10 Things I Learned: The Shooting and Ride in the Whirlwind

Most of the locations of both The Shooting and Ride in the Whirlwind—near Kanab, Utah, long known as Little Hollywood—are now underwater, having been covered by the man-made Lake Powell.

While revisiting the locations for the Criterion release, director Monte Hellman found and interviewed Calvin Johnson, the chief wrangler on both films. Johnson, who is now ninety-two years old, started in the business at the age of ten.

The Shooting was written by Carole Eastman under the pen name Adrien Joyce. She went on to write another film starring Jack Nicholson, 1970’s Five Easy Pieces.

When writing Ride in the Whirlwind, Nicholson read journals and other accounts from the period, most notably A. S. Mercer’s The Banditti of the Plains, or The Cattlemen’s Invasion of Wyoming in 1892 (The Crowning Infamy of the Ages)—a scathing 1894 exposé about Wyoming’s Johnson County War that includes a description of the siege of the KC Ranch, which ended in the burning down of the ranch house. Nicholson got the inspiration for the film’s burning cabin scene from that historical episode.

Hellman used Western Costume Co., a Hollywood institution, for both films. The bib-front shirt worn by Tom Filer as Otis in Ride in the Whirlwind is one of the company’s most popular rental items, and it is remarkably similar to the one so iconically worn by John Wayne in Stagecoach—whose wardrobe, Hellman says, was also supplied by Western, almost thirty years earlier.

Hellman saw actor Warren Oates star as Randle P. McMurphy in a 1965 Hollywood stage production of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and cast him in The Shooting—a pivotal moment in Oates’s career, as critic Kim Morgan points out in her appreciation of the actor for the Criterion release. Ten years later, Nicholson would play McMurphy on-screen.

While looking at a new scan of The Shooting’s original negative for the Criterion release, Hellman noticed something that had never before been visible on any print or home video version of the film: in the scene pictured above, Oates has tears in his eyes. Said Hellman, “I’m only sad that [director of photography] Greg Sandor isn’t here to see it. It’s the way it looked when he shot it.”

According to Hellman, Nicholson did his best work during the first two takes of a scene, while Oates preferred to do a lot of run-throughs. So for the pair’s scenes together in The Shooting, Oates would begin opposite a stand-in, whom Nicholson would replace when Oates was ready.

The Shooting actor Will Hutchins was born in the Atwater Village neighborhood of Los Angeles. As a child, he visited the location of 1941’s Never Give a Sucker an Even Break and ended up making his first appearance as an extra in a crowd scene in that film.

As Hutchins tells film programmer Jake Perlin on our release, Oates was excellent at charades.

Susan Arosteguy is a producer at the Criterion Collection.