I first met Charlton Heston in early December, 1979. I was the line producer for the pilot of the Screen Actors Guild Legacy Series ,and we were getting ready to videotape Henry Fonda’s interview with Heston, who was the host/moderator.
We were taping at the American Film Institute, which was then at the old Doheny estate in Beverly Hills. There was an underground stream that ran beneath the upper parking lot on the premises. No trucks were allowed to park there.
One of Pacific Video’s trucks (the company taping the interview) trucks had parked in that lot in spite of a sign that clearly stated “NO TRUCKS ALLOWED.”
A Little Upset
Heston came roaring into our temporary production office, towering over everybody there. “Who the blankity blank…parked that ***** truck in the upper lot?”
A totally cowed driver from Pacific Video admitted that he had parked the truck. “Didn't you see the bleeping sign that says “No trucks in this lot”? The driver slunk toward the door and quietly said he would move the truck.
Heston turne to me and glowered. “Would you like a cup of
coffee, Mr. Heston?” I asked. A smile slowly crept across Moses’ face. “Yeah,” was his reply. And that was my introduction to Charlton Heston.
Besides being president of the Screen Actors Guild from 1965 to 1971, Heston had been Chairman of the American Film Institute in its formative years. He also had helped launch the AFI Life Achievement Award in 1972, which went to John Ford.
In Opposition
The SAG Legacy series was difficult to get off the ground. There was a faction in the Guild that felt that the Screen Actors Guild shouldn’t become a producer. Heston, initially was opposed to the idea until Legacy Chair John Kerr met with him and convinced him of the merits of
preserving great film actors’ memories of their career for future film makers. There was also the resolute SAG board member who insisted that since we were film actors. So the interview should be shot on film, not tape.
He then went on to introduce the idea of having three 16 mm cameras shoot the interview simultaneously from different angles. When I
pointed out to the committee that the cost of editing this session would be prohibitive, the idea was abandoned.
The pilot for the series was an unqualified successes. Heston later told me that he was quite pleased with the way he conducted the interview although, he refused to be the regular host/moderator. A second pilot was taped six months later with Eddie Albert being interviewed
by Fernando Lamas. The Screen Actors Guild Strike of 1980 interrupted the series, and it wasn’t resumed until 1988.
The pilot with Henry Fonda was sent to the Library of Congress at the Kennedy Center in 1981 and their response to the interview was as follows:
Dear Mr. Ashley:
I wanted to write and tell you how good and useful the Charlton Heston interview of Henry Fonda has been to us….
This is an excellent example of oral history because it contains so much
information, some of it not available from other sources…
This interview is remarkable in another regard: both Mr. Fonda and Mr. Heston are relaxed and informative; the former expansive without being wordy, the latter knowledgeable and yet respectful without being fawning….
Sincerely yours,
Peter J. Fay
Head Librarian
The next time I saw Heston was at the Golden Boots Awards in Century City in 1997. Heston was receiving the award for his work in several Westerns, most notably the classic “Will Penny” in which he played an aging cowboy who gives shelter to a young woman and her son while
wintering at a line shack on a large ranch in the 1890s.
Heston told me that he was proud that he had gotten to work with several of the film legends that he had idolized while growing up…
“Orson Welles, Jimmy Stewart, Gary Cooper, Gregory
Peck, William Wyler, Cecil B. DeMille….” he reminisced.
In 2002, I came up with the idea of having Heston do an interview at the site of the chariot race in the 1925 version of Ben Hur on La Cienega and Washington boulevards, bordering Culver City. Of interest to me at the time was the fact that not all of the 1959 version was shot in Rome.
Several scenes were filmed on soundstages in Culver City, and the pirate attack on the galley ship that Ben Hur is imprisoned on was filmed in the giant tank on Lot 3 on Jefferson Boulevard.
No Interview
The pirate ships and galley were electronically controlled miniatures.
The interview never materialized as Heston was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease in August,2002.
When Heston's obituary appeared in the newspapers and on television, most of the coverage was about his role as President of the NRA and his opposition to gun control.
Forgotten was his long running presidency of the Screen Actors Guild and his role in the formation of the American Film Institute. Heston was for most of his career a Democrat. He supported Adlai Stevenson for President in 1956 and John F. Kennedy in 1960. While Heston is remembered for his larger than life portrayals of Moses in “The Ten Commandments” and Ben Hur, he also appeared notably in Orson Welles’ classic “Touch of Evil” Tom Gries’ classic Western “Will Penny”
and Rod Sterling’s “Planet of The Apes.”
Late in his life, Gregory Peck recalled that although he and Heston disagreed politically, they remained friends. Peck said that he admired Heston’s ability to play larger than life characters like Moses, Andrew Jackson and Ben Hur. Recalling his portrayal as Ahab in John Huston's
“Moby Dick,” which Peck regarded as a failure, he said that he could never have played those characters as well as Heston.
