Hollywood on the Rio Grande

HOOKED FOREVER

- Introduction
- Hooked Forever
- Innocent in the Velvet Jungle
- The Commission of Doubt or
  What the Hell do we do Next
- Stinky Flies in the Gourmet Soup
- One for the Money, Two for the Show
- The Wrap Without Bow Knots The wonderment of movies started for me as a seven-year-old boy during the Depression in the drought/oil-bust town of Hobbs. A few miles south of there, my father, W.B. Evans, had turned our small cattle ranch into a tiny town called Humble City. The name fit perfectly. He built a school and a post office. In desperation he hand-dug an irrigation well that furnished the water for a big vegetable patch. The strawberries and watermelons flourished. We would haul these to Hobbs in a worn-out Model T Ford. I had the "honor" of peddling these delicacies door to door. A dime was fine pay for a box of strawberries and 15 cents for a watermelon. On one trip Dad gave me a dime and suggested I might wish to spend it on a Tom Mix movie.

The lights were on in the little theater prior to the showing. The ceiling was painted sky blue and someone had stuck pieces of tinfoil on it in varied sized stars. I lay back in my seat - front-row-center - and was hypnotized by this marvel until the theater darkened and the movie came on. It was moving magic.

The fact that I lived around real cowboys who did not wear guns - and Tom Mix was said to have been one of those - did not alter the awe at the Western fantasy there before me. It was greater than all the world's reality combined. I watched it three-and-a-half times before Dad came and dragged me from this brand new world of wondrous illusion. At the same time millions of other little kids around the world were discovering the wondrous myth of Western movies.

Tom Mix, the worldwide Western star, had made some of his earliest films at Las Vegas, N.M., in 1915, long before I was born. Mix contended with God, my horse and my three dogs as things worthy of worship, and I went to see him every dime I could get.

In 1954, a movie company came to Taos to film Make Haste to Live starring Stephen McNally and Dorothy McGuire. Three half-assed cowboys, Marion Minor (same first name as John Wayne's real one), Chet Mitchell and myself were hired to ride our roping horses across the street to add atmosphere. It was work one minute and wait for an hour. Wait. Wait. Wait. We did this all day, then came back the next day and did the exact same procedure all over again with the cameras set at a new angle. We thought this was the most boring job possible - besides that, they paid our horses twice as much as they did us.

In 1956, Edward Abbey published a book called The Brave Cowboy. It had fine reviews and small sales. In 1958, my first book of short stories was published and a second book, a biography, Long John Dunn of Taos, was scheduled. During this scattering of time and dreams, I was sitting in the Taos Inn drinking beer with Abbey. We were both broke. His lovely, ex-model-now-artist wife was waitressing therein and paying for our foamy beverages. We were lamenting the fact that Kirk Douglas had paid him only twenty-five hundred dollars for the film rights to his noted novel. The film would be titled Lonely Are The Brave.

In my deep appreciation for his wife's generosity, I firmly suggested he should take some of her paintings to the Albuquerque production office and rent them for set decorations. He did it, and they were paid $200. That may not seem like much, but beer was only 25 cents a bottle. I have seen the film several times, but have failed for certain to identify any of her paintings.

About the same time they were wrapping Lonely Are The Brave I finished my own contemporary cowboy novel The Rounders. Before its publication, it was submitted to MGM in manuscript form. Director Burt Kennedy found it in a "slush" pile. By a miracle he read it and loved it. This single, accidental action would eventually lead to several pictures and uncountable millions of dollars for New Mexico.

Burt took The Rounders to Fess Parker - a world hero at the moment because of his Disney role as Davy Crockett. Fess loved it. When he called me to come to Hollywood to discuss optioning the book - with Burt Kennedy directing it - my history, Burt Kennedy's history and a good part of the history of the making of Westerns in New Mexico would be forever altered.