Meeting Clint
Stanley Dyrector
I think it was around 1958, and I was on this cattle call. We actors had to go on these often, back in the day. There were usually dozens of actors who might be up for the same part, and I waited on a long, long line that particular day. The studio we auditioned at might have been Allied Artists.
But first, by way of historical reference, dear reader, let me tell you this. I had joined the Screen Actors Guild in 1957 for 200 bucks. The reason I joined was that I was luckily cast in a movie called, Teenage Rumble. Rumble’s title changed soon thereafter to Dragstrip Riot. The film was released by American International Pictures (AIP) in 1958. AIP was known for their low-budget movies. Their boss loved weird film titles that caught the teen market’s fancy. Like, for instance, The Man with X-ray Eyes or Roger Corman’s Bucket of Blood, etc. Speaking of Roger Corman, many of his films became cult classics. A few of them starred a young and talented Jack Nicholson, who was a screenwriter and actor, and later became the superstar we know today.
Briefly, here’s the story of how I got my role in Dragstrip Riot. It was a fluke—someone else, a young fellow named Kuldip Singh, was assigned my role originally. He had been a contestant on Groucho Marx’s “You Bet Your Life.” During the early casting days, though, he dropped out and was history. I know not why he quit.
At this time, I was attending the Hollywood School of Drama under the GI Bill, and an agent saw me there on stage doing a scene from “Born Yesterday.” I played the Broderick Crawford role. (Paul Douglas played the role on Broadway.) The agent liked my John Garfield look and took me to the producer of Dragstrip Riot. The agent convinced the producer that I was the funniest kid in Hollywood and said I’d be the perfect comedy relief for the film. Goes to show you what happens when you’re in the right place at the right time—that, and having an agent who was great at bullshit!
I must’ve been fifth or sixth billed on credits when the film was released. I played the lead’s best friend, Cliff. Dragstrip Riot also included Connie Stevens before she was famous, and the singing group The Lettermen. Fay Wray played the mother to Gary Clarke’s lead. Remember Ms. Wray had starred in King Kong a couple of decades before. Yvonne Lime (The Rainmaker) was the ingénue in love with Gary Clarke’s character.
All of the good kids got to drive shiny 1955 Corvettes that the producer was able to finagle somehow. But the bad guys…well, you guessed it already, they rode motorcycles and wore black leather jackets.
As Cliff, the comic relief, I did my impersonations of Bella Lugosi’s Count Dracula, a snappy Edward G. Robinson, and a suave Charles Boyer for all of my clean-cut, good-guy friends. The bad guys were always after us, trying to kill us or beat the holy hell out of us. As always happened in the 1950s low-budget world, we beat the bad guys and the movie ended happily.
The cast went to the premiere of the movie at the Cornell Theatre in beautiful downtown Burbank.
I learned a lot doing my first professional movie. One of my big problems at the beginning of my career was being told I had a Brooklyn accent. Yet I would be hired to play Native Americans, and I was good. Though I now cringe at the fact that the playing field for minorities was not fair or level back then, I was an actor and happy for the work at the time.
Eventually, after the slings and arrows struck me, I became disillusioned with acting. It had finally dawned on me that acting was a business—I had never thought of it that way while growing up—and I was never good at business.
Getting back to the cattle at Allied Artists. The line was long and I was the last in it for a while. I think we actors were there for a low-budget war movie. I remember that I really needed the job—I’d been washing dishes at a deli in between the bit parts I did here and there. I never worked as an extra on a film. I understood that to be a death knell for actors back then. I was in the Screen Actors Guild not the Screen Extras Guild. Yes, at one time they were two different unions.
Finally, a tall, lanky, good-looking guy a few years older than me got behind me in the cattle call line. He said he’d just got dropped from either Universal or Warner Brothers because they did not want to pick up his contract. He said he really wished he’d get a part in this el-cheapo movie. This sandy haired fellow with the handsome grin introduced himself, saying, “I’m Clint Eastwood.”
________
Stanley Dyrector’s award-winning interview show, “The Stanley Dyrector Show,” can be seen in various locales and on the Internet. Find him on Facebook.
