COVER STORY : ON LOCATION : Riding With Bronco Billy : In New Mexico’s badlands, Crystal goes West along with some fellow ‘City Slickers’

It’s cold, and a raw wind is blowing in the first drops of what will soon become a serious storm. The horizon and nearby mountains are fast disappearing into a uniform gray blur as a film crew, shivering under orange Day-Glo ponchos, watches a grizzled cowboy on a quarter horse named Jolson (for its black face and white mouth), pick his way carefully down an arroyo in the badlands 30 miles north of Santa Fe.

The camera rolls for the umpteenth take as the actor reins in his horse and deliberately tangles himself in the lariat he is twirling awkwardly in an attempt to lasso a stray cow. “I wasn’t born with roping genes,” says cowboy Billy Crystal, when the rope misses its mark and the cow runs free into the nearby pinion woods with wranglers in hot pursuit.

Crystal, who is both star and executive producer of the movie to be released this summer, turns his horse toward the camera and, with a nod in the direction of the vanishing cow, deadpans: “It must be a team- steer .” The bad pun is good for a big laugh, even from the teamsters on the set.

You might think Billy Crystal is one lame dude on a horse--fortunately for him, that’s what the role that he had largely created calls for, so “City Slickers” is putting him right in his element. “(I’m) close to my comic sensibilities throughout,” Crystal says, with that warm smile that made him a welcome guest in millions of homes during during this year’s Oscar show. “It’s my voice strongly . . . the first time in a movie that it feels like my ideas are coming to fruition so completely.”

For the past 10 years, Crystal seemed to be a star looking for the right place to shine. Since he made his debut in Joan Rivers’ understandably little-seen “Rabbit Test” (he played the world’s first pregnant man) and his continuing role in the prime-time spoof of daytime TV, “Soap,” Crystal has brought enormous goodwill to every performance.

But odd casting in such buddy movies as “Running Scared” and “Throw Mama From the Train” failed to give him the freedom to run toward his own pinion woods, and although “When Harry Met Sally . . . “ threatened to make Hollywood think of him as a romantic leading man, it seemed to him to further limit his opportunities.

“Now, I get deluged with the same movie (roles) over and over again,” he says, during a break in shooting the lassoing scene, “and I said, ‘Well, this is silly, I’ve got to start tailoring things for myself. This has something to say and it’s my own.”

Billy got the idea for “City Slickers”--the first of a two-picture deal he made with Castle Rock Productions--only a year and a half ago and says he’s amazed at how fast production evolved. “I was watching ‘Eye on L.A.’ or ‘Two for the Town,’ one of those ‘We get free trips shows,’ ” he recalls. “They were doing diving and fantasy camps and I thought ‘cattle drive!’ I don’t know why, it just popped into my mind.”

The result is “City Slickers,” the saga of three yuppie buddies from New York who treat themselves to an “adventure vacation,” a cattle drive from New Mexico to Colorado. But almost as soon as the greenhorns have saddled up and yelled “yee-ha!,” the crusty trail boss dies, leaving them to drive the 350-head herd the rest of the way--through mountains, storms and across a raging river.

Crystal plays Mitch Robbins, a New York radio ad salesman. His buddies, Ed and Phil, are played by Bruno Kirby (Crystal’s journalist buddy in “Harry Met Sally”) and Daniel Stern, one of the hapless burglars in the current hit “Home Alone.”

Although Crystal believes that his role is the “funniest part I’ve ever played,” “City Slickers” is definitely not a slick, formula comedy. “The movie talks about a lot of things,” he says. “My thought was to talk about friendship, trusting and the secrets even best friends have from each other. You’re friends with people for years and years and sometimes it’s only because you have been friends for years. This film explores the whys.

“I also wanted to make ‘Deliverance’ with laughs. . . . I wanted it that real. And it also has the romance of the West that I wanted . . . the dream that kids have from the time they are little and play Cowboys and Indians. These are guys who have run out of dreams and keep manufacturing false ones because the present isn’t dream time anymore. Through the fantasy camp they find reality and I think that’s what’s so exciting about the movie.”

It was also through the movie that Billy says he discovered something about his own dreams. “It’s weird. When I first came to Los Angeles in 1975, it was the first time I had been out West. I said to Janice (his wife of 20 years), ‘I feel like I know this all too well.’ I don’t believe in other lives, but I felt like I had been here before, very strongly. For a couple of days it was very upsetting. I said, ‘I think I was a cowboy, I feel at home with this stuff.’

“Fifteen years later, I get the idea for this film, and once we got the go ahead I start taking riding lessons. I had never ridden for real, just at hotels, stupid riding, and suddenly, I’m riding like a maniac. Then I couldn’t wait to rope and start herding cattle. . . . Within a month I was roping steers from a horse, you know, rodeo stuff. It may sound nuts, but it’s been all too comfortable to me.”

Jerry Gatlin, a stuntman who has been riding and running cattle since he was a child, worked on 14 films with John Wayne (including “The Undefeated” and “The Sons of Katie Elder”). He was hired to teach Billy and other cast members to ride and rope. “We started May 15 and rode five or six days a week (until production began Sept. 12),” Gatlin says. “Billy is a natural athlete and a natural cowboy . . . he has an instinct for working cattle. The first time we ran steers for him, he roped two out of five. If he had been raised in the atmosphere I was, he would have been a hell of a cowboy.”

Crystal says the first film he remembers seeing as a kid was “Shane,” and that its co-star, Jack Palance, was always in his mind to play Curly, the trail boss in “City Slickers.” “Here I am happily working with him,” Crystal says. “When I was a little kid, I’d run around saying ‘Prove it!,’ which was his big line in ‘Shane.’ When we were working on the script (with longtime Ron Howard collaborators Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel) all of us took turns being Jack, breathing heavily and using that voice. Now to hear the lines exactly as you wrote them is a thrill . . . and he’s awfully funny and very touching too.”

Palance, described in the script as having a face that resembles a “saddlebag with eyes,” is tired after a long day of shooting. The notoriously aloof actor, puffing on roll-your-own cigarette given to him by a production assistant, says he isn’t bothered by the fact that his bad-guy persona has become so much a part of Hollywood’s visual vocabulary it’s nearly a cliche.

“I could never have been anybody else,” he growls, adding that his family means far more to him than making films these days. Palance runs about 150 head of cattle of his own on his ranch near Tehachapi. “One of the things you identify with Curley is a kind of freedom. That’s me, Jack Palance, when I talk about my children and grandchildren.” So why take the role in “City Slickers”? “Because I think it’s a beautiful script, a hell of a nice role and (other reasons) I don’t even need.”

As for Crystal’s turn as a cowboy, Palance says: “Billy is very comfortable in the role, there is no doubt about that. Since he had so much to do with writing it, much of it seems to be about his life. He’s very comfortable in the part.”

Perhaps comfort isn’t quite the right word. Billy notes, “I got in great shape before the movie began . . . if I hadn’t, I would have been hurt.” Crystal, in fact, does most of his own stunt work, which included herding cattle across the rain-swollen rapids of the Los Pinos River in Colorado and hanging onto a tree in the middle of a stampede.

“The other day, Jack and I were on horses all day, a really hard day,” Crystal says. “Jack got off and said to me (imitating Palance’s voice), ‘I should have done what you did. I should have been riding before this. God, my ass hurts.’ An ass is an ass. I don’t think it matters if it’s a 70-year-old ass or a 42-year-old ass. It still hurts.”

Bruno Kirby, who’s been a friend of Crystal for 15 years, agrees with Palance that there is a lot of Billy in the film. “There are a lot of parallels, but not just in Billy’s character. All of our characters talk about things that happened to them which, in truth, happened to Billy in his own life.”

Ron Underwood, the 36-year-old director of the $25-million-plus “City Slickers,” explains that “Red River” was also the inspiration for many events in Crystal’s film. “The cook in that film was named ‘Cookie,’ and so is ours,” he says. “And we have a ‘Yahoo’ scene (when the cattle drive starts), a river crossing and a stampede.”

Underwood was chosen by Crystal because of his one previous film, last year’s well-reviewed but little-seen comedy science-fiction movie, “Tremors.”

“He took a silly premise and made a very, very funny movie out of it,” says Crystal, who acknowledges it was also important to have a director who was willing to share much of the creative decision-making. “I said, ‘You know I’m going to be a very strong voice in this project,’ ” Crystal recalls saying to Underwood. “ ‘Does that scare you?’ He said, ‘No, are you kidding? What a great chance to collaborate!’ ”

Underwood, a USC film school graduate who has also directed many children’s TV shows, agrees: “After ‘Tremors’ I was offered 20 features, and accepted this one. The final cut? I would say that Billy, because he doesn’t have an extremely strong ego, is open to what is best for the film. He’s not dogmatic about his ideas and I’m not the kind of director who is iron-fisted, a dogmatic monarch. I’m sure we’ll have a lot of discussions.”

“He’s a remarkable guy, a little crazy in a good way,” Crystal says of Underwood, now that they’ve been working together for a few weeks. “He looks like someone from ‘Up With People,’ but he’s really Ron Howard on acid. This lovely guy with a smiling face will say, ‘I’m going to put you in the river now and drag you for 150 feet. The river is about 48 degrees and we do that for 10 days!’ ”

Martin Shafer, a Castle Rock partner adds, “I pressed hard for Ron after seeing ‘Tremors,’ in which there was a lot of physical stuff plus lots of humor, a combination like our film.”

Shafer also expresses amazement at the speed with which “City Slickers” evolved. “It happened quicker than any film I have been involved with...from idea to finished picture in under a year and a half. ‘Misery’ (another Castle Rock production) took two and a half years.”

The heart of the story of “City Slickers” is the wisdom that Palance’s Curly passes on to Billy’s Mitch, and the lesson Mitch learns from the experience of helping a cow birth a winsome calf named Norman. Crystal is only half-joking when he worries that Norman will steal the movie.

“I would order someone now to start the ‘Norman’ dolls coming,” he smiles. “Mitch can’t relate to his wife or kids and, yet, he has this little animal, and he becomes responsible again. Ron (Underwood) and I auditioned dozens of calves. . . . Talk about a cattle call!”

Brindle calves, Holsteins, Gurnseys, none of them seemed right. “We don’t know from calves,” Crystal says, “and then you meet them and they’re kinda ugly. Big pink eyes and that face (he makes a cow face)! They’re, well, cows! But off in the corner was this little fawn-like creature and he’s, he’s different. Like Bambi, very different and very vulnerable. Turns out the breed (Golden Jersey) was tough to get, but we said, ‘Do it!’ That was one of the best decisions about the movie.”

It wasn’t easy, though, because for a movie on a three-month schedule, the birthing of the calves had to be spread out over a period of time so they would all appear the same age. Eventually, however, with the Animal Rights representative looking over their shoulders, the baby Jerseys made their film debuts.

Their presence offered Crystal some of his best opportunities for improvisation. While shooting a scene where Mitch was getting ready to leave the West behind him, the calf walked up to Crystal, who read his scripted lines--”Norman, get out of here. Go, leave me”--then began ad-libbing. “Do you want to be a Whopper?’ Don’t you know what happens to suede in the rain?”

What’s next for Crystal? He says he hasn’t decided whether to accept the invitation to host the coming Academy Awards, but says it’s unlikely. “It takes me a long time to do that show,” he explains. “I enjoyed doing it before and it worked very well, but I really want to do another film during that period if I can.”

One project he is planning is the fictional life story of Buddy Young Jr., a comedian character introduced in Crystal’s 1987 HBO comedy special, “Don’t Get Me Started” whose name is “Mr. Saturday Night.” “What I’ve wanted to do is a sort of ‘Raging Bull’ approach to the life of a funny man, spanning 45 years of his life in comedy . . . the Catskills, live television, and seeing what happens when a funny man isn’t funny anymore . . . what they do to their kids and families.”

There are countless other offers on the table for a man who describes his own situation as “dizzying.”

But if you expect a serious assessment of his stardom from Crystal, you might as well go talk to his horse.

“I’m always thinking when I’m on that horse,” says Crystal, who has bought his equine co-star from “City Slickers” and plans to stable him near his home in Pacific Palisades. “I think about ‘Well, I could do this’ or ‘I could do that.’ I think I’ll just ask my horse about it all. He takes less commission.”