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Show 7 !0 Thursday, August 1700 PARK 5 Autumn Tennis Tournament 3 ! cnf Singles Doubles competition for All Levels Trophies & prizes Entry Fee $5 Deadline Sept. 12 Registration forms and more information At the Club i Zr4r nip - M To are er, an - CZ do a" "Tall 1,3 'I:, a bee "",1. s" ' 27, 1981 The Newspaper BOM? SKI StlL3 BGINS SATURDAY SPTMBR 5th iBMiOMlffl I -snni i-nni it s-f AVE. OPEN 8 8 DAILY 649 Prospector Athletic Club 649-6670 iq in on st. 01 te ag ;estau ,NDb 2 - 4949 A - can On 'Grizzly' set Keenan Wynn is creative actor at work by Rick Sometimes this job is worth it. After all, where else could you have a chance to sit down with one of the premier character actors of the last 40 years, and watch while he recreated the moments he'd created for films like "Nashville" and "Dr. Strangelove"? The man's name is Keenan Wynn, and he is co-starring co-starring in "The Return of Grizzly Adams," a Taft International In-ternational special movie for NBC television, as an old woodsman friend of James Capen Adams. He is not, however, playing Mad Jack. The character's name is Bert Woolman. "They only called me to play the part about a week ago," Wynn told The Newspaper in his trailer on location. 'Right off I told them I was not going to try to imitate Denver Pyle." Nothing wrong with Pyle's portrayal, he said. It's just not the way he would play the character. Wynn won't just take his lines and play them. After years in the business, producers know he's an actor ac-tor who can creatively mold his part. He works best when he can improvise, change his lines a little, or at least change the sense of his lines. "I get paid a lot to do bits," he said, "because they know I'm gonna be this way when they hire me." He explained his "Grizzly" "Griz-zly" character this way: "He's a 70-year-old man who doesn't believe it," said Wynn. "He sees a river and he says, 'Hell, I can swim the river,' but he can't. Adams has to save him." Bert is a good woodsman, Wynn said, but he is a little too old to be doing the things he tries to do. While Mad Jack was cast for comedy, he said, he's trying to make has character charac-ter real and human. "Bert and Adams aren't close in an obvious way," he said, "but Adams is the son he would have liked to have had. He'd never say that though." Wynn has already finished at the Golf Park City's Finest Restaurant Open nightly except Monday . 6:00-11:00 Sunday Brunch 11:00-2:00 Live Entertainment Friday & Saturday Tom Distad Reservations Please 649-7177 A variable for Private Parties of 20 or more. Quality newly constructed energy-efficient home for sale 2200 Monarch Avenue Prospector Village $139,500 Perfect for first - low down payment - owner will consider 2nd with possible no payment for 3 years to qualified buyer - 1700 square feet - 3 bedroom, 2Vi bath - 2 x 6 wall construction - R-30 ceiling -R-19 walls - triple glazed windows solid core doors cedar shake roof EkjRKBRIDi Brough the scene where he's swept down the Provo River for Adams to rescue. He went through the scene seven times, without a double, in 35-degree water, and without many safety precautions. "There was just a net in the water to keep him from being swept on to the next state," joked actor Norman Alden, who serves in this picture pic-ture as a technical liason. (Alden is an easily- recognized character man, perhaps best remebered as the high school coach who accidentally drowned in Mary Hartman's bowl of chicken soup.) Bert is laid up after his river mishap, while Adams goes back to civilization to seek out his little daughter Peg. "He can't go back in there without me," complains com-plains Bert. "See, Denver would play that as grouchy and cantankerous," can-tankerous," said Wynn. But Bert reads the line in a more anxious, hopeful vein, with more vulnerability to it. : "Why...he can't go back in there.. .without me!," Said Wynn, "I'm playing the character, not the words." When The Newspaper caught up with Wynn and the "Grizzly" crew, they were filming at their Western set at Keetley, hidden within the mountains west of U.S. 40. The plot includes a small fire, and the crew was preparing to burn a stand of pine trees in a gully north of the set. There was some possible hazard involved, so keeping a cool head, I sent ace photographer Phyllis Rubenstein down to film the blaze at close range, while I alertly watched for danger from the ridge a quarter-mile quarter-mile away. You don't just set fire to a tree and let it burn, explained ex-plained Taft spokeswoman Cirina Hampton. The fires are ignited by butane tanks connected to lines running under the trees. Fire crews are standing by, said Hampton, Hamp-ton, and the trees are hosed down after every take. Course I time buyer! - redwood siding - gas appliances - solid hardwood custom cabinets - wood burning stove - tile baths & entry - skylight massive party deck - concrete driveway - large storage areas - ana many more quality features - shown by appointment principles only please! 649-7708 I i-v , Ik '? " 'Ak- i- ; ; -1 ; . .sir , tWZ Photo by Phyllis Rubenstein Keenan Wynn looks as ornery as Stanley the mule on the set of Taft's movie for NBC, "The Return of Grizzly Adams." The shots are brief, just long enough to show Wynn and his mule, Stanley, fleeing the blaze. The cast filming here is full of acting veterans like June Lockhart, Chuck Connors, Con-nors, and Noah Berry. One name that might not ring a bell is Peg Stuart (as the widow Tompkins, who nurses nur-ses Bert back to health.) But Stuart is the lady who almost became Scarlett O'Hara's sister. Director George Cukor cast her in "Gone With The Wind." But when Cukor was fired from the picture, so was Peg, and her part went to Ann Rutherford. The crudest part is, Peg is a native of Atlanta, Georgia ; her stepfather went to school with Margaret Mitchell. "When I got the part, the Atlanta papers played it up," she recalled. "I studied diction for two years to get rid of the Southern accent," she said. But even today when she talks on the phone with her mother, out it comes ! During the '40s, she was under contract to Republic Studios, the low-budget operation that produces those legendary Saturday-afternoon Saturday-afternoon Westerns with Gene Autry, Roy Rogers and John Wayne. The films are now widely popular with nostalgia buffs, and Stuart often finds herself attending Western film gatherings and fan conventions. She has trouble watching the films, however, filled with so many old friends who are now dear. "We were like a great big mow -r,,. i -v'-vm; W4 family there," she said. While Stuart worked at Republic, Keenan Wynn began his movie career at about the same time as a contract player at the "Tiffany "Tif-fany studio," Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. But he has unsatisfied with his work there as an artist. "I was in 70 pictures there, and had nine real roles," he said. "I it weren't for the stock company com-pany work I did, I would have gone crazy." He was always cast as the best friend. "I held Gene Kelly's coat while he beat up somebody," Wynn said. Even his own father spoofed the stereotype when he opened a comedy act in Las Vegas. And here I witness wit-ness a rather privileged moment. Keenan, who is constantly slipping in and out of accents, begins to suv-tly suv-tly imitate his father's genial, light-headed delivery as he recalled the speech Ed Wynn gave to the Vegas crowd: "Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Ed Wynn. For those of you who don't know who I am I'm Keenan Wynn's father. And for those of you who don't know who Keenan Wynn is he's the fellow who gets splashed when Esther Williams jumps in a swimming swim-ming pool." After he left MGM, he couldn't get any offers. He was still Gene Kelly's friend to Hollywood. "Then I got a part on live television, in Rod Serling's The Rack a good part in a good play," he recalled. "The next day r t mm TTimwwwww-' . -f--- -ajjwwwy wrmw the phone calls started coming in from California." Wynn's list of 204 films includes in-cludes some fine movies and fine directors. Among them : -"Nashville," with Robert Altman is an experience ex-perience he remembers with fondness. "There's about five hours of that picture and you'll see it someday," he said. His character was a timid middle-aged loser with a dying wife. "I bought the clothes for that guy at Goodwill, right in Nashville. The first scene I have is in an airport soda fountain, and I order what I knew that kind of guy would orderpistachio or-derpistachio ice cream. And they don't have it." Wynn was appearing in British film in the early '60s when he ran into Stanley Kubrick in a hotel lobby, who offered him two weeks work on a film he was working on. The part? Colonel "Bat" Guano in "Dr. Strangelove." Wynn was allowed to improvise im-provise his key lines, and came up with one of the film's classics. Col Guano is persuaded by the Peter Sellers character, Major Mandrake, to shoot up a Coke machine for change to make a vital phone call that, hopefully, will halt a nuclear strike against Moscow. "You'll have to answer to the Coca-Cola company," warns Col. Guano. For every good part, there were a dozen that were edited to death in the cutting room. '"Orca, the Killer Whale' was one of those," Wynn recalled. "I spent nine weeks on that one." In the picture, Wynn only appears briefly and is soon gobbled for hors d'oeuvre by Orca. He knew and respected director John Ford, but the autocratic film-maker, who was notoriously hard on actors, ac-tors, never cast Wynn in a film. "I asked him once, 'Why don't you use me?' And he said, 'I'd rather keep you as a friend.'" His proudest possession, however, isn't an acting award. He reaches for his belt, assured us that, no, he wasn't about to expose himself. him-self. The belt, you see, has a special buckle. It signifies that Keenan Wynn is an honorary member of the Motion Picture Stuntman's Association. "Only eight other actors have received this," he said proudly. "People like John Wayne, Lee Marvin, McQueen, Lucille Ball, because she did her own falls, and some others." "For those of you who don't know who Keenan Wynn is"-he's still the fellow getting splashed. He's the white-bearded fellow floating down the Provo |