A Young Stuntman Was About to Be Cut From True Grit — John Wayne Asked Him One Question D

The morning that almost ended his career before it began started with cold hands. Not cold from the temperature, though the air in Ouray County, Colorado in October of 1968 had a particular sharpness to it. The kind that comes down off the San Juan Mountains and doesn’t ask permission.

His hands were cold the way hands get when a man’s body has pulled everything inward, away from the surface, toward whatever it’s trying to hold together at the center. His name doesn’t matter here. What matters is what he was holding, the reins of a horse that didn’t want to be held on a narrow canyon road waiting for someone behind a camera to tell him to move. He was 26 years old.

This was his first major production. He had driven out to Colorado from Los Angeles with a duffel bag and a union card that was barely a year old. He had done smaller work before, low-budget westerns, a couple of television spots, one job that paid well enough to make him think this was going to be easier than it was.

He knew how to ride. He knew how to fall. He had spent the three days before leaving Los Angeles telling himself that those two things were the job, that everything else was just showing up and doing it. He had been telling himself that every morning since he arrived in Ouray. True Grit was teaching him otherwise.

The production had been shooting in and around Ouray for 6 weeks by the time he arrived for the canyon sequences. The landscape was the kind that looks like a painting until you’re standing in it. And then it just looks like a place where things can go wrong in ways that don’t announce themselves.

The roads were narrow enough in places that the camera trucks had to be repositioned by hand. The drop on the east side of certain sections ran somewhere between 800 and 1,000 ft depending on where you were standing and whether you had the nerve to look. Henry Hathaway ran the set the way a man runs something he doesn’t trust anyone else to run.

Loudly, specifically, with a concentrated impatience that never quite became anger, but was always 1° below it. He had been directing film since 1932. He had a very short list of things he considered acceptable and a very long memory for the things that weren’t. The stunt man had been told about Hathaway before he arrived.

Everyone had. He kept his head down, did the work, stayed invisible. For the first 2 weeks, that was enough. Then came the canyon sequence. The shot required him to move a gray gelding through a narrow cut in the rock at a controlled canter, turning hard left at a specific marker while the camera caught it from above.

The horse had been unsettled since before dawn. It moved sideways when it should have moved forward. It pulled toward the canyon wall when it should have stayed wide. There was something in the animal’s behavior the stunt man could feel but couldn’t name. The way you can feel a conversation going wrong without being able to point to the exact sentence that did it.

He ran the approach twice. Both times the horse broke rhythm 20 yd from the marker. Both times the stunt man brought the animal back to the start and sat in the saddle and tried to understand what he was missing. He could feel the problem. He couldn’t locate it. There’s a particular frustration in that, in knowing something is wrong and not being able to find the exact place it’s wrong, and it sits in your chest and makes everything harder.

Hathaway watched the second attempt from behind the camera and said nothing. The silence had a specific weight, the kind that means a decision is being made and the outcome isn’t going to be in your favor. The stunt man brought the horse back to the staging area and stood there with the reins in both hands.

The wrangler was occupied at the far end. The rest of the crew had the purposeful movement of people who had somewhere else to be. Nobody looked at him, not because they were indifferent, because there was nothing comfortable about looking at a man standing at the edge of something that might go badly. He had no idea what the horse was telling him. That was the truth of it.

That was when he heard footsteps on the gravel behind him. Heavy, unhurried. The kind of footsteps that don’t announce themselves because they don’t need to. He turned around. The man standing there was in a canvas work jacket that had seen better years and a hat with sweat stains along the band.

No costume, no eye patch. Just a large, broad-shouldered man holding a coffee cup and looking at the horse with the calm, assessing expression of someone who finds animals more straightforward than most people. He didn’t look at the stunt man. Not yet. He looked at the horse. If you’re watching this and you’ve never subscribed to this channel, we’re still under 1,000 subscribers and we’re just getting started.

A subscribe from your phone takes 5 seconds and it’s the only way to make sure the next story finds you. Wayne took two steps forward and stood at the horse’s left shoulder. He was quiet for a moment. He reached out and put one hand on the animal’s neck, just below the mane. Not petting, just contact. The horse’s ear moved but it didn’t pull away.

“What’s he telling you?” Wayne said. The stunt man looked at him. The question landed somewhere unexpected. “I’m not sure.” He said. Wayne nodded like that was a fair answer. “Left side.” He said. Not a question. “Yeah, he keeps pulling toward the wall.” “Wind comes down through the cut at an angle. Comes in on his left.

” Wayne took a sip of his coffee. “Horse raised in open country, all of a sudden he’s in a canyon with sound coming at him from directions he can’t track. He’s not disobeying you. He’s compensating.” He said it the same way you’d say something about the weather. “What do I do when he turns?” the stunt man asked.

Wayne thought about it. The thinking wasn’t performed. It was the real kind. The kind where a man goes somewhere quiet inside himself and comes back with something useful. “You’ve been correcting early,” he said. “Soon as he starts to pull left, you pull right. He feels the correction before he finishes the thought.

Now you’re both nervous and he doesn’t know why.” He looked at the stunt man for the first time. “Let him start the turn, then bring him through it, not against it. You’re not fighting the animal, you’re finishing a sentence he started.” The stunt man was quiet. He turned the idea over.

He thought about the two runs he’d made, the exact moment the rhythm broke, where his hands had gone each time. Wayne was already talking about something else, the angle of the cut, where the camera would sit, what the horse would see at the marker versus what the rider would see, technical things, specific things. The kind of things a man talks about when he’s more interested in the problem than in the person holding it.

4 minutes, maybe 5. Then Hathaway called the shot. Wayne turned and walked back toward the main unit. No parting words, no gesture, nothing to mark that any of it had happened. The stunt man mounted. He walked the horse once through the staging position. He felt the animal’s attention shift as they moved toward the cut.

The familiar pull starting in the shoulders, the drift leftward beginning. He didn’t correct it early. He let the horse start the turn, and then he brought him through it. The marker came up, the horse held the line. The camera above the canyon wall caught all of it. Hathaway said nothing after the take.

He moved to the next shot. On that set, silence from Hathaway was the closest thing to a compliment you were going to get. The stunt man brought the horse back to the staging area. He looked back at where Wayne had been standing. The man was already gone. There was no version of this where the stunt man got to say anything to him.

Wayne hadn’t waited for that. He hadn’t given him the chance to, and later, much later, the stunt man would understand that this was deliberate. That walking away before it could become a moment, before the younger man could feel like he owed something to someone, was not an accident.

It was a choice, a specific and considered one. That walking away was part of the gift. That was the whole point of it. True Grit wrapped in November of 1968. It released the following year and did what it did for Wayne’s career, which was considerable. He won the Oscar for Rooster Cogburn in April of 1970 and accepted it with the careful grace of a man who had not entirely expected to be standing there.

The stunt man kept working. He never became a name, but he didn’t need to be. He was reliable. He showed up on difficult locations and did difficult work and didn’t make it anyone else’s problem. Other stunt men knew him the way people in that world know each other. Not from credits, but from reputation.

From the kind of work that doesn’t get talked about because it went exactly right. He spent the better part of two decades doing it, and the work was good, and that was enough. In the early 1990s, a small regional publication sat down with him for an interview. The kind of piece that ran in the back section of a magazine that no longer exists.

At some point, the interviewer asked him what the moment was. The one that had kept him going through all of it. He described a morning in a Colorado canyon. He didn’t give the year. He didn’t give the name of the film. He said a man came and stood beside him and asked him what a horse was saying. And the question was so simple and so direct that everything else fell back to where it belonged.

Behind the work, where it was supposed to be. The interviewer asked who the man was. The stunt man looked out the window for a moment. A man who knew how to listen to a horse, he said, and who figured that was something worth passing on. He didn’t say the name. He didn’t seem to think the name was the important part. He was right.

There is a version of that morning where Wayne finishes his coffee and walks to the main unit and says nothing. Where Hathaway pulls the stunt man from the scene before the next take. Where that career ends on a gravel staging area in Ouray County. Quietly, without drama. Which is how most things end. That version almost happened.

The distance between that version and the one that did was one man deciding to walk over instead of walking away. Not because it was a grand gesture. Not because anyone was watching. Because he saw a problem that had a solution and he knew the solution and it took 5 minutes and so he did it.

The San Juan Mountains are still out there. The canyon roads are still narrow. The wind still comes down through the cuts at the same angle it always has. Nobody who was on that staging area is left to tell it. Just the story. And the story is enough. If you enjoyed spending this time here, leave a comment about what John Wayne represented to you.

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