My brush with movie stars -- On The Way Out, Vol 4, Part 5

A chance meeting with some film icons...

It was 1967, and I was too young to know better.

I had hired on with a regional airline and, at the age of 21, was sent to what seemed to be an isolated town out in the middle of nowhere. It was back in the day of the one-engine stop, and our aircraft would swoop in and land in Moab, Utah, and quickly pick up a passenger or two, throw on a couple of bags of mail...maybe a box of freight, and be airborne in less than eight minutes.

Sounds crazy. However, that was exactly how regional airlines operated back in the day.

It just so happened I was at the right place at the right time as the December snow had melted, and the town residents were treated to a pleasant spring but a particularly warm summer.

One day, as I was going about my duties, Hollywood showed up and landed a six-engine piece of work on our only runway, taxied to the ramp, and began to unload.

In later years, I would become a movie buff, but not yet...not during this time frame. If I had known all the movie stars I was about to meet that summer, well, I would have probably gone bonkers or become unhinged...and turned into a real looney toon.

Thankfully, I was none of those things and did my job -- offering my assistance day after day...after day. 

What a summer it turned out to be!

The Western movie filmed that summer was called " Blue" — starring Terence Stamp, Ricardo Montalbán, Karl Malden, Joanna Pettet, and Peggy Lipton. At the same time, a TV movie was being shot entitled Fade In, and the star was a young stud by the name of Burt Reynolds, along with Barbara Loden, who just happened to be married at the time to one of the greatest directors of all time -- Elia Kazan (above photo). 

Reynolds would say later in life that the movie he was in should have been called Fade Out.

Kazan would fly in and out of Moab during the summer, and I had the opportunity to speak with the man on several occasions. Of course, I had no idea at the time that I'd someday become a writer...but standing before me in 1967 was the man who directed On the Waterfront, Splendor in the Grass, East of Eden, and A Streetcar Named Desire.

Kazan's life can be a history lesson for many of my readers who want to surf the Internet and discover the world the great director lived in during the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s.

Loden (photo on the left) was Kazan's second wife, and she died in 1980 of breast cancer. Kazan passed away from natural causes in 2003 at the age of 94.

Reynolds was 31 when Blue and Fade In were in production, just a few miles northeast of the Moab airport. He died at the age of 82 in September 2018. The great character actor Malden, pictured with me in the softball team photo below, had just turned 55 in March of 1967. He died of natural causes at the age of 97.

All of the above seems like a lifetime ago. I recently journeyed through Flagstaff, through Monument Valley, made my way into Utah, and eventually ended up just 35 miles east of Grand Junction, Colorado, where I visited my youngest son and his family.

At the 600-mile mark of my trip, I passed through Moab. I stopped for gas and a bite to eat. I looked out the restaurant window and recalled what happened to me and my family of three during the summer of 1967. What a beautiful area of the country. Six years prior, during the summer of 1961, The Comancheros with John Wayne, Ina Balin, and Stuart Whitman began production near Moab. That's a story for another day.

I'm 79 now. I was 21 back then, and I knew very little about life. I've come a long way, yet here I was on the same highway...traveling down the same roads, eyeing the beauty of the land once again... the same land I traveled through some fifty-eight years ago.

Burt Reynolds

Team photo above: Sunday morning softball with some of the Hollywood gang and my town-team teammates in 1967 in Moab, Utah.

That is skinny me, age 21, third from the right, second row. The tall guy in the back row, Karl Malden. Ricardo Montalban, kneeling in the front row, fourth from the right.