When Hollywood heard that the teen-age heartthrob from the nighttime soap “Beverly Hills 90210,” Luke Perry, was going to make a cowboy movie, they thought it would be the standard oater.
Luke would be packing a six-gun, riding a white horse, wearing a black hat and saving the fort from Geronimo or, given the temper of the times, Geronimo from the fort. Or, he’d be facing down the rustlers at high noon or cleaning out the Last Chance saloon or saving the noon stage.
There isn’t a shot fired in “8 Seconds,” the Luke Perry-starring vehicle, but it’s as Western as sagebrush. It’s about the last stand of cowboy culture in this country--the rodeo. The most romantic era of American history is kept alive only through traveling ride-and-rope shows that remind wistfully of the time when great cattle herds roamed the prairie and the bunkhouse, not the sound stage, was the citadel of the riders of the range.
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The title “8 seconds” refers to the time the rodeo cowboy has to stay aboard a bucking bull to score any points in a rodeo and the story is that of one of the legends of that sport, a young buckaroo named Lane Frost who died on the back of a bull in Cheyenne in 1989.
Young Frost grew up the son of a rodeo bareback rider in small-town Oklahoma and the movie chronicles his determined--and ultimately fatal--attempt to outdo his father on the tanbark of the re-creations of that old West of cowcatchers and bronc riders.
It’s a sports story in sum. Billy the Kid might have been a bull rider--or bulldogger--if he’d been brought up in another era.
For Luke Perry, the part was a labor of love. Not that he was a rodeo fan, but he confesses that his earliest show business ambition was to be a stuntman.
“Growing up in Ohio as a boy, I not only used to think the stars did their own stunts, but I thought every movie was a documentary. Those things were not made up, they were really happening up there on screen.”
Playing a bull rider gave him a chance to fulfill part of his dream. He spent hours--more than 30--riding horned, homicidal critters on a ranch in Northern California to prepare for the part.
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“Part of every ride in the picture, I rode,” he says. “We found the script on the shelf. It had been bought, tried, but never got to the screen till we whipped it into shape.”
His theatrical-release screen career up to then had consisted mostly of vampire flicks, but his TV popularity with Misses America prompted producers to lay other scripts before him. He chose “8 Seconds.”
Bull riding is a sport like no other. You know all you need to know about it when I tell you that you don’t face a foe named Dick Butkus or Lawrence Taylor or even Ronnie Lott. Your foe is listed in the program as Homicide, Evil Intent, Murder One, The Widow Maker, and even Stalin, or Capital Punishment.
There is a famous sports cartoon that shows a skinny, big-eyed fighter standing in a corner, looking over at a troglodyte in the other corner while his manager is saying to the referee, “My boy says he don’t fight till he finds out precisely why they call him ‘The Bushwick Assassin.’ ”
Rodeo cowboys would know where he was coming from. You spot a bull about an 1,800-pound pull in the weights, to say nothing of horns and hoofs. You ride him one-handed. You wind your riding hand in a rope hold called a death wrap. Lane Frost’s was so tight he frequently couldn’t let go of the bull even after his ride was over.
Getting off a one-ton Brahma is a little like jumping off a truck speeding down the Grapevine with the brakes gone. When you get off, the bull frequently wants to make sure you never ride anything again. That’s what happened to young Lane Frost.
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These cowboys do it for a belt buckle and a little traveling money. There are no million-dollar contracts in rodeo. Michael Jordan might have taken an occasional elbow to the ribs, but he never had to worry about a horn to the eye.
Luke Perry, who might have chosen a drawing-room drama or a costume picture for his big screen debut, knew he was opting for controversy. Rodeo is the target for animal activists trying to make the world safe for the grizzly bear.
“I love animals,” Perry protests. “How come I was a hero when I fought to be able to raise horses and hogs on my own (San Fernando Valley) farm and I’m a villain when I ‘glorify’ rodeo? I’m no spokesman for the sport, but when so many livelihoods depend on the well-being of animals, don’t you think they will see to that well-being?”
The film might not appeal to all critics. But it will appeal to everyone who ever wore a 10-gallon hat, or wished they could wear one. It’s not Kafka. It’s not Victorian England. But it’s a film about a sport that takes us back in time and place to where, as a narrator once had it, “Men were men and the women were glad of it.”
If it has a theme, it is expressed when another champion cowboy, Tuff Hardeman--played by Stephen Baldwin--tells Lane Frost to quit whimpering and to “cowboy up.”
This cool hand Luke is to be commended for attempting to recapture a part of Americana we can ill afford to be without.
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