The Shooting - Production

Production

In 1964, Monte Hellman and Jack Nicholson had made two films together, Back Door to Hell and Flight to Fury, which were produced by Roger Corman and filmed back-to-back in the Philippines. After completing the films, the director and actor wrote a screenplay called Epitaph and presented it to Corman to produce. Corman did not care for the script but asked if the two would be willing to do a western for him instead. When they expressed an interest, Corman further suggested that they film two westerns, in a similar manner to the Philippine-shot movies they had just finished. They agreed, and while Nicholson started working on the script for Ride in the Whirlwind, Hellman asked their mutual friend Carole Eastman to write The Shooting.

According to Hellman, Eastman's script was used almost exactly as written with no need for any rewrites. However, Hellman felt the first part of the script had too much expository material involving Gashade’s trip through the desert as he returned to the mining camp, so Hellman simply deleted it, noting that “Exposition, by its very nature, is artificial.” After discarding the material, Hellman began shooting at approximately “Page 10” of the screenplay. He felt the story was “perfectly simple” and didn’t need any additional information to help the audience figure things out. Nonetheless, Corman insisted on Hellman inserting a certain amount of exposition that Corman hoped would help explain the story. Corman felt that if mention was made three times during the course of the film that Gashade had a brother, audiences would not be confused by the climactic sequence. Hellman reluctantly agreed.

After briefly considering Sterling Hayden for Gashade, Hellman was shopping in a Los Angeles bookstore when he suddenly and simultaneously thought of Perkins, Warren Oates, and Will Hutchins for the main roles. Perkins was Hellman’s next door neighbor at the time, and she had known both Hellman and Nicholson for many years, having first met them while all of them were attending the same acting class. Hellman immediately telephoned Nicholson with his casting idea. Nicholson agreed that the three actors would be perfect.

Hellman and Nicholson scouted locations for several weeks, and looked at such familiar locales as Monument Valley before deciding on Kanab, Utah. They chose that area because it offered them both the “box canyon” needed for Whirlwind and the “desolate desert” for The Shooting.

Corman financed the picture, serving as the film's uncredited Executive Producer. The budget was $75,000. Shooting began on April 15, 1965, with a production crew consisting of only seven individuals. During the first two days of the production, actual shooting was extremely limited due to near-constant rain which caused severe flooding in the areas they had planned to shoot. Hellman estimated that $5,000 of the already small budget was eaten up by the wasted time. Another $10,000 of the budget was for the horse wranglers’ salaries, the only union element of the film, apart from the actors. Corman’s deal with Hellman and Nicholson was that if the film went over budget, any additional costs would come out of their own pockets. Despite the initial problems, the film was completed for the original budget estimate.

Because of the restrictively low budget, no light equipment was utilized during the shoot. Gregory Sandor shot the entire film in natural light. For the film’s many tracking shots, Hellman estimated the crew had only been able to bring along about eight feet of dolly tracks.

After The Shooting was completed, production immediately commenced on Hellman’s Ride in the Whirlwind, a similarly mysterious western that also featured Nicholson and Perkins in the cast. Both films were completed in a total of six weeks of continuous shooting (three weeks per film).

Hellman reportedly spent over a year editing the films, then had them played at various film festivals throughout the world. In 1967, both films received excellent reviews at the Montreal World Film Festival, and were shown out-of-competition at the Cannes Film Festival.

No U.S. distributor expressed any interest in either film. Nicholson sold the foreign rights to a French film producer, but the producer went bankrupt, and the prints of both films remained in bond at the Paris airport for almost two years. After "considerable legal maneuvering", Hellman and Nicholson were able to get the rights reverted back to them. In 1968, Hellman managed to get both films theatrical showings in Paris, albeit without a distributor. According to Hellman, The Shooting was a sizeable arthouse hit and played for over a year in Paris. Also in 1968, the U.S. rights for both were sold to the Walter Reade Organization, a New York-based theatre chain that occasionally distributed films (they also handled the initial release of Night of the Living Dead). They decided to pass on a theatrical release. Instead, both films were sold directly to television. In 1971, theatrical rights to the film were obtained by Jack H. Harris Enterprises Inc., who purchased the rights based "on the strength of Jack Nicholson's new-found fame." Although publicity materials were produced, the Internet Movie Database shows no record of any subsequent release having occurred under Harris.