Legends of the Old West - BONUS: Barry Corbin Interview

Episode Date: July 15, 2018

Veteran actor Barry Corbin talks all things Western: Lonesome Dove, No Country For Old Men, the life of legendary Texas cattleman Charlie Goodnight, and the state of western movies. Warning: some strong language (though it's all quotes from a play) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Benefits vary by card. Other conditions apply. I'm thrilled to present an interview with one of the great character actors of our time Barry Corbin he's approaching his 40th year as a film and TV actor, and this past April of 2018, he was inducted into the Hall of Great Western Performers at the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City. The emcee for that ceremony was his old friend, Sam Elliott. Barry's credits are way, way too long to list, but I sat down with him to talk about a few classics. list, but I sat down with him to talk about a few classics. First, he embodied the man in the myth of Charlie Goodnight, the famous Texas cattleman, in the one-man play by Andy Wilkinson called Charlie Goodnight's Last Night. Goodnight and his partner Oliver Loving were the core inspirations for the characters of Woodrow F. Call and Augustus McRae in Larry McMurtry's all-time great novel, Lonesome Dove. And of course, Barry Corbin played the role of Roscoe Brown in the epic TV miniseries. He'll tell some stories

of the making of the film, as well as his memories of filming another movie in the same area, but one that could not have been more opposite, though it also starred Tommy Lee Jones. That one was No Country for Old Men. You can currently see Barry as a guest on the show The Ranch on Netflix and in a whole host of upcoming movies. I met him at his home in Fort Worth, which is basically a shrine to the Old West. And here's an amazing nugget. On one of his bookshelves is a hardcover copy of Lonesome Dove, signed by every single living Texas Ranger. It's an incredible sight. So, without further ado, here's Barry Corbin. I was thinking, why are westerns not popular among young people?

When I was a kid, which is, I'm 77 years old, when I was a kid, the old West was like what the Vietnam War would be to a kid now, you know, just recent. There were still cowboys coming to town horseback when I was a kid in La Mesa. It's like now if you watch a western to the kids today, you watch a western to the kids today, it's like watching a Revolutionary War movie to a kid when I was a kid. You know, you didn't want to watch a movie with guys with powdered wigs and stuff. You know, that wasn't, you didn't want to see that because it was ancient. Well that's what the western is now to these kids. Yeah, they don't have Western is now to these kids. Yeah, they don't have any way to identify with it.

There's no way. There's no way they can identify with it. Most of them have never seen a horse. And if they went to get on a horse, they wouldn't know how. Now it's all spaceships. They've got Star Wars. That's Western, but it's spaceships instead of horses and livestock. Well, I think on that topic, that is kind of one of the questions I wanted to ask,

is why do you think it's important to keep the Old West alive, both the iconic moments that have been kind of romanticized and the darker moments? Why is it important? It's important to us as Americans, just as Greek mythology is to the Greeks, Norse mythology is to the Danish, Roman mythology is to the Italians. It's that important to keep it alive. If we don't keep it alive,

we lose our national identity. We lose our self-identification as Americans. It's our mythology. It's our mythology. It's our mythology. It's our, and it's not real any more than Mount Olympus with God sitting up there,

you know, running everything. It's idealized. We made it a myth. In point of fact, a cowboy guy working on a ranch somewhere, he'd get to town maybe twice a year, and he'd go wild, crazy. We think of it, now you see a western,

and you see these people riding horses on the street, milling around on the boardwalk, saloons full. Well, that never happened. I mean, there wasn't anybody in town. They were all out working, you know. People who were in town, shopkeepers and people were in their places of business. There wasn't people wandering around the street carrying baskets and riding their horses up and down the street. I tried to convince them when you're doing a movie, I said, we don't need all these people out here. They didn't have that many people in the whole state.

Once a month they'd come in and do the shopping and sit around and gossip a little bit and then they'd go back home. They didn't hang around in town. It is basically who we are as a nation. And if we forget that, then we might just, well, just quit and turn into Russia or something, turn into China. It doesn't make any difference. If we lose our history, we've lost everything. I started reading it and I said, well where's this character Ellis? Where does he come in? I keep reading and reading. All this blood and gore and shooting people and, you know, putting bolts in their heads and stuff.

I don't know if I want to do this thing. I kept reading and reading and reading. Finally, I got to that scene. I read it. Whoa. I went back, read it again. I called my manager and I said, well, hell yes, I'll do it. That scene is the movie. That's the whole movie. And so I made a deal with them. But I had this, I'd already agreed to do this other thing. So they asked me to come up and rehearse in Santa Fe before they started shooting.

So I went up to Santa Fe and, you know, got together with Josh Brolin. I'd known him from before. Javier came in the bar. We were all sitting around the bar talking. If I'd known, if I'd seen that movie first, I would have got up and left when Javier came in. He was a very nice, friendly guy, you know. We were all sitting around talking.

Next morning, we go into the ballroom, me and Tommy Lee and Joel and Ethan were in there, just us. So we ran through the scene. They said, okay, well that's all we need. So they didn't even do anything, they just had us run through the scene. So we went to lunch, Tommy Lee and his entourage, he had some guys with him, you know, drivers and people, you know. So we all went to lunch. And then I flew out the next day to go to Kansas to do this other movie.

I worked on that for about two weeks, and then I was horseback the whole time. I flew into Marfa, got in a wheelchair, and the wheelchair made me sore than the horse did. It was an uncomfortable old wheelchair, you know. We were out in the country in this old shack, you know, and they had rattlesnakes up under the floor. You could hear them. If you stomped on the floor, they'd rattle down there. And they had those cats wandering around. I said, you know, let's go let them cats get out because if you do, you're never going to see them again because there's coyotes around here and there's snakes up under the house. So those cats are gone if one of them gets out.

Well if you watch the movie, when Tommy Lee walks in the door, a cat scans out, runs out. Well they never saw that cat again. So they shot that. I came home, you know, didn't think anything more about it. Then the movie came out, and we went to see it. I thought it was pretty good. I thought it was a good deal, and that scene worked real well, I thought. It gets the best picture of the year.

What were a couple things about Charlie Goodnight himself that maybe the layperson wouldn't know, that you may have learned getting deep into it the way you were? He was a very complex man. He had no education, no formal education. He was self-educated. He was a self-taught botanist. He's one of the first ones to experiment with interbreeding the bison with cattle. He developed a strain he called cattle-lo and they called it beef-lo now. It's a hybrid. He also tried to experiment with breeding pigs with goats.

That didn't work out. But he tried all kinds. He was always experimenting with things. He was a with things. He was a planesman and obviously he worked out in nature and his whole life was based around nature. He was a friend of cattlemen who helped him build his house. Okay. The Star House. Yeah, the Star House, yeah.

It's still standing in Cache, Oklahoma for the Rangers. Sol Ross was their Ranger leader. When they found Cynthia Ann at the battle, they used to call it the Battle of Pease River, but it was no battle. All the men were going out hunting and they just – there was women and old people, you know, in there. And it was basically a slaughter. They killed everybody. And they saw this one woman with a baby and they noticed she had blue eyes. It was Cynthia Ann Parker. She'd been kidnapped years before. And Goodnight wanted to just let her go with her people, with the Indians, because he said she'll never be able to adjust to our way of life. And she never did adjust.

Her baby died within a year, and within a year after that she was dead. She kept trying to escape, trying to go back. She wanted to go back. trying to escape, trying to go back. She wanted to go back. But he was, he always had an affinity for natural people. Civilization to him was not a good thing. He fenced it. He was one of the first people to fence his. He brought in barbed wire to the panhandle because he knew that it was the coming thing. He quit carrying the gun as soon as they had law there. He never carried one after that. He always had one with him, but he never carried one.

When he was an old man, he was going to the old trail driver's reunion in San Antonio. He caught the train in Goodnight, Texas and rode down to Fort Worth. Met up with an old friend of his. His old friend came and they took the train down to San Antonio. He was going to be down there a week. Had a little carpet bag with him. Goodnight did. That's all, only the luggage he had with him. There was a clean shirt, couple of changes of underwear, box of cigars, bottle of whiskey, and a Colt.45.

That's all he took. I tried to travel that way myself. The play takes place in one night, Good Night's Last Night on Earth. It's called Charlie Good Night's Last Night. The audience either is a figment of his imagination and it's people that he knew or they're people coming in to pay their last respects. You never know for sure because he never knows for sure. So it starts out, well at the very first he says, he comes out, you know, the old man comes into his bedroom, basically. He comes in and he looks around.

Some goddamn town denizen left the gate a-swinging. Leave a goddamn gate like you find it. Is that too difficult?" And I'm talking to the audience, I'm picking people out and talking to them. That's the kind of guy he was. One of the things that he, one of the quotes, a lot of it's direct quotes from what he said, J. J. Evitz, direct quotes from what he said, J. Evitz Haley brought J. Frank Dobie to visit the colonel, they called him colonel, and he was in his 90s and they couldn't find him. They went up to his house and nobody was there. And they went around the back and he was out there he had his coat off he

had post hole diggers he's digging fence post post holes you know and out there working and then Haley says excuse me me, Colonel, are we bothering you? He said, well, hell yes, you're bothering me, but don't study about it. If you hadn't come along and bothered me, some other son of a bitch would have. Come on in, set yourself down. So he took them in and gave them a drink of whiskey, and then he started telling them all about his life. But that's the kind of guy he was.

He'd cuss all the time. He was rough talking, but he was very sensitive. He'd cover up the sensitivity with a bunch of bluster and cussing. So what the play goes from being very rough and hard talking and as it goes along it gets more and more poetic. And, you know, there's one point where he's talking about son of a bitch Stu.

He says, not son of a gun Stu. If you're going to use a name use the proper name. It's son of a bitch. And then he starts it will be Christmas soon back home, back home where the nights are cold and clear and you can see tomorrow from today. I would go home again. I would go home again.

Then he goes from that to, last Christmas, I sought to have a son of a bitch stew made for our Christmas repast. But somebody unbeknownst to me meddled in the provisions and what we had was a damn poor excuse for a son of a bitch. The thing that McMurtry did, he made Gus and Carl contemporaries. In fact, Oliver Loving

was like a father figure to Charles Goodnight. Goodnight was 30, and Loving was 50 in his 50s. And when Loving was killed, when the Comanches got him, Goodnight said that he was the nearest thing to a father to him that he'd ever known because his father died when he was very young. And his stepfather was kind of cruel to him. So his father figure was Oliver Loving,

and it was like losing a father. When he heard that he'd been wounded, he immediately got on a mule and rode 100 miles in one night to Fort Sumter. And good night did take Oliver Loving from after he died from New Mexico to Weatherford because he gave his word that he would. He said when Loving was dying, he said, I don't want to be buried in a foreign country. Take me back to my lodge in Weatherford.

So he did. Lodge in Weatherford. So he did. I don't know if you know the whole history of this story. Well originally, McMurtry was commissioned by Warner Brothers to write a screenplay because they wanted to have a movie with John Wayne, Jimmy Stewart, and Henry Fonda. So he wrote this screenplay and it was basically Lonesome Dove and it was called Streets of Laredo and Wayne wanted to play

Gus. Stewart didn't care, he just, you know, whatever they wanted him to play he'd do. And Henry Fonda was going to be Jake Spoon. Then Wayne got sick, Fonda was having heart problems, so it all fell apart and they never did it, which is a good thing. I mean it would have been a good movie, but it would have been just a movie. McMurtry went, when he realized they weren't going to do it, went and brought the rights back. He bought it from Warner Brothers and wrote that book.

I read the book, and I went to my agent, and I said, look, they're going to make a mini-series out of this book. I need to be in this mini-series when they do it. Well it was about a year and a half or two years later when they did it and my agent forgot that I'd said anything about it. Well fortunately they came into Hollywood and were seeing people, but only seeing people that they wanted to see. I mean, they didn't have an open call or anything,

you know. People, nobody was submitted for it. They came into town and they called in the people they wanted to see. And I was one of them they called in. And I said, I don't care what part it is, I don't care what part I play, I just want to be a part of it. So they hired me to do Roscoe. That was really a great experience for me. For a lot of the other people who had to go through all the hell that they went through, it wasn't such a great experience. But for me it was

wonderful. My scenes were the first to be shot, the stuff in Fort Smith. So I came in and worked for, I think, two weeks, maybe two and a half weeks. Then I went away for three months, I guess. Did two other movies in the meantime. Then came back and finished the movie in New Mexico. So it was, you know, I only worked at the most three and a half weeks on the movie, you know. Well, after I, when I was there, everybody, when I first started, everybody was optimistic, looking forward to it. Duvall had his hat. He wore his hat all the time. He hadn't been

on camera yet, but he'd walk around town in Austin with that hat on. And everybody was optimistic and feeling great. I shot my stuff and left. Came back and Tim and we were in New Mexico in Santa Fe and Tim Scott was there. Everybody was mad. Everybody was mad at each other. I couldn't figure it out. So Tim and I went to get a hamburger. We'd been sitting at a hamburger joint sitting outside. And I said, Tim, what happened? I said, everybody was so happy and so looking forward to doing this thing. And now everybody's at each other's throats. What went on? Tim said, cattle drive. So my idea was I had the best part in the movie because I never saw a cow.

I didn't have to do anything with the cattle drive. So I had a good memorable part and I didn't have to fool with the cattle. You can't separate your raising from who you are. Larry McMurtry grew up out in Archer City. His family, they were all ranchers. He knew he didn't want to do that. He knew he wanted to write, basically. If you saw, I don't know if you saw Hud, Horseman Passed By.

The part that Brandon DeWilde played in Hud was Larry McMurtry. He was a young kid growing up on the ranch, but had an idea of the world and he wanted to tell the story. So McMurtry basically is a storyteller, which is basically what all writers and by extension all actors, we're storytellers. We are the people that back in the days of the caveman or back in the days when the Indians were living out. We're the guys that go by the campfire and tell stories. We're the ones that keep history alive. Reach up there and get that book. I want to show you this. This is one of a kind.

You're never going to see this again. It's signed by every living Texas Ranger. You're kidding. Texas Rangers gave it to me. They hired me as a speaker. They have a yearly banquet that they, you know, for all the Texas Rangers. Retired and active, you know. When they invited me to speak, they gave me that. Help make the show more visible to new listeners as they're browsing through all the different podcasts out there.

You can find us on the web at Old West podcast dot com and our Facebook page. Legends of the Old West podcast. The handles for Twitter and Instagram are at Old West podcast. We'll see you next time. Cash back at Sephora, Old Navy, Expedia, and other stores you love. You can even stack sales on top of cash back. Just start your shopping with Rakuten to save money at over 750 stores. Join for free at rakuten.ca or get the Rakuten app. That's R-A-K-U-T-E-N.