While the settings were picturesque, the fact that almost all the fort scenes could be shot on the grounds of Goulding's meant that Ford could maximize production time; lengthy rides out into the valley were only necessary for action scenes. In this way, Ford knew he could complete the film under schedule in the astonishingly brief time of four weeks, only slightly more than the average television movie of today, and several weeks less than was usual for a Technicolor Western shot on location. There was no downtime, if the weather clouded up so a given scene couldn't be shot, Ben Johnson, a new addition to the stock company, could ride. "He liked to watch me ride a horse," remembered Johnson. "All these guys were better actors than I was but I could beat them all riding a horse."
Johnson was born on an Osage Indian reservation in Oklahoma in 1918, and had been working on a cattle ranch in 1939 when Howard Hughes bought some horses for his film The Outlaw. Johnson was making $40 a month at the time, and was hired to accompany the horses to Hollywood. "The first week I was on his payroll," Johnson remembered, "I made $175, as opposed to $40 a month. That's why I stayed in Hollywood."
By 1948, Johnson had doubled for Gary Cooper, Joel McCrea, and most of the Western stars of the time. Johnson was doubling Henry Fonda in Fort Apache when a couple of horses ran away with a wagon during a take. Johnson stepped out from behind the camera and stopped the runaway. Moved by the stuntman's unassuming courage, Ford got down off the camera parallel and went over to Johnson. "Ben, you'll be well rewarded for this." Johnson thought that he'd get some more stuntwork out of his good deed, but two weeks later, Ford called him into his office, handed him an envelope, and told him to have his lawyer look at it.
As the envelope wasn't sealed, Johnson pulled out the contents and discovered a personal services contract with Argosy Pictures. "The fifth line down [read] 'to $5,000 a week,' " remembered Johnson. "That's as far as I read. I got a pen off his desk and I signed "
Ford clearly liked the young man a great deal, and saw in him something of Harry Carey's ease and likability. Aside from his natural athletic gifts, Johnson was the token normal person in the Ford stock company. He wasn't a drunk, wasn't given to fits of temper, depression, or grandiosity, but did have a natural authority on screen.
Budgeted at $1.8 million, the picture required Ford to work seven days a week. The first two days of the schedule were given over to selecting locations, then he dove in. The first day, Wednesday, October 27, 1948, he shot action footage of Indians, stagecoaches, and Ben Johnson riding, and covered an astounding eight and a half pages of script. After that, he averaged between five and six pages of script a day (the average for a large-scale studio picture is two to three per day).
Scott Eyman "Print the Legend: The Life and Times of John Ford" (1999)
