Interview with LARRY BUCHANAN

BijouFlix: How did you get started in the film business?

Larry Buchanan: I grew up in an orphanage in Texas and was adopted by The Variety Clubs of America, which is a national organization made up of people in the motion picture business who take care of the Will Rogers home in Oklahoma and the Woodland Hills home in California for old actors.

I was kind of unofficially adopted by them and eventually got a job at Fox in the prop department. This was 1942 and I was 18. I was doing acting work at Fox -- bit pieces with Greg Peck in THE GUNFIGHTER and things like that -- and grew up more or less as a Fox contract player in about two years.

But I really only wanted to make films. I wanted to be a director and producer and writer, but in the early '40's the union wouldn't let you get through the gates. You couldn't get on a crew, or even learn to direct.

But Woody Van Dyke, who was one of the great directors of all time and cut in the mold of John Huston and Wellman, had classes in his

Beverly Hills home in editing. There were no cinema degrees being given in Dallas, so that's where we learned our craft. He said, "Go to New York. Go to the Signal Corps Photographic Center where they'll pay you to direct."

So I went to New York and while acting in theater in the evening I went out to the old Biograph Studios on Long Island and made training films for the military for a couple of years.

Then I was invited back to my home town Dallas to head up the Jameson Studios there. They had invited me down there after they had seen my first feature. I was

in a play with Jack Klugman, and I took Jack to the Big Bend country where he played the heavy in a thing called APACHE GOLD, my first feature, a $17,000 black & white western. The leading lady who was playing a Mexican was Neill Adams, who later became Steve McQueen's first wife and bore him two sons.

Anyway, the Jamesons liked the film and said, "We need a director down here because they're making international commercials," and so forth. And that filmmaking was the beginning of the big boom in Texas. We started something there that's gotten very big now, second only to L.A., I think. Jameson gave me a free hand, which meant I could do features inbetween commercials. They said, "Fine. If you find the time, make your features."