Introduction

 'Interview'   2

The following is the transcript that Peter did for the Blu-ray recording of Which Doctor' Gunsmoke. It shows the time stamps for the recording should you have a copy, alternatively you could join us at  

 (1) Peter Graves <3 | Facebook where you can see many films and appearances in their entirety.

Hello. I am Peter Graves, and we are watching an episode of Gunsmoke. As most of you may know, I am big Jim Arness’s little brother, and this is episode is entitled ‘Which Doctor’, which I directed.

One of the two guys there is George Linsey. He is a very amusing guy who did a funny job in this episode of Gunsmoke, but who also was on the Andy Griffiths show. I was so pleased to be able to have that calibre of actor.

 

1.28

I had not done any directing, nor thought about it. I actually had a deal with Universal Studios. I had made a television series for them in England, called ‘Court Martial’, starring Brad Dillman. It was a story of two army lawyers in World War 2, based in Europe. We spent a year over there, and it was a lot of fun and a very good series, but it was not the right time for it. It played for one season, then was taken off. I returned to the USA, where I still had a contractual arrangement with Universal Studios,

I was with my brother Jim and got to talking a little about directors and directing. I said to him I had thought about directing, because I thought I would be good at it. I like actor-directors especially, because they know how to talk to actors and usually to writers, which is most important, as there are not so many directors who are really good at that.

 

2.57

Jim and I talked, and then he suggested I do an episode of Gunsmoke. I was delighted, we did that, and it was a lot of fun. I think preparation was almost as much fun as the shooting. It was being produced then by John Matley and Phil Leecock. Phil left us a number of years ago now, as John has, I believe. I must also mention Ken Curtis and Amanda Blake who are the dearest people. There is a funny story about Amanda, connected with this particular show. I will tell you about it later. It was kind of like old home week out at the CBS studio centre. I knew a lot of the people on the crew. I had worked with them and the cameraman and a number of the actors, particularly Milburn Stone, with whom I had made two films. One was ‘Black Tuesday’, with Edward G Robinson, in which Milburn played a priest. The other was a John Ford picture called ‘The Long Gray Line’, in which Milburn played General John Pershing, of World War 1 fame. The director, John Ford ,used to get very frustrated with Millburn forgetting his lines. He had a long speech where he was swearing-in a bunch of recruits. It is a wonderful speech, but he could never remember it all.

Ford would say ‘Milburn, holy God, what’s the matter with you’, and for Millburn Stone, that kind of treatment only made him angry. His wife once said Milburn was never happy unless he was angry, but he was a dear person, and a great barber-shop singer as a matter of fact. We had a number of very good singing sessions while we were on location with the movie ‘The Long Gray Line’. We had with us Harry Carey junior and Phill Carey, who had a wonderful voice, and Ward Bond would chime in and a couple of other guys. It was a lot of fun.

 

5.59

Anyway we were still preparing and I had not been aware of how I might feel, starting to direct and shoot a show, but it was wonderful and I was quite calm throughout the whole process. I remember sitting the first day probably in Phil Leecock’s office, and looking at a board up on the wall, giving a schedule of the show, and I noticed under Jim’s name that quite a few days were crossed out. I asked Phil about it and he said ‘those are the days that Jim doesn’t work. It was well planned, I think the one that I would direct, was a Matt Dillon light, Yes, we wanted to do that and I certainly under my first directorship didn’t want to be giving the biggest star on television a lot of directions. I I was very happy to work it, mostly Milburn Stone and Shelly Morrison, the girl in the episode. the story mostly belonged to them, and superb actors that they were made it very easy for me. Anyway, there was that schedule and I noticed more and more things on them regarding the film and proposed episodes and so forth, and always those indications where Jim was gone for that particular period of time, so Phil had a wonderful thing going there. On television you work very hard and long hours and certainly with his talents he was the perfect, the ultimate Matt Dillon. He deserved everything he could get. He really had a nice life, it seems to me. He didn’t have to drive through the studio’s gate until about nine in the morning, and he drove right out at five, which was pretty good for him.

 

8.35

I don’t know what year of the series that was. My guess would be that it was about the tenth. Jeez, that was only half way through that run. That’s quite something, a twenty year run. Anyway, the whole thing was good and enjoyable. There were some cattle drive scenes in it and we shot at a location way out, a place called Thousand Oaks, which is now West Lake Village and all the surrounding very wealthy suburbs of the city of Los Angeles. It was a very enjoyable experience and went well. I did it because I had vowed to myself certainly that I would bring it in under schedule and under budget. I had seen a lot of directors take liberties that they shouldn’t have been allowed to take, and I liked the idea of a tight schedule and doing things on schedule, and the episode came off pretty well, I think.

 

10.23

I also worked at Thousand Oaks on a picture called Texas Across the River, a sort of comedy western. The story I’m thinking of was one afternoon when we were sitting around waiting for a scene to be set up, and Dean Martin’s assistant brought him a drink, scotch and water. he took a couple of sips and he looked at me and he said, ‘Oh jeez, I’m sorry, would you like a drink?’ I said ‘No thank you Dean, it’s a little early for me’ and he pointed to his stomach said ‘Your tummy doesn’t know what time it is, it’s dark in there’, so I said, ‘what the hell, bring me a drink.’ That was working with Dean Martin. I had done another show for CBS, a movie about Danial Boone, I played Danial. We shot a lot of that out at Thousand Oaks and we had to stage a fight there. Linden and I have a fight and tumble down a long hill while we’re doing it. It was not until we had finished the whole thing that somebody said, ‘My God! that’s poison oak’. We had been fighting in it for all of three hours, and I came down with the worst case of poison oak you have ever seen, I think they had to shut down production for a couple of days or something. It kept recurring and we didn’t realise that the wardrobe had become infused with it, so every time I put clothing on from that wardrobe, and the character Danial Boon only wore one suit, , we had to start the whole thing again. That’s the history of Thousand Oaks.

 

12.46

Talking about actors directing, I played a part in the only film Charles Laughton directed, ‘The Night of the Hunter’, a very grizzly story, featuring a magnificent performance by Bob Mitchum. Shelly Winters and Lilian Gish were in it. The photography was black and white, some of the best I have seen, and it has become a cult movie now. ‘Night of the Hunter' plays quite regularly on television. Charles, being an actor. was absolutely wonderful. I think the first day of doing a scene with him we finished the scene, but one thing Charles always did was keep shooting. He would never cut the camera unless it was running out of film or something. You would do a scene and he would say ‘Keep turning, thank you,’ and then ‘Well let’s do it again, and give us a little more of that, or a little less of this, or think about this, and action.’ You would do the scene maybe three or four times and then he would finally say, ‘cut’, or the camera operator would say, ‘We are out of film’. I would say to him, ‘Well how was that for you Mr. Laughton?’ and he would say ‘How was that for you Peter?’ and I said, ‘I thought that last one was quite good.’ ‘So did I, print it.’ That was a wonderful way to make movies you know. It’s too bad that he didn’t get to direct more of them. He directed in the theatre as well, but he was a magnificent actor and director.

 

15.05

I worked with Edward G Robinson on a picture called ‘Black Tuesday’ and he was the old star and I was the young guy playing the opposite male lead with him. It was a prison break story and I was fascinated from the time I got into the business with the camera and the whole technical side of making films. We were doing a scene with Eddy and when we finished a take, I looked at the camera operator and I said, ‘What lens you got in there Joe, is that a forty?, and he said ‘Yeah, yeah it’s a forty.’ ‘Now what was the focal length and the distance and have you had to swing focus from him to me at certain points?', and he looked at me and said, ‘Do you know all that stuff?’, and I said, ‘Well you know, I like it.’ He said, ‘All I ever try to do is to learn how to act’, and he walked away, and I think they called lunch. Boy, he was dynamite on the screen. It’s hard to think of him as that great puss that he had, that ugly, sort of bulldog face, but he thought he was beautiful. One day a we came out of the rushes, he said, ‘Hey there’re doing great for you kid, photographing you just beautifully, but they’re getting my wrong side all the time you know, all the time'. It’s hard to think of him having a good side or a bad side, but he had heart, that’s what he had, and a lot of talent.

 

17.23

Otto Preminger, actor director in a little picture we did called Stalag 17. Otto Preminger was for the most part an overbearing man. He was a genius I think, but he certainly knew it and used it except when he was working on Stalag 17, with Billy Wilder directing. Billy of course would brook no invasions of his territory at all, so Otto, on that film, never tried to cross a line and start directing himself. He was wonderful as the German colonel , putting on his boots and talking to Berlin at the same time. He was excellent. He subsequently did a film with Wilder, called 'The Court Marshal of Billy Mitchel’ which he directed, and then he was his great overbearing Teutonic self. He always had to have a patsy of some kind that he could pick on, and it seemed to me. Adam West was one on that film. Gary Cooper, who played Billy Mitchel, hated his military hat. He just couldn’t stand it, so every time he could, he’d duck it somewhere under a cushion or something, and Preminger would look at him and say, ‘Where’s Billy's cap .. get Billy’s cap.’, and wardrobe would get blamed every time for losing Billy’s cap, but they had nothing to do with it. it was Gary Cooper who didn’t want to wear the blasted thing. Anyway, Preminger was a tough, strong director, but again, top notch. Very brilliant, intelligent and intellectual fellow.

 

19.52

At one point I was contemplating doing my first television series, as every actor was in those days, or were already committed. I said I had been offered a television series. Preminger got mad right away and said, ‘Well it’ll serve you right. You’ll be finished, absolutely finished in motion pictures if you do a television series. Just remember that I told you’. Well 50 years later I’m still working, and he’s long gone. But that’s what people in this business thought about television in those days. I know Jim was off and on, hot and cold, about whether or not I should I do a television series called Gunsmoke. Well we know now the answer to that question, but it was a struggle for every young actor at that time who was a leading-man type. We were looking at the big screen and that’s what we had known all of our lives, so it was a tough decision, but a lot of people made it and made the right decision, and got very lucky with it as well.

 

21.19

CBS seemed to like the job I had done on ‘Gunsmoke’ so they talked to my agent about having me, giving me a commitment for the next season or to direct half a dozen episodes. That would have been just fine with me, but it was about that day that I got a phone call in the evening from CBS saying, ‘'We want you to do a show that we have called Mission Impossible”. That takes care of the directing for a while, I thought, but it seems to have taken care of it for longer than that. So that’s how that came about. Had it not been for Mission Impossible, I would probably have gone on and directed, perhaps changed careers as a number of actors did, but I don’t regret what happened.

 

22.31

Ken Curtis was a wonderful actor, an even more wonderful singer, and a member of the singing group ‘Sons of the Pioneers’. I had been a fan of his a long time before he came on to Gunsmoke, and boy, talk about barber shop quartets. I think we must have had one or two singing sessions while he was doing this show. He was a splendid character, a fine man. He’s been gone for several years, but he was a magnificent performer and walked right in to Gunsmoke, and I think they accepted him the moment he opened his mouth.

 

23.18

Jim was absolutely right about there being sort of three kinds of Gunsmoke types, be Matt Dillon light, Matt medium and Matt heavy. The meaning was that he would be minimally in a certain episode or in a good part of it, or it would lie heavily on his character and his shoulders and people might be critical of such a thing, or say that he was trying to get away with being lazy or something like that. It was not the case. They all were very concerned about wearing out, or getting to know a character too well. You had to retain a certain kind of mystery, and certainly he was a genius at doing that. making Matt Dillon his own, but never letting you see all of it. he been like that as a brother too, very conservative about his personal feelings and being and doings.

 

 

 

24.43

When Jim and I were kids, I don’t know where the story might have got around that I wanted to be an actor, because I didn’t. I was doing all the usual stuff that kids do, playing cowboys and Indians, and we went to every Saturday matinee and watched ‘Hop-a-long Cassidy’ or whoever it was, Buck Jones, Tom Mix, all of those wonderful cowboys, movie cowboys of our era. In school, I did love music, At about twelve or thirteen years of age I wanted to play the clarinet. At the time I idolised Benny Goodman and Arti Shaw and I had all their records. At Ramsey Junior High school I went to see the Band Master at the beginning of term. He was assigning instruments to different people and he looked at me and I was a head taller than most of the people around there, so he gave me a tuba and said ‘You will learn the tuba. Take it home this afternoon and get started.’ So there I went, crossing Minnehaha Creek, of Hiawatha fame, and away from school to our home. Tears were welling in my eyes, and my father looked and me later that night and said, ‘What’s going on?’ and I said, ‘Jeez I want to play the clarinet more than anything and he gave me this tuba because I’m big and it’s big’. He laughed and the next day he went to school with me and he talked to the Band Master and said, ‘Gee, Peter really wants to play the clarinet and would you allow that?. He replied ‘Of course I would.’, so that’s how I started playing the clarinet. At the time, my prime motivation as to what I might want to do in life was to be a musician, and get into big bands and all that stuff.

 

27.21

So I did that but I had also been interested in speech, not so much drama then because I didn’t know much about it, but I took a speech course or two in school and that followed. I then went in to the Army Air Corps, and when I came out of that, to the University of Minnesota, where I wanted to take a speech major. I went to the head of the department who said ‘Why don’t you take a theatre major? I think you’ll learn more and you’ll have more fun with it, and it will open up a whole new world to you, full of theatrical things and that wonderful literature which is among the greatest of all the literature of the world. I did that and yes, the first time I got on a stage in a play as an actor, I fell in love with it and said, ‘This is what I want to do, and carried on from there. Jim, at the time, had, as you probably know, come out of WW2 with a very serious wound in his leg, which indeed has dogged him all his life. The infection refused to give up, so he tried to go back into college and that didn’t please him. He was restless of course, as so many war veterans were, so he and a friend took off from our home in Minnesota, Minneapolis to come to California as a lark, and the first thing he fell in love with was the surf. He learned how to surf and that was what he wanted to do. Along with that, and having met some people here, he joined an acting school in Beverly Hills. I think it was called the Bliss Haden Theatre at that time, run by two actors, Harry Haden and Lilla Bliss. The first time he got up on stage, a producer named Dore Schary saw him and said, ‘You’re perfect for my movie with Loretta Young called The Farmer’s Daughter, and wham, he was off to a flying start.

 

29.53

I came and visited him on a summer holiday I guess and fell in love with the same thing, because by that time I had started in the theatre. Boy it was Hollywood and it was for me and, for him, so that’s how the two Aurness boys made it from Minnesota to California, and nobody would have ever thought it!

 

30.26

I came here with a good childhood friend, Jack Smite, who was also just finishing college and who went on to become a fine director of many pictures, ‘Midway’ among them which plays all the time now. Anyway the two of us took the train out because that’s the way we mostly travelled in those days. Jim met us at Union Station in downtown Los Angeles, and he said, ‘Jeez, what are you guys doing here? Things are terrible, the business is awful. I haven’t been working, I don’t know what’s going to happen and you get on the train and go back to Minnesota if you have any brains .’ we said, ‘Nope nope, we’re here, we’re staying.’ He said, ‘Ok, well go to a stand and buy a copy of the Hollywood Reporter, and good luck to ya.’ That was sort of the story, briefly, but he was actually very helpful in showing me the ropes for beginners in this business, and yes, a big help to me.

 

31 47

Since Jim was first, here in the business, and I suppose on that first picture, he used the full name A.u.r.n.e.s.s. Aurness, but then no one could ever pronounce it or understand it, or spell it, so he simply dropped the ‘u’ and became Jim Arness. I don’t know they thought he was Desi Arnaz's brother or something, but when I started I thought that I should have a different name, and Graves is an old family name from my mother’s side, from her father’s lineage, so I chose that and so it’s legitimate and that’s how that worked.

 

32.52

If I made it sound as though Jim kind of fell into it, which is partly true, nevertheless it made a big impression on him, and both of us that first job., after quite a bit of sweating for it. It was a very meaningful thing, and that’s when we both became more serious about it than we probably had been before. Jim did a couple of plays at the Pasadena Play House, as did I. He played that wonderful minister in George Bernard Shaw’s ‘Candida’, opposite Virginia, the girl who became his first wife, so now he was quite serious about learning how to be an actor and learning to act and becoming part of it. In the film business, which is based on a star system, you also want to learn how best to present yourself as a character, as you are using your own personality to integrate with a part in a play in a scene. There were two kinds of learning. One is to learn how to act and certainly do the technical parts of it, but also to build your art. There are two parts to it, the art and the mechanics. To develop your art is something that every actor wants to be serious about and Jim certainly was, and I was too.

 

35.14

We developed slowly, but I think most people do. I didn’t ever go to an acting school, but I had lots of advice and I was very careful about watching other actors and seasoned actors, and watching how they handled themselves and so forth. I remember in one of my early pictures the director saying he wasn’t satisfied with how I was playing a scene and he said, ‘Jeez, every time we do a take, you do it a different way, what the hell is this? Now look at old Joe here, he’s been doing it for forty years, and he gets in there and he does the same thing every time and you are all over the place, what’s going on?’ I said, ‘I’m trying to find out what the hell I’m supposed to be doing, what this character is thinking and feeling and so forth.’ Which was a legitimate question, because it was a way of searching for your talent and your art and how to bring it out and then develop it. This guy, like a lot of directors, knew how to say action and cut, and put some pieces of film together, but unlike Charles Laughton or Preminger, he didn’t know how to talk to actors. It's a rare thing in directors in the film business, but when you get the good ones, you really get them. So that’s how I think I approached acting and learning about it and how I suppose Jim did himself too, but he was a natural actor. Boy, I’ll never forget the time that he got the part in ‘The Thing’. He hadn’t worked for a while and the rent was due and you know, it’s tough like with everybody. He was so grateful for it and he gave everything he had to being the ‘Thing’, and went on from there and you could almost see his development in the films that he did before ‘Gunsmoke’ came along, the stuff with Duke Wayne, then over at Warner Brothers and the other things that he did. He was a natural, and he brought to Gunsmoke a great part of himself, as well as creating a Matt Dillon that would be the model for the world. You know, in Upper Mongolia they know Jim Arness as Matt Dillon and that's quite an accomplishment.

 

38.17

Jim and I as kids, we grew up like boys I guess. There were just us two boys in the family, but Jim was the adventurous one. I remember my mother saying that she could put me down with a couple of toys for four hours and wouldn’t hear a word from me, and Jim would be out trying to hop freight trains to Montana, and he did. He was an adventurous soul, and as anybody who really knows him or has spent time around him knows, whether it be on the set or personally, he’s a clown, he’s a comedian and man is he funny when he gets started. Then again he’s uncontrollable you know, this big guy just throwing this stuff at you until you’re holding your ribs. It’s funny, that's a part of Jim that you don’t see unless you know him pretty well, or unless you work with him and he blows up on the set one day and has one of these funny things going on. Then other actors quail before him because they’re afraid that the take will then be broken up because of what he started. He will then present a very sober face, saying ‘What’s funny, did I say something funny?' So as kids we were just natural and I was the younger brother and not quite as big as him. We would have disagreements as happens sometimes, but I would learn how to do things. I once shot him with an arrow. I thought I was Robin Hood. I was doing Errol Flynn or something and I loved archery. I was mad at him and I shot him in the leg with an arrow, and I think punctured the ski., He, you know, went after me, but by that time I had learned how to run faster and hide. I think I let him cool off for a few hours, and everything was all right, but, our childhood is just nice happy memories to me now. When we both started getting employed in the film business I think our mother and father were pleased, but like my wife’s mother and father, her father, a very well-known doctor in St. Paul Minnesota, the last thing that had ever occurred to him I’m sure, was that his daughter might marry someone who wanted to go to Hollywood and become an actor. ‘Is he crazy?’, so it took us a while to win him over but I think they were all pleased, but they didn’t quite know what to make of it. What did actors do? You know they go to some strange place and there’s something about a camera and they come home, but what’s that really all about, we really don’t know. I think they grew along with us as we learned more about the business, we did too. Interesting.

 

42.24

I was thinking back to this episode of Gunsmoke. This was an Amanda light story. I think it was one or possibly two short scenes in the bar in the Long Ranch. but the first day that she was scheduled, she didn’t arrive on the set. Nobody could find her. They called her house and friends of hers, her agent and so forth - no Amanda. When they finally got a hold of her, she said something like, ‘ I just don’t want to do this.’ A surprise to me. I had known her for a number of years and done something else with her too. She said 'I don’t think this is right for Kitty’s character.’ We gave her lines and scenes to old Glen Strange, who played the bartender you know and he was fine and did very well. I never discussed the matter with Amanda. I don’t know that I ever saw her again.

 

43.56

If you go back to the Paramount days of starting in Stalag 17 in the early fifties, I had never up to that time, been able to get a job on a picture at Paramount. I had gone to the casting department for a couple of things, but got the part in Stalag 17, which was a wonderful part, but it was this German spy. Ever after, when I would be up for something at Paramount, they would say, ‘Oh absolutely not. This is a part for an all- American boy and you’re a German Spy, get out of here!’ The truth is that I didn’t work at Paramount studios again for about fifteen years, until Mission Impossible came along. You know there was a little type casting thought to be going on around Hollywood, and there still is.

 

45.14

‘Airplane’ was a funny twist for me, because nobody knew who these young guys were. I thought it could be a career ender for me, you know this wonderful pilot of this large airplane who also kind of has a thing for little boys. Now you have me from ‘Fury’ days, and Mission Impossible and a lot of stuff I’d done on the screen that was pretty straight arrow stuff, and now I’m going to play this cookie thing, so I said, ‘No, I think I’ll pass on this.’ A minute later I got a call from Art Koch, who said 'Wouldn’t you come in and meet these guys and talk and see what they have in mind'. I said, ‘Of course’, and did so, then I knew, what they were trying to get at. They wanted to take these characters who had been known in films as straight arrows, Bob Stack and Leslie Neilson and even Lloyd Bridges had not done a lot of comedic stuff on the screen. Mr. C Hunt, holy smoke, and they wanted to use us characters as we were on the screen, as we always had been known, but in these ridiculous situations, and it worked.

Of course I was scared to death at the first screening, as I didn’t know what the hell was going on, but then when I saw this very professional audience rolling in the aisles I thought oh, this is something new for us. The other night I went to the Motion Picture Academy, where they had the 25^th anniversary showing of Airplane. It was quite a reunion because a lot of the people who had worked on the picture were there, including the crew, office staff, and a lot of fans. Airplane was quite an amazing turn in a career.

 

47.28

Jim, starting out on serious things, stayed with that, and clown that he is off screen, boy he’s a pretty straight fella on the screen and has always seemingly stayed with that. What happened to him after Gunsmoke is interesting too, because he went on to do ‘How the West was Won’ . He was this marvellous character, the mountain man, and he was really super in that.. I think I referred earlier to his war wound from World War 2 and how it kept getting re-infected all of his life. When he reached the point where he couldn’t even climb up on a horse any more, he said, ‘I knew then that it was time to quit,’. He tried a modern dress thing. I remember somebody sent me a script about two brothers who were older guys and they had been in love with the same girl, and earlier when they were younger. One of them was a small town sheriff in Texas and the other was a private eye in Los Angeles. I thought jeez, Jim and I had never worked together, we could do this, and I sent it to him. He read it and said, ‘Na Peter, I don’t want to do that, you know, I’ve gotten so I’m not comfortable in anything but the 19^th century anymore. Yeah, that’s where I belong, and that’s where I’m going to stay’, so we dropped that idea but it had been interesting.

 

49.24

Look there, Peter Graves, directed by, I like that. That’s nice, it brings back some good memories for me and I get to give my brother a call this very day and tell him I’ve been thinking about him, good. Nice fun.