For the life of me I can't remember ever watching this movie all the way through as a kid. The mom and pop video store we rented from didn't carry it. It never showed up on TV. If any of my boyhood friends had seen it, they never made a peep about it. Prior to watching The Legend of the Lone Ranger recently, the most I could recollect was seeing storybooks and toys at an Odd Lots five or six years after the film came out. In the rush to capitalize on the success of Superman, producers began snatching up old properties and giving them the commodious big screen treatment. Flash Gordon and Popeye were two other big properties that sought to match the scope of Superman and Star Wars. Popeye did all right, while Flash Gordon bombed here in America; both have become cult objects over the last twenty years or so. The '81 Lone Ranger has had no such reevaluation, mainly because no one can find it.
There was little hope for another Superman. The story goes that no one could decide whether the picture was to be funny or serious, so rewrites were constant. Spilsbury, perhaps feeling he was to be the next Redford or Newman, allegedly acted a fool on the set, fighting and screaming at the other cast members or crew. Stories abound that Spilsbury would refuse to do certain set-ups, balk at lines he was expected to read, and hated his Lone Ranger costume. Why you would sign up for a Lone Ranger movie, but refuse to don the garb is beyond my comprehension, but Spilsbury seemed to be protecting his look. After the film wrapped, all of Spilsbury's dialogue had to be rerecorded. I was unable to pin down an exact reason for this. Some claim that Spilsbury refused to return to do ADR and was replaced, while another rumor claims the actor's wife was sick and dying and unable to rerecord, while yet another story alleges that director William Fraker hated the actor so much that he basically banned him from any further production work. James Keach stepped in to dub the lines, which didn't help an already terrible acting job. Spilsbury had all the charisma of an Access Hollywood anchor, so that paired with a voice that sounded as though it were speaking from another room ensured a doomed performance.
The Legend of the Lone Ranger opened in May 1981 and died a brutal death. Critics savaged it, Spilsbury won Razzie Awards for Worst Actor and Worst New Star, and the picture only made back $12 million of its $18 million budget. Spilsbury never worked again, drifting through the eighties and nineties modeling in Europe and teaching acting classes in Vancouver. Strangely, Andy Warhol seemed to predict this downturn. In his book, The Andy Warhol Diaries, the artist writes about an interview he conducted with Spilsbury on August 1st, 1980.
"I had an appointment to meet the new Lone Ranger, Klinton Spilsbury, at the office. Robert Hayes and I were going to interview him. He's on TV tonight and I think I'll take a look. He was really good-looking. Long hair, 6'5, and a face that's a cross between Warren Beatty and Clint Eastwood. He had a bottle of wine. He was an art student, he said, out in California and he was married and had a little baby, but his wife--she was rich--she left him, he said, because he needed too much time (laughs) with his own thoughts. He was making movies, directing, and then he said he wanted to know how it felt to be an actor, so he took acting lessons and then an agent saw him and he went out for a part, and they gave him the first one, the Lone Ranger. But he didn't want to sign at first because it included all the extra things he'd have to do, like wear the costume and sing things, but then they took that stuff out. He said he modeled once, that he didn't really want to but someone had just asked him to, so he did. Then he was really drunk and gave me his belt. Then started really talking, he told me that he'd been at Studio 54 and I'd gone over and said, "You have to be careful, you're dancing with a drag queen." Klinton said he's a friend of Dennis Christopher's, he fell in love with Dennis Christopher, and then with that kid Bud Cort, who was in Harold and Maude. Then he said he'd been picked up by [American fashion designer] Halston and woke up in bed with Halston. And it was nutty, he was telling me all this and blowing his whole image."
A few commenters on various message boards have claimed Spilsbury was a Mormon confused by his sexuality and that the fights and flameout happened because he wasn't certain how to be a gay man in Hollywood. I looked for any recent sign of Spilsbury, whether it be a blog or random comment on a message board, but my search came up empty. Someone start up a Kickstarter and make a documentary on this guy. I'm dying to know what happened.
Problem #2 is that the movie is mostly set-up. Instead of supplying any characterization, the movie constantly deals in shorthand. Here's the Ranger as a boy watching his parents die. Here he is befriending a young Tonto. Now we're on to the Ranger's pre-vigilante days as a lawyer. This is where we meet his love interest, and on and on and on. We don't even get to see the character in his Lone Ranger gear until fifty-five minutes into the picture. The film runs a short ninety-three minutes, so only a third of the film shows the titular character being the titular character. Even worse, Jason Robards shows up as a drunk, snarky Ulyssess S. Grant and completely steals the show from the Ranger and Tonto. He's Bukowski as President, mocking the shitwater towns he has to visit and making farting noises whenever someone brings up courage and patriotism. I love this guy.
Problem #3 is that there is no fire behind the camera. No one cared about actually making this movie. I'm not saying they needed to be die hard fans of Clayton Moore's The Lone Ranger or the countless stories that were published in the early 20th century; they needed to at least be invested in what they were doing. Everyone (minus Robards) is sleepwalking. To patch over the missing portions of the script, the production hired Merle Haggard to provide narration and if you don't think they stole this idea from Waylon Jennings talking up The Dukes of Hazzard, well, then you're a damn fool. This is a movie that makes Christopher Lloyd (as villain Butch Cavendish) as dull as dishwater. You forget he's in it. Instead of settling on a script, the producers wrangled up $18 million (approximately $44 million in today's market) and spent it rewriting a movie. Remember the story about the Salkinds approaching Sam Peckinpah to direct Superman? It's an odd fit, but if ever there was a name property suited for Peckinpah, it was The Lone Ranger. Granted, he was on a coke and booze fueled downward spiral at this time, so I doubt anyone would have insured him. Still, dealing with this kind of myth was Peckinpah's stock and trade. There's a few bloody gun shots in the '81 Ranger, surprising since this was considered a family film at the time. If they were going to delve into that dark territory, then they should have hauled in Bloody Sam. Might have been another masterpiece of his.
Is The Legend of the Lone Ranger worth anyone's time? Absolutely not. The public was right in turning their backs on this dubious wreck. It's too straight faced for camp, too dull to supply cheap thrills, and too scattershot to even merit being called a movie. It's more akin to a picture flipbook. Things go by and stuff looks like it's moving, but there is not a single event happening of note. This is a movie that deserved to be buried in the Hollywood Cemetery of the Forgotten.