By Clint McElroy
HQ 78 | SUMMER 2012
Bill Paxton has a remarkable résumé. He moved to Los Angeles at 18 and made his film debut in Crazy Mama in 1975. Since then, he has appeared in movies like The Terminator, Aliens and Twister, starred on HBO’s Big Love and most recently portrayed Randall McCoy in the Hatfields & McCoys miniseries on the History channel.
History ran a two-hour documentary as a companion piece to the miniseries, and I had the honor of playing Randall McCoy in it – but my path to the part was much simpler than Paxton’s.
I just acted crazy.
As a general rule of life, acting crazy has proven very beneficial to me over the years. It prevented me from getting my butt stomped outside Boney’s Hole-In-the-Wall when I was a junior at Marshall. On that particular occasion I spotted a large fellow, who resembled a shaved gibbon, wearing one of those “I’m with Stupid” T-shirts with the arrow pointing to the right. I quietly observed to my buddies that perhaps the arrow should have been pointing straight up. Apparently I wasn’t quiet enough, because the gibbon heard me and was peeved. He told me to step outside, which I did. But when he emerged from the bar, I unzipped my pants and warned him, with a maniacal look in my eyes, that I was going to relieve myself on him, which would be like getting sprayed with battery acid because that’s how it was with all the people on my home planet Jupiter. “You’re nuts!” he said, and walked away.
Leap forward 36 years to a spot about two blocks away – the Joan C. Edwards Playhouse. I was in the play Proof directed by Jack Cirillo, who – other than Wile E. Coyote – is the only super-genius I know. He had put together this amazing cast – Adrienne Goodwin, Patrick Taylor, Shelby Brewster and myself as Robert, the tortured math genius who feels his sanity slipping away. By the end of the piece my character is, as my lovely wife Carol put it, “crazier than an outhouse rat.”
At one of my particularly crazy performances, Joe Murphy of Trifecta Productions was in the audience. Joe and his compadres at Trifecta had been contracted by History and Thinkfactory Media to film a documentary to run following the channel’s miniseries about the Hatfields and McCoys starring Kevin Costner and Bill Paxton. Thinkfactory and Trifecta were filming segments of the documentary at Huntington’s own Heritage Farm Museum & Village using local actors.
“I loved what you did in Proof!” Joe told me. “I would love for you to bring that same talent to our documentary.” I was speechless.
The day of filming arrived, and it was a particularly busy morning at WTCR, so I was a few minutes late getting to Heritage Farm. As soon as I stepped out of my car, a pile of clothes was thrust into my hands and my fanny was shooed into a dressing room.
“Everybody’s been waiting for you!” costume designer Nicole Peckens informed me. “They’ve been holding off filming until you got here!”
Until that point, I didn’t know what part I was playing. I had assumed I was going to create the role of “Dead Guy Sprawled in the Creek with a Bullet Hole in His Head.” Why hold filming for a corpse?
Five minutes later I was flying across a dirt path in a golf cart piloted by Trifecta’s Chad Midkiff who told me, “You’re playing Randall McCoy, the head of the clan.”
I was stunned. But not so stunned that I didn’t notice that this was a big-time film shoot. We flew past re-enactors, camera people, costumers, sound technicians, animal handlers, special effects artists and caterers (a personal favorite). This was a real film set.
Chad drove me out to a cabin toward the back of a holler. I saw familiar faces like Debbie Wolfe, who was playing Randall’s ill-fated wife Sally, and Michaele Craig, playing the even worse-fated Alifair McCoy. There were some faces I didn’t recognize, like Josh Debenni, the young actor who would play my son Calvin McCoy – the worst-fated of them all.
Off to the side, armed to the teeth and sporting a terrifying red beard, was another person I recognized. It was The Herald-Dispatch’s own Dave Lavender, who was playing my arch-nemesis Devil Anse Hatfield.
We were shooting the “New Year’s Day Massacre” scene, where Devil Anse’s gun-toting cronies sneak up on the McCoy cabin, set it on fire and rain hot lead down on them as they come running out.
The coolest thing I did for the entire shoot was run out of the smoke and flames of the burning cabin, whip up my double-barreled shotgun, cradle it on my hip and blast both barrels at those bushwhacking?Hatfields.?Of course, the hero moment didn’t last long: my next action was to run like a scalded dog.
Later, we filmed the scene where Randall returns to the cabin, stumbling around, a broken man helplessly wandering among the bodies of his fallen family. Joe later told me, “That might be my favorite scene in the whole documentary.” I responded, “Yeah, but how about when I went all ‘Yippee-Ki-Yay’ with that shotgun?”
The filming experience was fascinating. Director Mark Cowen worked seamlessly with the folks from Trifecta like Joe, Jeff Reynolds, Derek Levine, Chelsea Hughes and Josh Edwards. Experienced actors like Jon Apgar and Seth Cyfers collaborated well with people like Huntington Mayor Kim Wolfe and Barboursville Police Chief Mike Coffee to create complex and believable characters without a word of dialogue.
When shooting wrapped, I felt sky-high. It had been a blast, and to be honest I felt like I had done some good stuff. So maybe it was with just the slightest bit of cockiness that I walked over to Mr. Cowen and said, “You know, I’m in radio, so if you need someone to do the narration for the documentary, I could possibly work you into my schedule.”
“Oh, thanks,” he said graciously. “But we’ve already got somebody.”
“Really?” I sniffed. “And who might that be?”
“Kevin Costner,” he replied.
“Yeah,” I said. “He’s pretty good.”
Immediately I started looking for a convenient hole to crawl into.
