Humor From the Depression : Actor James Best speaks from personal experience in the comedy-drama ‘Hell Bent for Good Times’

Times being what they are, unknown young actors often put together their own projects to let the world know they exist.

Sometimes they’re not so young--and not so unknown--like actor James Best.

With a Hollywood film and television career that started 45 years ago when he was put under contract by Universal Pictures, Best has come back to town. He has a project. He wrote a play called “Hell Bent for Good Times.” He’s directing it and playing the lead. Co-starring with Best is Peg Stewart, who got her start playing the teen-age daughter of Joel McCrea and Frances Dee in 1937’s “Wells Fargo” and was under contract to Republic Pictures.

They’re as excited as a couple of kids with their project, which opens Thursday at West Hollywood’s Court Theatre.

“Hell Bent for Good Times” is a comedy-drama about an Ozark family laughing their way through the Great Depression, and it’s something Jim Best knows about. Born in Kentucky, he was adopted and raised in southern Indiana, across the Ohio River from Louisville.

“I grew up with this type of rural people,” says Best, perhaps most recognizable to today’s fans as Roscoe P. Coltrane on TV’s “The Dukes of Hazzard.”

“It was at the end of the Depression, and my adopted parents lost everything, so I knew what the Depression was. Since no one else had anything either, we really didn’t know we were that poor.” He settles back in his chair on a shaded back porch in the Hollywood Hills and lets the import of his words sink in. Then, with a little chuckle that sounds an awful lot like the character he’s rehearsing, he adds: “We found humor. We found humor out of the simplest and most gentle things.”

Later, he decided that someday he would try to put some of that interplay into the mouths of actors.

“I thought I’d really like to capture that wonderful childlike honesty,” he says. “Those people are depicted so many times as caricatures, like Li’l Abner--it’s a shame, because there is a beauty down there, and tremendous honesty, where you don’t have to lock your doors, and so forth. A handshake’s worth something. It doesn’t turn into a fist.

“What breaks my heart, in this day and age, is that people have lost that somewhere. Everybody takes themselves so damned seriously. Then, people actually had a sense of humor about simple things. They didn’t have money. They didn’t have power, they didn’t have prestige. Money wasn’t the important thing, because nobody had it. Consequently, they had to rely on their sense of humor to get them through a very tough era. When you’re laughing, you can’t think about being hungry, so you try to laugh as much as possible.”

It sounds like a prescription for the sizable chunk of our population now going through a modern version of the same economic sickness.

Peg Stewart knows about that part of the country too. She came to California from Atlanta.

“I still had some Southern accent,” she says.

As a contract player, she played opposite stars from Guy Madison and Hugh O’Brien to Roy Rogers and Gene Autry.

“Oh, I loved Westerns,” she says with a laugh. “I didn’t realize it then, when I was making them, how much fun it really was. I’d have to say, outside of camp days, that was the happiest time of my career out here, when I was at Republic. Fun time--because, really, you got paid to ride a horse!”

It was, in fact, Westerns that brought Jim Best and Peg Stewart together for this production. They were doing personal appearances at a Western film festival in Memphis, Tenn., last year, but had never met. Best said to his wife, Dorothy, “My God, there’s Peg Stewart!” And Dorothy Best countered, “She’d be marvelous to play Ada in your play.” Dorothy is co-producing the play with Tony Brassfield and Ted Williams.

A “late ‘50s child star in L. A.,” as she describes it, Dorothy Best did a lot of episodic television, including “Leave It to Beaver” and the Westerns “Restless Gun” and “Wanted: Dead or Alive.”

Stewart laughs. “How long,” she asks Dorothy Best, “did it take you to straighten your legs back out?”

“I somehow avoided that,” Dorothy responds. “I didn’t get involved with horses too much.”

After six previous productions around the country, “Hell Bent for Good Times” was suddenly a project that was ready for what Best calls “the big boys in L. A.”

Best and his wife left Hollywood in 1985, right after “The Dukes of Hazzard” stopped shooting. He was a little burned out on Hollywood, and decided, as he says, Florida was where “I’d put it all together.”

“I went on the film commission down there, and I opened my acting school at the University of Central Florida. I know what the hell I’m doing, and they respect me down there, whether Hollywood does or not.

“You must understand,” he says, “I’m not knocking Hollywood. I’m knocking the lack of courage that has developed. In the old days, there would at least be a lot of courage, when you had the marvelous movie moguls who really knew how to make pictures. They would hire people who knew what they were doing.

“Now everybody’s a ‘genius’ who puts a piece of footage in the can. I’m so tired of looking at films where directors are looking into the wrong side of the camera, basically things that any amateur would know not to do. They use this word genius. It amazes me.”

Peg Stewart leans forward to remind Best about something British director David Lean said once when accepting an award.

“He said, ‘Our industry was made on imagination and taking a chance. And you accountants don’t take chances, and you’re going to lose this industry.’ I had goose bumps when he said that, because it’s true.”

That’s why Jim and Dorothy Best are raising money for the film version of “Hell Bent.” Dorothy was head of group sales at the Ahmanson for five years and produced TV’s syndicated “Sportsman’s Dream.” A business bent left performing behind.

“She keeps my bolts together to keep the car running,” Jim Best says. He’s ready to drive his project into Hollywood.