoot, Roy Huggins needed to get the season’s scripts ready earlier than usual. The time in Utah would be limited, but with advance planning, footage could be shot for all the episodes. ABC’s third season renewal had been a short order — twelve episodes — with the possibility of an order for the “back nine” later on. Huggins wanted all twelve episodes already committed to to have the advantage of Moab footage to maintain the high production values and special wide-open-spaces look. During the last two weeks of April 1972, Huggins concentrated on stories, holding two or three story conferences a day. The pace slowed down after that first flurry, but by the time production began, all twelve scripts were in some stage of development. “The Long Chase” would open the season, followed by “High Lonesome Country.” These two episodes were mostly outdoor stories and would be shot entirely in Moab. New opening title sequences and portions of all episodes except “The Strange Fate of Conrad Meyer Zulick,” “The Day The Amnesty Came Through” and “McGuffin” would be shot on location with the interiors done in the studio soundstages later. Generic footage of Heyes and Curry riding through the area became the basis of the tags for each episode, the particular dialogue for each being looped in later. In this manner, even those scripts which weren’t a part of the location shooting schedule would still have a share of Utah’s majestic vistas. Besides splendor, this footage added a sense of space to Heyes and Curry’s wanderings and enhanced their characterization with the audience becoming privy to the boys’ life on the trail as they argued and teased their way from town to town. This tag format, not incidentally, also accommodated the new policy of “dispensable” tags that the network affiliates demanded. In some markets, the affiliates wanted to carve out additional commercial time to enhance their revenue and the easiest way to gain an extra minute and a half was to lop off the tag at the end of the show. During the first and second seasons, the tag was often the final story element and eliminating it left the episode incomplete. In the third season, the tags became lagniappe, adding punch but no longer essential to the story.

  On June 30, 1972, Jo Swerling took charge of a cast and crew eighty-five persons strong as they settled into their quarters in the little town of Moab. Not many problems arose which required Swerling’s intervention, but “somebody had to be there to make sure we didn’t go too far over schedule or budget,” Swerling explains. “And keep pointing at the sun that’s setting….” Most of the locations where they would be working were within the boundaries of the Manti-LaSal National Forest and Swerling was the point man, working as a liaison between the production and the park rangers, who were happy to see the company, but concerned about possible damage to the land. Adding to the complications of shooting on location were the constraints of respecting the protected environment. Swerling elaborates, “[We] had to be careful we didn’t disrupt anything, knock any rocks over, that sort of thing. There were a lot of rangers around, kind of keeping an eye on us.” [2]

  Alex Singer was the director chosen to lead the Moab production team. He recalls the experience fondly. “It was a magical place. Moab must be one of the most beautiful places in the world. I felt very pleased.” But while the scenery around Moab was beguiling, the environment was brutal. It was early July — the temperature climbed to over 120 degrees Fahrenheit and stayed that way. Yet, as Singer points out, “it was the driest heat I’ve ever known, which meant that once you sort of got used to it, it was very tolerable.” Getting used to it required drinking lots of water. Singer made sure that every member of the cast and crew drank at least a gallon a day.

  While keeping hydrated was essential, Singer felt that actually going to fetch water, or having someone bring it to him, was a waste of time. He solved the problem by carrying a canteen. And as he was constantly referring to his scripts, he decided it would be nice to carry them with him at all times, too. He had a pouch made to hold the scripts and found that it was also a good way to carry his wallet, his glasses, Kleenex, chewing gum and any other essential he might need. “I was completely independent as I moved through time and space,” Singer recalls. “I looked like I was going to war.”

  And move through time and space he did. It was against his principles to ever have the crew see him sit down on the theory that if the boss didn’t sit down, the crew wouldn’t either. But film production is an arduous task, especially when coupled with the heat and dust of a desert summer. “People are tired, they’re physically tired,” Singer explains. “It’s very easy for the set to kind of decline into paralysis unless there’s something going on. So, I felt I was duty-bound to be the tummler. It’s a Yiddish word and it means the guy who makes the noise.” Singer’s efforts to “make the noise” and keep things lively endeared him to the crew and they started to play games with him.

  They started in a simple and subtle way. Because of the heat, Singer had developed the habit of wearing a sweatband under his wristwatch to keep it from sliding around. One day the crew imitated him, each person wearing a sweatband under their watch, then using exaggerated gestures as they worked to draw his attention to their wrists. On another day, Singer wore pants that were a little too long. Afraid he would trip over them as he rushed around the set, Singer rolled up his cuffs a couple of inches and was able to move about unhampered. The next day the entire crew rolled up their cuffs, creating a new fashion trend on the set. “They made me laugh,” Singer remembers. “And they made themselves laugh a lot.”

  Pleased with the success of their teasing, the crew planned a bigger joke, involving not only the crew, but also Singer’s wife Judy and the staff of a local Chinese restaurant. Singer ordered a complicated entree, so when his dinner came a bit later than everyone else’s he didn’t think too much about it. At last the waiter brought his meal, placing it in front of him with an elaborate flourish and a straight face. The dish looked beautiful, garnished with parsley and other greens. “It was an interesting arrangement of things,” Singer muses. “Chinese food is a little bit exotic in some of the ways in which it is prepared, so I allowed for that and kind of examined it.” The entire room was dead silent as everyone watched the director closely. “I tried to get a hold on something that looked like I should hold it,” he continues with a laugh. “And there was nothing but chicken bones artfully put together.” The crew roared with laughter at his confusion. It took great daring for a crew to play such a trick on their director, but it was great fun and a total success. “They were very proud of themselves,” Judy Singer adds. The director was also proud of them. Singer approaches directing as performance art, communicating a certain euphoria to the crew that creates excitement and a sense of fun. “It was a way for me to be able to push them without being aggressive and without being personal,” Singer explains. “I got a marvelous reaction from this crew.” [3]

  The time in Utah wasn’t all fun and games, though. In fact, at times it was downright dangerous. After a long, tiring day of shooting, cast and crew would return to town for dinner and a bit of relaxation. Having a film company in town was a boon for local business owners, but for the local cowboys, these Hollywood interlopers soon wore out their welcome. The cowboys watched in frustration as their starry-eyed girlfriends gravitated toward the visitors, flirting and fraternizing with the glamorous film crew. The situation became so tense, Jo Swerling took to traveling in the company of the unit’s stuntmen, Jimmy Nickerson and Sonny Shields, for protection. It was a wise decision. One night while walking from the hotel to a nearby restaurant, two cowboys in a pickup truck stopped at the intersection where the three men were waiting to cross the street. The driver rolled down his window and greeted them with a sneer. “Hollywood faggots!” Shields sauntered over to the truck and challenged him. “You got something to say to me?” The driver replied with another choice epithet. “Step out of the car,” Shields demanded. The cowboy opened the door, put one foot on the ground and folded up in a heap. Shields’s left hook had been so fast, neith
er Swerling nor Nickerson had seen it. Ignoring the man at his feet, Shields addressed the passenger. “Have you got anything to say?” The cowboy shook his head, slid behind the wheel and took off, leaving his buddy in the street.

  Ben Murphy may have played the “fastest gun in the West,” but he had no desire to become a target for irate cowboys, or even cowgirls, in Moab. “I just knew instinctively — don’t go out in public. I knew people’d come gunning for me and I’m no fighter,” Ben admits. One night he did leave his hotel room, going to a local bar where Monty Laird was to perform his gun-twirling routine. The phalanx of crew members surrounding the actor didn’t deter a hostile woman from approaching him. “Oh, you’re Ben Murphy! Ya wanna fight?” Ben realized the woman was just drunk and being ornery; he diffused the situation by being polite. Laird wasn’t so lucky.

  Laird’s gun-twirling routine didn’t endear him to the local cowboys. After the show, as he was leaving the bar, three cowboys jumped him and started to beat the tar out of him. But Laird, though rather slight of stature, was wiry and tough. He was also a fighter and never went about unarmed, as the cowboys learned to their shock. Laird managed to reach his boot, pull out his knife and sink it into one of his attackers. He made his escape and the cowboys disappeared with their buddy, the knife still sticking in him, much to Laird’s disgust. “I lost my best knife that night,” he regretted. The next morning he related the incident to Swerling, who wondered how soon it would be before the police came calling. No one knew how badly injured the cowboy was, but Swerling eventually decided it must have been minor and the cowboy so humiliated that he didn’t talk about it. “There was never a peep out of anybody. He didn’t die or anything,” Swerling explains. “I think there would have been major consequences if that had happened.” [4]

  Being in Utah, far away from the watchful eyes of the Black Tower and the limitations of the Universal backlot, was invigorating. Singer and cinematographer Gene Polito no longer had to frame their shots in such a way as to avoid showing nearby power lines or the castle battlements on the back side of the western sets. While Singer always enjoyed the challenge of filming the great outdoors within the backlot boundaries, he was excited to be shooting a Western the way it ought to be shot — in rocky canyons and remote hillsides, where every turn offered a new and unexpected surprise. “The locations were really exotic, really remote…They had exactly that quality that you want from a western where you don’t know what’s around the other side of the rock over there and the rocks are so beautiful that it almost doesn’t matter what’s around the other side,” Singer rhapsodizes. He took full advantage of the countryside, giving the show a sense of reality lacking in its first two seasons. He was excited by the beauty of the surroundings as well as the challenge of shooting half a dozen episodes at once, each of them essentially an action film. “The physical freedom just gave the whole show, the shows, a lift in spirit that was very special,” Singer recalls.

  Singer had been the director who shepherded Roger Davis through his first days in the role of Hannibal Heyes. Now he was the director breathing new life into the series. Having also directed several episodes with Peter Duel in the role, he was in the perfect position to judge the performance of both actors. He had been impressed by Peter’s talent, his ability to read the lines with real understanding. “That makes doing a kind of an out-of-the-side-of-the-mouth comedy, which is what this was, a pleasure because you have somebody who really touches the right notes and [gets] it straight,” Singer says. Roger Davis gave a different interpretation. Singer recalls Roger had a sweet nature that was very different from Peter’s take on the character. “It was a kind of openness and accessibility that I think worked very well for the character.”

  Pleased as he was, he was somewhat dismayed by a quirk of Roger’s. “He managed to get himself injured in ways that simply astonished everybody,” Singer explains. “He could fall in places where you’d say ‘There’s nothing to fall from.’ He could trip over things where there’s nothing to trip over…[The crew was] always on the edge of their seats every time he did something.” Luckily the injuries, though frequent, were minor and none of them show on film. “Once or twice they were a little scary,” Singer recalls. “The crew tried so hard to avoid any difficulty. The guys doing the special effects and the stuntmen would do anything to keep him from getting hurt. He got hurt anyway, but I don’t think he was ever out of action completely.”

  Monty Laird remembered one such scary incident. The scene called for Roger and Ben to gallop down a hill full out. At the bottom they were to make a quick left and go through a wide gate. Laird checked Ben’s horse and tightened his saddle, knowing the competitive spirit between Ben and Roger would turn the scene into a race no matter what the director had in mind. Always protective of Ben, Laird advised, “Okay, now when you get down to the bottom of that hill and you get ready to make that left to go through that gate, lean to the left and bring your horse around into it.” Ben listened to the advice, as he always did. Laird then went over to Roger and asked if he could check his saddle. “No! I checked it,” Roger retorted, reluctant to take advice from anyone other than the director. The two actors mounted their horses and took off “like two race jockeys coming out of the chute.” Ben followed the advice and made the turn. “Roger made that turn sitting straight in the saddle, went over to the left, the saddle twisted on the horse, he got hung up in the stirrup and it drug him, oh God, thirty or forty feet,” Laird recalled. Roger finally broke loose of the stirrup as members of the crew ran through the clouds of dust to rescue him and capture the horse. The fall was spectacular, but fortunately Roger suffered only bruises. [5]

  Ben and Roger were getting used to working together. They didn’t have the natural chemistry that had existed between Ben and Peter and the circumstances of their pairing didn’t help the situation. “I liked Roger. He was a personable fellow,” Monty Laird mused. “But him and Ben just didn’t click.” Part of the reason they didn’t click was that neither one of them understood how the other one worked and neither one of them took the time to find out. It was a new season, but Roger still felt insecure in his position as the replacement for the well-liked Peter Duel. Alias Smith and Jones was, as everyone who worked on it agrees, a fun show. But not for Roger. “The problem with Smith and Jones was that, for me, for the most part it was hard and I wasn’t having a good time,” Roger remembers. “And there was an element of Ben’s enjoying that I wasn’t having a good time…at least from my paranoid perspective.” [6]

  Roger performed best when reacting to another actor. He looked to Ben to give him that support and was constantly frustrated when it wasn’t forthcoming, leading him to feel Ben was deliberately making things hard for him. Ben also had his moments of frustration with his co-star, but his lack of response to Roger was not caused by a conscious desire to irritate him. It happened because, most of the time, Ben couldn’t see him well enough to be able to play off the nuances of his performance. While Roger knew Ben was nearsighted, he had no concept of just how poor his eyesight was. Normally Ben wore contact lenses, but that quickly became impractical in Moab. “You don’t want to wear lenses in all that dust,” he explains. “It was just one pain in the ass after another out there.”

  Without his contacts, Ben could have been giving his own performance to a wall. “I don’t care who’s feeding me lines. I don’t see them anyway.” But it was driving Roger crazy. “I would think that Ben was enjoying it,” Roger expounds. “…and I would come over to him and I’d say, ‘Jesus, you’re just standing there!’ And he would go, ‘I don’t even see you. I’ve had my glasses off.’ ” [7]

  Ben admits that, although he realized how difficult it was for Roger to replace Peter, he didn’t do much to ease the tension between them. And, in truth, he did find an element of enjoyment in Roger’s daily mishaps. He shrugs, “Roger’s one of those guys who just kind of got in his own way a little bit sometimes, but once you didn’t let it bother you, it was hysterical t
o watch.”

  Neither Ben nor Roger were expert horsemen, but at the studio that wasn’t important. The horses were well trained and experienced in film work and the actors could perform without having to expend a lot of effort controlling their animals. In Utah, that changed. The studio did not send their stable of trained animals with the production team, but instead hired horses from local owners. Naturally these horses were not camera-savvy, as Roger and Ben learned one day.

  The scene called for Roger to ride up to Ben, stop, deliver his lines, then turn and gallop off. Ben and Roger were in place on one ridge, while the camera was set up some distance away on another ridge. The actors wore microphones and also had walkie-talkies to communicate with the crew. The first take began. Roger rode up, stopped, delivered his lines, then galloped off. But there was a technical glitch and they had to do it again. Once more Roger rode up, said his lines and rode off. Again something went wrong and the scene had to be re-shot. Ben grins as he remembers what happened next. “By the time you do something with a horse two, three, four times, the horse has got it down.” The horse had learned the drill and had no patience with the tedious repetitiveness of filmmaking. On the next take, Roger rode up, got out half the dialogue and suddenly the horse turned and took off. Through the walkie-talkies the actors could hear the crew burst out laughing. They tried it again, but the horse wasn’t interested. Over and over they tried to get the scene done and, despite Roger’s best efforts to control him, over and over again the horse hurried them along. It was getting late, they weren’t getting the shot and Roger was growing more and more embarrassed as the crew laughed ever harder. Ben continues the story, “ I remember he’s riding up again, he stops the horse, he starts to say his lines and the horse then does the usual — starts to turn and take off again — and I remember seeing Roger’s eyes just roll up to the back of his head. Only I saw this, the camera couldn’t see it, but you could just see this man and all of a sudden it was like, ‘Oh fuck.’ ” That was the last straw. Ben, who had maintained his composure though take after take, gave up the struggle. He laughed so hard he fell off his horse. Finally giving in to the stubborn animal, the director called it a day. The dialogue was looped in later. [8]