We're less than a week from Christmas and I expect I may have a couple of books coming my way for Christmas gifts.
Today's post of Dave-El's Book Report is about one such book. But not one that I got last Christmas.
But the Christmas the before.
Which I did not get to read until this year.
Between the basic responsibilities of life (work and stuff) and my excessive TV viewing habits (see the weekly Tuesday TV Touchbase posts) and movie watching obsessions (chronicled in my Cinema Sunday posts and my soon to be started Cinema Saturday as well), finding time to sit down with a book can be a bit tricky.
As much as I enjoy reading.
A few months back, we lost our internet here at the Fortress of Ineptitude for a couple of days which finally gave me an excuse to sit down with the book that is the subject of today's post.
The book for is The Boys: A Memoir of Hollywood and Family co-written by Ron Howard and his brother Clint Howard.
Ron Howard started his career as a child actor in The Andy Griffith Show and The Music Man and as a young man appeared in the film American Graffiti and the TV series Happy Days. He has gone on to become a prolific and award winning film director and producer.
His brother Clint was also a child actor on the 1960's TV series Gentle Ben. He was also Baylok in the Star Trek episode "The Corbomite Maneuver". Clint took some missteps that led him to drug and alcohol addiction which nearly derailed his life and career. Clint got himself clean and while he never achieved stardom, he continues to make a good living as a working character actor in supporting roles.
(And Clint always has a role in Ron's pictures. For example, you can find Clint working at Mission Control in Ron's Apollo 13 film.)
The Boys is more than just a book about the careers and lives of the two Howard brothers. It also a tribute to their parents, Rance and Jean Howard.
Born in the midwest in the heart of the Great Depression, Rance and Jean had their own dreams of becoming actors, of being stars of stage and screen. Stuff keeps getting in the way. Jean gets hit by a car in New York City and she requires a lot of time to heal but she never gets completely better; all through her life, she experienced pain and discomfort relating to those injuries.
Rance gets called up for military service just as there are growing opportunities in the nascent medium known as television. By the time he completed his military service, it was too late to get his name on the lists of agents and casting directors.
A chance encounter gets their young son Ron noticed for a film role and it is quickly obvious that Ron has a knack for this sort of thing, the instincts of an actor. Rance and Jean put their own dreams and aspirations on the back burner to make sure Ron had their full and unconditional support as Ron developed his young acting career.
And they echoed that commitment when Clint showed a similar aptitude for acting.
One of Clint's first acting gigs was on the Andy Griffith Show. That kid named Leon who was always offering his peanut butter and jelly sandwich to random people? That was Clint Howard.
Being on set as Ron's guardian, Rance would get the occasional acting job. Ron recounts the story of how Rance stepped in a moment's notice to play the role of an FBI agent in Mayberry.
As kids, Ron and Clint were oblivious to their parents' sacrifices. For the most part, Rance and Jean made sure their sons had as normal a life as possible for kids whose faces were on TV screens across the country every week.
And Rance and Jean also were honest arbiters of the boys finances. The boys were aware of how much they were making and their parents took only a small agent's fee (much smaller than other parents of child actors) and put all of the rest away for the boys for when they would be legally adults.
Lessons of frugality continued into adulthood. When Ron was old enough to buy his own car, Rance talked him out of an expensive sports car. Ron instead bought a VW Bug which still sits in the Howard family garage to this day.
Clint's slide away from sobriety owed less to his notoriety as a TV and movie actor and more to the times, the early 1970's interests in drugs. Clint tells how he thinks he's still holding things together as he graduates from high school but he recognizes his tenuous grasp on being really in control of his life.
When Ron married his teenage sweetheart Cheryl (to whom he is still married to this day), the two were driven away from the wedding by Clint who admits he was high as hell.
Ron chronicles his endeavors to move from acting to directing by scoring a chance to direct a movie from noted B movie producer Roger Corman. Ron is candid about his experience directing Grand Theft Auto and the mistakes he made and the lessons he learned. (One lesson: do not rely on Kentucky Fried Chicken for craft services. There are other options for better food at less cost.)
There a couple of acting gigs that Ron had provided some more background on. He mentions his episode of MASH (he accidentally sat in Loretta Swit's chair and she made sure he knew that was wrong) and his turn co-starring with John Wayne in his last movie, The Shootist. But he doesn't elaborater on how those 2 roles came to be on his radar to audition for them.
The two brothers fire some good natured barbs at each other as they tag team the writing of the book, taking turns around sections of the book. (Clint ends the book calling Ron "Opie Cunningham".)
The Boys is a heartwarming memoir that shows what happens when child actors have a loving and supportive home. Yeah, Clint took a bad detour for a bit but even the best environment can't protect us from all our bad decisions. And Clint's recovery from that downturn owes a lot to that love and support from his parents and brother.
This book shows it is possible to grow up in Hollywood without being totally fucked up.
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