Dream Factories and Radio Pictures (17 page)

ME:

Tell us about the Wagon.

Podmer:

You seen the movies, ain’t you?

ME:

Three or four times each.

Podmer:

Then why ask me?

ME:

Well, it looked like
you
firing off the Lightning Rockets and the Nimbus Mortars. . . .

Podmer:

It was me. I didn’t use no stuntman! I wisht I had a nickel for every powder burn I got on that series. Some days I’d be workin’ at M.G.M. morning and hightailing it all the way across Boise to the first National lot, and runnin’ on the set sayin’ my lines, and the makeup men would be bitching because I’d burnt half my real beard off, or had powder burns on my arms, or something. One of those other films I ain’t got no eyebrows in a couple of scenes.

ME:

What about the Sferics Box? I know some critics complained there was nothing like it in use among the rainmakers in the real Old West.

Podmer:

Do I look like a goddamn engineer? I’m a thespian! Ask Mayhew or Selvors about that stuff. I do know I once got a letter from a guy what used to be a rainmaker back then—hell, he must have been older when he wrote that letter than I am
now
—who said he used something like that there Sferics Box—they’d listen for disturbances in the ether with them. Had something to do with sunspots, I think.

ME:

That was twenty years before deForest sent the first messages. . . .

Podmer:

They wasn’t interested in talkin’ to each other, they was interested in makin’ a gullywasher! That’s what the guy wrote, anyway.

ME:

In all those films, Shadow Smith never used a gun, right?

Podmer:

Well, just that once. People talked about that stuff for a long time. It was the next to last one [
The Watershed Wars
, 1937 —ME] and they was that shootist for the Windmill Trust that called Shadow out to a street duel—Shadow’d just gone into the saloon to find him after all those people were killed when the Windmill Trust tried to make Utah Great Lake salty again, and Shadow’s so mad he picks up a couple of guns from the bar and goes out, then you cut out onto the street, bad guy’s standing in it, and Shadow comes out the saloon doors a quarter-mile away and starts shooting, just blasting away and walking up the boardwalk, bullets hitting all over the streets around the shootist, and he just takes off and runs, hightails it away. When Shadow realizes what he’s done, that he’s used gun-violence, he gets all upset and chagrined. People still talk about that. What few Westerns were made later, even the ones they started filming a few years ago in what was left of the Sahara Plains, they’d never done that—always romanticized it, one-to-one, always used violence. Never like in
The Cloudbusters
, where we used brains and science. . . .

ME:

It wasn’t just Shadow Smith’s death that finished the series, then?

Podmer:

It wuz everything. Smith died. Thalberg had been dead a year by then, and Goldfish wanted to move Selvors up to the A pictures; he never could leave well-enough alone. The next one we knew was gonna be directed by just someone with a ticket to punch. Selvors tried to stay, but they told him their way or the highway. That was the middle of ’38, just when the European market fell apart, and people was nervous over here—they didn’t have to wait but till August before our market started The Long Fall, and people started the Back-to-the-Land movement; they ate all right but there wasn’t any
real
money around. Anyway, that’s about the time Mayhew had the garish-headline divorce and we’d be damned if we’d let other people write
and
direct
The Cloudbusters
. Also, they took Bill Menzies away from us. He’d designed the Thunder Wagon, and most of the props and did the sets, and about half the effects on the movies—remember the credits, with that big thunderhead rolling in on you and suddenly spelling out
The Cloudbusters
?—that was Menzies’ doing all along.

So we all got together, just after we wrapped The Thunder Wagon and we made a gentlemen’s agreement that there wouldn’t be any more Cloudbuster films—it was hard to do, we’d been a real family except for that shitty Hornmann kid, I hope he’s burning in hell—[Robert Hornmann was killed in a fight in a West Boise nightclub in 1946 —ME] and for me it was walking away from a goldmine, and my only chance to get top billing again. But it was easiest for me, too, since I had a picture-to-picture deal and all I did was line up enough work to stay busy for the solid next year. I also put out the word to all the other comic relief types not to go signin’ anything with the name
Cloudbusters
on it. . . .

ME:

Have you seen Sergio Leone’s
A Faceful of Rainwater
?

Podmer:

Was that the Wop Western about the Two Forks War?

ME:

Yes. It’s supposedly an homage to
The Cloudbusters,
much grittier but not as good, I don’t think.

Podmer:

Nope. Ain’t seen it.

* * *

From: BLAZING SCREENS!
The Magazine of Celluloid Thrills
, June 1972.

SOUNDTRACK THUNDER AND NITRATE LIGHTING
!

By Formalhaut J. Amkermackam

Imagine a time when most of the American continent was a vast dry desert from the Mississippi to the Pacific Coast!

Imagine when there were no lush farmlands from sea to sea, when coffee, rubber, and tea had to be imported into this country!

Imagine that once men died crossing huge sandy wastes & when the only water for a hundred miles might turn out to be poison, when the Great Utah Lake was so salty it supported no aquatic life!

Imagine when the Midwest was only sparse grasslands, suitable for crops only like wheat & oats, or an economy based on the herding of cattle & sheep!

Imagine a time when rainfall was so scarce the only precipitation was snow on the high mountains in the winter & when that was melted there was no more till next year!

These things were neither a nightmare nor the fevered dreams of some fantasy writer—this was the American West—where our forefathers actually tried to make a living—
less than one hundred years ago!

YOU CAN TAKE A PLUVICULTURE BUT YOU CAN’T MAKE IT DRINK

Then came the men & women who not only talked (as Mark Twain once said) about the weather but they did something about it! They called themselves storm wizards, rainmakers, and even pluviculturists (which is the fancy word for rainmaker!) & their theories were many & varied but what they did & how they did it & how they changed our lives & the destiny of the world was the stuff of legend. But at first everybody just talked about them & nobody did anything about them.

Until 1935, that is!!!

TWO THUNDERHEADS ARE BETTER THAN ONE

That year George Mayhew (the screenwriter of
Little Lost Dinosaur
&
Wild Bill Barnacle
) teamed up with James Selvors (director of such great movies as
The Claw-Man Escapes
,
His Head Came C.O.D.,
and the fantastic musical war movie
Blue Skies & Tailwinds
) to bring to the screen a series of films dealing with the life & times of the men who broke the weather & transformed the American West to a second Garden of Eatin’—
The Cloudbusters
!

THE GUN THAT DROWNED THE WEST

Aided by the marvelous & mysterious Thunder Wagon (in which they kept all their superscientific paraphernalia & their downpour-making equipment) they roamed the west through five feature films & three shorts that will never be forgotten by those who’ve seen ’em.

SHADOWS OF THINGS TO COME

For the lead in the films (except for the last one where he had only a brief appearance due to his untimely & tragic death) they chose Shadow Smith, the big (6'5½") actor who starred in such films as
Warden, Let Me Out!, My Friend Frankenstein
, and lots more. Before the Cloudbusters films, his best known role was as Biff Bamm in
Spooks in the Ring
,
Singing Gloves
, and
Biff Bamm Meets Jawbreaker
, all for Warner Bros. Shadow was born in 1908 in Flatonia, Texas, & had worked in films from 1928 on, after a stint as an egg-handler & then college in Oklahoma City.

He fit the role perfectly (his character name was Shadow Smith too) and, according to people who knew him, was just like his screen character—soft-spoken, shy, and a great lover of the outdoors. It is interesting that the Shadow Smith character in the Cloudbusters never used a firearm to settle a score—sometimes resorting to scientific wrestling holds & fisticuffs, but most usually depending on his quick wits, brain, and powers of logic.

WHO DAT WHO DAY “DOODAD”?

As comic relief & sidekick “Doodad” Jones was played by Elmer “PDQ” Podmer (the “PDQ” in the name of this old-time character actor stuck with him for the alacrity with which he learned & assayed his many roles, and the speed with which he went from one acting job to another, sometimes working on as many as three different films at three different studios in one day!). The character of “Doodad” was one of the most interesting he ever had. Many characteristics were the usual—he used malapropisms like other sidekicks (“aspersions to greatness” and “some hick yokelramus,” and he once used “matutinal absolution” for “morning bath”) but was deferred to by Shadow Smith for his practical knowledge & mechanical abilities, especially when something went wrong with the “consarned idjit contraptions” in the Thunder Wagon.

Their young assistant, Chancy Raines (played by Bobby Hornmann, who died tragically young before he could fulfill his great talents as an actor) was added in the second film as an orphan picked up by Smith and “Doodad” after a drought & sudden flash flood killed his mother & father & little sister.

Together they roamed the West, in three short (three-reel or twenty-eight-minute) films and five full-length features made between 1935 and 1938. They went from small towns and settlements to the roaring hellcamps of Central City and Sherman Colorado to the Mojave Desert in California, and as far north as the Canadian border, bringing with them storms & life-giving rains which made the prairies bloom—always in their magnificent Thunder Wagon!

SKYWARD HO!

The Thunder Wagon! A beautiful & sleek yellow and blue (we were told) wagon pulled by a team of three pure white horses (Cirrus, Stratus, and Cumulus) and one pure black horse (Nimbus)!

Designed by director/cameraman/set designer/special effects man Bill C. Menzies (who had come from Germany via England to the M.G.M. studios in Boise in 1931), the Thunder Wagon seemed both swift & a solid platform from which Shadow, “Doodad,” and Chancy made war on the elements with their powerful Lightning Rockets, Nimbus Mortars (& the black horse neighed every time that weapon was fired), and Hailstone Cannons, which they fired into the earth’s atmosphere & caused black clouds & thunderstorms (& in one case a blizzard) to form & dump their precipitation on the hopeful thirsty farmers and ranchers who’d hired them.

DON QUIXOTES OF THE PLAINS!

But the weather wasn’t the only thing the Cloudbusters fought in the course of their movies. For they also had to battle the deadly Windmill Trust!

The Windmill Trust! A group of desperate Eastern investors, led by the powerful Mr. Dryden, dedicated to keeping the status quo of low rainfall & limited water resources in the Western territories! Their tentacles were everywhere—they owned the majority of railroads & all the well-drilling & windmill manufacturing firms in the United States & they kept in their employ many shootists & desperados whom they hired to thwart the efforts of all the rainmakers & pluviculturalists to bring moisture to the parched plains. These men resorted to sabotage, mis-sending of equipment, wrongful processes of law, and in many cases outright murder and violence to retain their stranglehold on the American West and its thirsty inhabitants!

DESICCATED TO THE ONE I LOVE

Through these eight films, with their eye-popping special effects (even the credits were an effects matte shot of a giant cloud forming & coming toward you & suddenly spelling out the series’ name!), their uncharacteristic themes, and their vision of a changing America (brought on by the very rainmakers these films were about!), there were thrills & images people would never forget.

If you ever get to see these (& someone should really put the first three shorts together in one package & release it to TV) you’ll see:

• A race to the death between raging floodwaters, the Thunder Wagon, and the formerly unbelieving Doc Geezler & a wagonload of orphans!
  
• “Doodad” Jones using the Nimbus Mortars to cause a huge electrical storm & demolish the Giant Windmill (thirty stories high!) sucking the water from & drying up the South Platte River & threatening the town of Denver with drought!
  
• The henchmen of the Windmill Trust (led by Joe Sawyer) dressed as ghosts in a
  silent
  (no sound of hoofbeats, only the snap of quirts and jangle of spurs heard in an eerie scene) raid on the town of Central City, Colorado!
  
• The climactic fight on the salt-drilling platform above Utah Great Lake in the hailstorm between Shadow Smith & Dryden, and three others seemingly plunging to their deaths far below!
  
• The great blizzard forming over the heated floor of the (once) Great Mojave Desert, with its magical scenes of cacti in the snow & icicles on the sagebrush!
  

ACTION! THRILLS! WET SOCKS!

You can see all this and more, if you travel back via the silver screen & your TV set to a time not so long ago, when the Cloudbusters rode the Wild American West in their eight films:

1. The Cloudbusters
   (1935—a short, introducing Shadow Smith, “Doodad,” and the Thunder Wagon!)
   
2. 44 Inches or Bust!
   (1935—the second short—the title refers to the rainfall they promise a parched community—introducing Chancy Raines & the Windmill Trust!)
   
3. Storms Along the Mojave
   (1936—the last short)
   
4. The Desert Breakers
   (1936—the first feature, introducing Dryden as head of the Windmill Trust!)
   
5. The Dust Tamers
   (1936—with the magic blizzard scenes!)
   
6. Battling the Windmill Trust
   (1936—with the giant windmill that threatens Denver!)
   
7. The Watershed Wars
   (1937—Dryden and Shadow Smith in hand-to-hand combat above Utah Great Lake!)
   
8. The Thunder Wagon
   (1938—the best film though not most representative due to the death of Shadow Smith ((who appears only in an early scene & to whom the picture is dedicated)) but the Thunder Wagon is the star along with “Doodad” & Chancy—they have to cause rain in three widely separated places & use the Hailstone Cannons to freeze an underground stream!)