As soon as we climbed out of the helicopter, we heard the music. “Hand me down that can of beans...” roared the goldminers. “Make them sound like the Red Army Chorus,” said Alan Jay Lerner. And up on the hill 250 extras jumped and leaped and fell in a ton of mud.
At a fork in the East Eagle Creek, near 9,000-foot Boulder Peak in the Wallowa-Whitman National Forest, Hollywood has come to make a $14 million super-extravaganza movie musical of Paint Your Wagon. The setting is one of the greatest natural fir and pine forests in America, yet the trees on the set are from Hollywood, the horses are brought in from a place in Nevada that teaches horses to act, the water oxen are from New England, the bear who plays a role in the wrestling scene is from Honolulu, the cows are from Texas, and the set designer is from Australia. The first things you see when you climb out of the mini-chopper are the towns. Two Gold Rush mining camps have been built by one of the biggest construction companies in the world at a cost of $2.5 million. One is called Tent City, complete with gold mines. The other is No Name City, which is Tent City seven months later (after the intermission)—a total town built on wires and pulleys, like an Erector set. The saloons, the churches, the whorehouses, everything does tricks. The roofs fly off, the ceilings cave in, and everything blows up and sinks into the river in a big climactic scene like Sodom and Gomorrah. In case they miss the shots (God forbid!) the buildings all snap back into place for a retake.
The entire location has to be seen to be believed, and it was all designed by John Truscott, who won some Oscars for Camelot. Not bad for a 30-year-old Australian, but what does he know about the California Gold Rush? “We had gold in Australia, too,” he grins, knee-deep in mud. Sen. Wayne Morse thinks the whole thing is so impressive he’s legislating to preserve the location for an Oregon tourist attraction after the movie people leave.
Not everyone is delirious, however. Nearly 600 people are here, living 47 miles from the set in a remote country ranch community called Baker (Pop. 9,986). It used to be a stage coach center during the Gold Rush. Now it is surrounded by ghost towns and porcupines, which keep giving all the Teamster’s Union drivers flat tires on the dirt roads leading into the mountain trails. Baker has no recommendable restaurants and the actors always climb into their cars after washing off the mud and cow dung at the end of a hard day’s shooting and meet at the A&W Root Beer Stand for taco burgers.
The best food in town is at Josh and Netta Logan’s house. (The Logans were smart enough to bring along all their servants.) Or at Jean Seberg’s, where her Spanish maid from Majorca, makes great gazpacho. Clint Eastwood rides a motorcycle and lives on a ranch, where he rises at dawn to slop his own hogs. Lee Marvin simply opens another can of beer.
Jean Seberg had dust poisoning when she arrived, but now she’s falling into the country routine like Linus with a new blanket. “The first week I would have packed my suitcases if anyone had invited me to a cookout,” she says cheerfully. “Now I’m going to a barbecue my neighbor, Mrs. Johnson, is giving next week. I’m part of the local scene.”
In the film she breastfeeds a baby on screen, rides horses, and sings a new song written for her by Alan Jay Lerner and André Previn. She wears Ungaros to the grocery store and the locals park in the driveway of her rented green house to see who comes and goes.
“I called my folks and invited them to come and fish and I told my mother she wouldn’t even have to get used to the place. It’s just like Marshalltown.”
Most of the extras love the location because they don’t have to shave. Dirt and long hair and no deodorant are the order of the day. Shortly after the company arrived, 150 hippies showed up in the nearby woods passing out goldenrod and living on berries. Logan has hired most of them for the movie and Jean has become their Mother Superior. Next week two hippies will be married under a waterfall and Jean, Lee Marvin and Clint Eastwood will all be in the ceremony while the wedding march is played by the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. Along with some of the other crew members, the Nitty Grittys have moved out to the woods near the set in a trailer. They eat in the commissary, set up like picnic tables, and fish, ride horses, and swim in the icy streams of melted snow. “It’s a long way from the Sunset Strip,” says the Number One Nitty Gritty, “but they pay us the same money for a room in town and we’ve seen enough of that town to last the rest of our lives.”
The temperature is 35 degrees tonight. Josh Logan stalks through the slime in baggy blue jeans, cowboy boots, a polo coat and a New York hat. “I don’t know what the hell I’m doing here,” he said, “all these extras, all these unions to contend with. You’re afraid to give anybody an extra line to say or the budget goes up $10,000. You have to organize all these horses, all these cows, all these people, get the shot during Magic Hour, while the sky is light enough to silhouette the nature you’ve come to photograph. I’m living each day to the next. I can’t wait to get back to civilization.”
Ten men haul in more mud and throw it all over the extras. Netta Logan turns to Alan Jay Lerner: “Why, Oh why couldn’t we have gone to Arrowhead? Or even Lake Tahoe?”
“It’s got to be difficult,” quips Lerner, clutching the finished scrip for Coco on his way to a private Lear jet which will fly him back to Los Angeles for conferences with Katharine Hepburn. “If it’s not difficult it’s not worth doing.”
And you think musicals are easy to make. Spiders crawl across the ground. Jean Seberg sits near an oil lamp, playing poker with a full-blood Sioux Indian named Eddie Little Sky, a former member of the Green Berets, and a hunchback Chinese named Peanuts. Karen Lerner announces she’s just driven over a pine stump and knocked a hole in the oil pan of a new Continental. Word arrives that one of the helicopters has gone down in the mountains and the crew had to walk to a farmhouse to phone for a mechanic. “Never a dull moment,” says Jean Seberg, who is a long way from her fashionable house in the Rue du Bac in Paris, and even farther away from Truffaut and Godard.
On the way down the gorge, a porcupine galumphs across our path in the road like a lopsided old man. “Hand me down that can of beans...” roars the Red Army chorus through the virgin wilderness, and the mikes bounce the music up to the snow-capped peaks above the pines. And up on the rise, for the 45th take, like witches in the moonlight, they’re still jumping in the mud.