The Making of Junior Bonner

The making of JUNIOR

A famed director, a cast of stars and a rookie screenwriter showcased the Prescott area in a classic film

The 4-year-old girl stood with her parents in a Prescott motel parking lot while they introduced her to the movie star. Shyly, the small girl looked down when he said hello and patted the top of her head. My daughter, Katherine, would always say she had met the highest-paid movie star in the world, Steve McQueen, but had never seen him.

In July 1971, the film company of Junior Bonner, including McQueen, Robert Preston, Ida Lupino, Ben Johnson, Mary Murphy, Joe Don Baker, William McKinney and Barbara Leigh, had arrived in Prescott at rodeo time. During the next seven weeks, the brilliant and controversial Sam Peckinpah — recognized as one of the top five film directors in the world and known primarily for his violent Western film The Wild Bunch — would direct this star-spangled cast. After three years of trying to break into the film and television world as a writer, I had written an original screenplay that was about to be made into a motion picture. Producer Joe Wizan had asked me to tailor my script to McQueen.

BONNER JR.

by JEB J. ROSEBROOK BEN JOHNSON IDA LUPINO ROBERT PRESTON

Amazingly to me, this dream of mine really came true.

Now I am returning to Prescott with my wife, Dorothy, and photographer Terrence Moore to recall the making of that movie 30 years ago.

Junior Bonner depicts the fictional story of an over-the-hill rodeo rider who returns to his hometown of Prescott. Out of pride, he's determined to ride Sunshine, a bull that threw him a week earlier. It also tells the story of a family trapped in a changing West. Preston portrays Ace, the father, a dreamer who envisions his last frontier as Australia. He lives with his estranged wife, Elvira, played by Ida Lupino, in a house where she sells antiques and rents rooms to boarders, while Joe Don Baker, as Curley, the younger brother, is finding his future selling Prescott and his mobile home development to America's retirees. Curley thinks his older brother, Junior, should quit rodeo and sell real estate for Curley's Bonner's Reata Rancheros. “I'm working on my first million, Junior,” he tells his brother, “while you're still working on eight seconds.”

Today I find State Route 69 is wider — four lanes. Beyond Humboldt, I pass the “set” used for Curley's Trading Post and Rancheros Sales Office. Once the Reata Pass Steak House, it now houses an art gallery and antique auction. Just ahead lies the explosion of retail and business development known as the Town of Prescott Valley.

In 1970 I returned to Prescott to attend the Frontier Days Rodeo for the first time in 15 years. I drove past the newly built homes, the real estate sales offices and early businesses that marked the Town of Prescott Valley. Incorporated in 1966, 110 years after its neighbor, the city of Prescott, Prescott Valley then boasted slightly more than 1,000 residents. That Fourth of July weekend, I sat in Matt's Saloon listening to a country band and thought of the rodeo that was a Prescott tradition, and the change in the Yavapai County landscape of ranch country I had known since boyhood. The genesis of an idea and a character was born. His name was to be Bonner. He would change my life.

Today the Town of Prescott Valley has more than 20,000 residents.

We drive past businesses stretching along each side of the highway. Where lots stand vacant awaiting the bulldozers and earth-moving equipment and signs advertising future office and retail space. To the north, homes stretch to the horizon. “Buy land,” Will Rogers once said, “they ain't makin' it no more.” Apparently developers here agreed with the philosophy.

In Prescott, bright sunlight graces the tall elm trees surrounding the timeless Yavapai County Courthouse. Booths offering jewelry, art and much more border the square, where hundreds of visitors stroll, looking and often finding a special purchase. Others take horse-drawn carriage rides around the square. Thirty years ago, Dorothy, Katherine and I had had lunch with the film crew in the shadows of the courthouse. Katherine wore a Western dress purchased in Prescott. I see her still in the dress, on a sea of green grass beneath the shade trees that invited her to a small girl's world all her own.

and starring

STEVE McQUEEN

I look across to Whiskey Row. The Palace, once a mainstay of Row saloons, is now a family restaurant, while at each end of the block, Matt's and the Bird Cage retain their traditional ways of celebrating the Fourth. And, in the new century, something new among young men and women — tattoos, a lot of them.

Filming began June 30, 1971, with the Frontier Days Parade in which McQueen, Preston and Lupino all had scenes, as did Baker as Curley, driving a tractor and pulling his Rancheros float. Five cameras rolled at strategic locations recording the parade and the actors' parts in it. Later that day, the cameras were moved to the fairgrounds to record as many as five McQueen stunt doubles, who all wore McQueen look-alike wigs, appearing in saddle bronc riding, steer wrestling and bull riding.

At night, with the fairgrounds empty, McQueen's stunt doubles took dangerous falls from several black bulls, each representing Junior's nemesis, Sunshine. One rider, a high school bull-riding champion, was momentarily unable to free himself from a bull. Captured on film, this moment would be the opening of the movie.

Peckinpah, growing impatient with the pace of the filming, directed his profanities at the cowboys working the chutes. Soon after, one of the bulls inexplicably made an unscheduled appearance out of the chute and, head down, charged the length of the arena, crashing against the fence and destroying an expensive Panavision camera as its crew scrambled for safety. Peckinpah glared toward the cowboys at the chutes. Frank Kelly, now 61, one of the McQueen stunt doubles in the scene, was there. He remembers the incident, saying, “You don’t cuss a cowboy.”

SCENES WITHIN SCENES

• Prescott’s railroad depot: Preston and McQueen in a poignant father and son moment that revealed Ace’s hopes Junior would finance his Australian dream. The evening before filming the scene, Peckinpah described to me how he would shoot it:

When Junior reveals he’s broke, Ace, in frustration will cuff Junior’s hat off because when Peckinpah was a boy this is what his father did to him. The scene would show McQueen as close to crying as he ever came in a film. In real life, he did not know his own father. as the band in the movie, but Owens proved too expensive. So Cox's band appeared in the film, as did two of Hart's original songs, “Arizona Morning” and “Rodeo Man.”

• Sitting at the “rehearsal table”: McQueen looked toward Johnson, telling us he had seen a rough cut of a film called The Last Picture Show, predicting Johnson would win an Academy Award for his performance. He did.
• The movie rooster: Rodeo legend Casey Tibbs, the Frontier Days grand marshal and our consultant, appeared with a rooster, boasting he never came to Arizona without one. Taking his rooster to a charity auction, Tibbs perched the bird on a microphone, claiming this was a “trained movie rooster.” (The rooster sold, but never made its film debut.)
• The chance of a lifetime: Rod Hart, then 35, playing in Bob Cox’s band at The Palace, told production executives he would like to try writing songs for the film. Buck Owens and his Buckaroos were under consideration

attend the Frontier Days annual Old Timers luncheon. John Kieckhefer and his wife, Lynda, are here. Kieckhefer was stock contractor for the Frontier Days Rodeo for five years, including during the filming of Junior Bonner. Lynda's father, Chuck Sheppard, now 84, is here. Sheppard, a member of the ProRodeo Hall of Fame in Colorado Springs and the National Cowboy Hall of Fame in Oklahoma City, appeared in Junior Bonner. After his rodeo days, Sheppard became one of America's best quarter horse trainers and manager of the Kieckhefers' K-4 Ranch in Big Chino Valley and Walnut Creek.

Unable to make the luncheon, bull rider Frank Kelly recalls in our telephone conversation how appearing in the film had held an extra benefit for him. “My wife was going to have a baby. As a stuntman I qualified to join the Screen Actors Guild. Their medical plan helped pay the doctor's bills.” Thirty years later, Kelly is in a new marriage and he and his wife, a world champion bull rider, have a 2-year-old son. He raises bulls and broncs on his ranch near Queen Creek and is the only bull rider to win “buckles” from the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association in every decade since the 1950s.

I revisit other changed locations: The former railroad depot now contains modern offices. Elvira Bonner's home and antique shop, now owned by Greg and Mary Heiland, has been restored and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. And Chuck Sheppard's home, barn and corrals, once completely outside of Prescott, are today nearly surrounded by apartment and condominium complexes.

We have dinner at The Palace, facing a large Junior Bonner mural, which was restored by owner Dave Michelson when he converted the saloon to a restaurant. My mind drifts back to 1971. The people of Prescott acted as extras in many scenes, but none more memorable than one of the largest saloon brawls ever captured on film.

For a week and a half, as Cox's band played on, the bar "fight" raged from one end of The Palace to the other, knocking over tables, chairs and people until Peckinpah called "Cut" (and, hopefully, "Print"). Ace's dog, Dougal, tirelessly wreaked havoc among the many who "fought," as he had done when let loose during filming of the wild cow-milking rodeo scenes.

Outside The Palace, I look up at the historic A-1 Beer sign. A large model of a horse once hung close by, advertising a Western store. Just before filming ended, a disease threat quarantined all horses in Yavapai County. We still needed driving scenes with McQueen, his trailer and a horse. Down came the model horse and into Junior's trailer it went!

I discover other changes: Today's rodeo cowboys wear logo-emblazoned shirts and chaps advertising their sponsors. Exclusive sponsorships underwrite the rodeo itself, while local or national companies support individual events. Combined with rodeo's increasing popularity, this corporate funding has increased the prize money from its 1971 level of $29,000 to a total of nearly $176,000 in 2000.

Further evidence of Prescott's enormous population growth since 1971 presents itself: When Prescott Daily Courier News Editor Tim Wideranders asked his readers who wrote Junior Bonner, only one person knew the answer.

Many who made a movie in Prescott during that summer of three decades ago are gone now: Steve McQueen, Sam Peckinpah, Robert Preston, Ida Lupino, Ben Johnson, Don "Red" Barry, cinematographer Lucien Ballard, composer Jerry Fielding and production designer Ted Haworth have all died, their work preserved on film.

At one point during the making of Junior Bonner, Preston sat at the bar in The Palace and asked, "If this world is all about winners, what's for the losers?" Needing a line for an answer, McQueen turned to me. I fumbled for one. Ben Johnson smiled; he had the line — "Somebody's got to hold the horses," he'd said.

Walking among the crowds on the square, I think about them — I, their writer, who still holds the horses. AH

EDITOR'S NOTE: For information about attending this year's Prescott Frontier Days and World's Oldest Rodeo, June 29 through July 4, call (520) 445-3103.

Jeb J. Rosebrook of Scottsdale returns to Prescott this July to participate in the Southwestern Writers Conference at Yavapai College.