Hollywood Lies
~ Chris Boles
One of my favorite movies continues to be Josey Wales. It showed Native humor. It was so odd to me and was odd even 'way back when' even as a kid, that movies showed these beings who were trying to be so native and did not have a clue! The make-up was wrong. The speech was awful. The dress was stolen from one tribe to another. In the TV show Danial Boone, the Native tribes was just unbelievable too, as the TV show had tribes in the West in the East and all over the map in error. It never felt right to this one even as a child.
There are some hidden exceptions that never went forward because they were not using the truth as their heritage. In the end, it was admitted that by some that they held
Native blood. Roy Rogers was one to always admit his Oklahoma Native bloodline. Others were ashamed of their truth.
One of the most famous Hollywood stuntmen was a man nicknamed Yakima Canutt. His grandfather was in the legislature. His dad owned a ranch in Washington State. I could find only one report that noted his Native heritage; but he was famous and was Republic Studio's choice for all the action-star-double scenes in the movies. He doubled for the best of Hollywood. He also invented wonderful devices for the stunts: Wagon tongues that became unhitched & wagon wheels that turned so the wagon would roll. He developed a shelf to use in the 'transfer scenes where rider leaps to stage or train', and most importantly he made the stunts that everyone has seen time and again where the rider jumps onto a horse, falls under the horses and the wagon and must climb back over the stage, jump to the horses and at last stop the runaway. A version was used on a tank scene in the third Indiana Jones movie too. This series of stunts has been in part worked into all manner of movies.
In a movie called “Tonka”, Sal Mineo played a Comanche White Bull. He trains a wild Mustang. The only thing truthful is that a horse called Comanche was the last standing survivor from the 7th Calvery at the Little Big Horn. The movie story is a phony; and the actors are non-native. The horse is a fine actor and performs spins, roll-backs and slides like a pro for three-fourths of the movie. He outshines all the human actors. Then this horse stops cold. He does not take his cues and he does not spin or anything else. The horse just quits cold turkey. The studio sends him down the road to train actors to ride—a lowly status—and a major down turn to the former pampering the mustang had received.
The horse that replaced him was a mare that was in the TV show Flicka by the same name. Even as a child, I knew horses, and I knew instantly that this horse was not the horse I had been viewing in the movie. It takes 500 movie horse prospects for scouts to view before they can find an actor horse. Most movies today use around five star horses with each one doing something different. In the movies. Seabusitt and Hidalgo movie directors used five head. The horse playing the lead had doubles painted and for Hidalgo the lead horse doubles were painted up with human body paint to match the key lead horse. In Hollywood even horses are not what they seem-- just like in the past movie stars were being painted as Natives.
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