On the Trail Again : THE WESTERN SAGA CONTINUES WITH A WILD MUSTANG ROUNDUP

From a distance, it looks as though Jon Voight is praying on horseback.

While lighting and sound technicians scurry this way and that, Voight slouches, eyes half-closed under his wide-brimmed hat, audibly repeating something over and over. Turns out he’s practicing a line, trying to get the cadence right: “How the hell they going to look out for themselves? How the hell they going to look out for themselves?”

Voight is rehearsing for the sequel to one of the most popular and acclaimed miniseries ever: “Lonesome Dove.” In this scene from “Return to Lonesome Dove,” a six-hour miniseries scheduled to begin Sunday on CBS, Voight’s character is furious that his partners want to hire a band of Mexican vaqueros who speak no English.

“How the hell they going to look after themselves?” Voight mutters, and his horse prances in a dust-kicking circle.

How much do Americans continue to love Westerns after all these years? So much that the makers of “Return to Lonesome Dove” couldn’t scare up any saddles or holsters from Hollywood’s prop houses this summer because so many horse operas were in production. Propmaster Sean Markland was reduced to buying dozens of new ones and then assigning a crew to spend five weeks soaking them in water, rasping them with sandpaper and burning them with blow torches to make them look properly weather-beaten.

All the good locations were taken, too. Kevin Costner had nailed down New Mexico for one of two upcoming films about Wyatt Earp. The popular shooting locales in Arizona, Texas and Oregon were roped for a passel of dramas, including a movie version of the old TV series “Maverick,” a Zucker Brothers film about Davey Crockett, and five Western TV series. The makers of the original “Lonesome Dove” used locations in the Southwest to stand in for Montana; this time director Mike Robe chose this sprawling ranch on the edge of Billings to stand in for Texas.

“What a stage!” says Robe, boyish and bespectacled as he takes in the same limitless rolling landscape of sage and sandstone that he used as a backdrop for “Son of the Morning Star,” the miniseries he directed about Gen. George Armstrong Custer. “You look 360 degrees and see not a road, not a power line.”

The original “Lonesome Dove,” Larry McMurtry’s story of Woodrow Call (Tommmy Lee Jones) and Gus McRae (Robert Duvall) driving a herd of cattle to a sweetgrass future in Montana won seven Emmys and a Peabody Award in 1989. Having returned Gus’ body to Texas for burial at the end of “Lonesome Dove,” Call--this time played by Voight (“Midnight Cowboy,” “The Champ,” “Coming Home”)--is schlepping north again.

As though moving 300 cows more than 1,600 miles weren’t tough enough, now he’s pushing a herd of wild mustangs to the ranch of Clara Allen, played by Barbara Hershey (“Tin Men,” “A World Apart”). Voight has the help of Louis Gossett Jr. (“An Officer and a Gentleman,” “Enemy Mine”), William Petersen (“Manhunter,” “To Live and Die in L.A.”), singer-dancer Nia Peeples and, returning from the original, Rick Schroder as Newt Dobbs and Chris Cooper as July Johnson. Also starring are the vaqueros that so bedevil Call.

“How the hell they going to look after themselves?”

Voight also has the off-screen help of 64-year-old Corky Randall, who started wrangling horses for the movies in the 1947 films of Roy Rogers and Gene Autry and is this film’s “ramrod,” or livestock chief. It takes a crew of some 30 wranglers equipped with walkie-talkies just to move 20 domesticated horses around the set, and Randall commands a million-dollar budget in this $30-million epic. Supervising from the comfort of his Jeep Cherokee, Randall packs his cheek with a plug of Red Man tobacco and rolls his eyes at the idea of five men moving a mustang herd halfway across the continent.

“It’s fantasy, but that’s what the movies are all about,” he says, expertly hitting the tiny brass spittoon that rides on the floor next to his boot. “I like that better than all this realism they’re into now, with blood spattering and heads exploding. In the old days a man was shot, he did a saddle-fall and the movie moved on.”

Voight gives it another try: “How the hell they going to look after themselves?”

When the credits roll at the end of “Return to Lonesome Dove,” two major players in the drama of the film’s making won’t get a mention, The first is the weather. The punitive rain clouds that submerged St. Louis and Des Moines this summer passed first over Montana, pelting the cast and crew with rain, golfball-sized hail and even snow. Ask anyone on the set what has made this production unique, and the first item mentioned is the biblical climate. “I get up every morning and switch on the Weather Channel,” says first assistant director Skip Cosper, whose gleaming $240 straw cowboy hat is the talk of the set. “I’ve heard that word unseasonable so many times this summer I hope I never hear it again.”

Lousy weather not only bollixed the shooting schedule--pushing it three days overtime--it also made for some tricky camera work. Montana, of course, is “big sky country,” and the sky this summer was a wild backdrop. Thunderheads towered like the aftermath of nuclear tests, rainbows sliced this way and that, and great fluffy clouds of glistening white lumbered across the azure sky like cattle on a drive. All that looks great on film, but the magic of Hollywood often requires a 30-second scene to be shot over several hours or even days. With the sky changing every 10 minutes, careless camera work could have rendered scenes in which clouds leapt jerkily behind the actors’ heads.

Usually, the West is a dry place, and part of the beauty of the first “Lonesome Dove” was the way it captured the West’s authentic dustiness without sliding into dull monotone. “Lonesome Dove” was a rhapsody in brown, a rich pallet that ran the gamut from the ocher of trail dust to the deep chestnut of horses and tack. But this year, all of the--here’s that word again--unseasonable rain made Montana look more like Massachusetts. What should be a landscape of flinty brown earth and dull gray sage instead glows bright green.

“How the hell they going to look after themselves?”

Twenty miles away from where Robe is shooting, second-unit director Douglas Milsome is trying his best to make the prairie around him look dry enough for the movie’s climactic wildfire. Milsome, a rumpled, bearded Briton of quick wit and easygoing manner, was responsible for its look. Reproducing that look in a year when the countryside is almost perversely healthy is a challenge.

His camera is positioned in the center of a disk of yellowed grass several hundred feet across that’s been “treated” to look parched by the sun. (“Don’t worry,” he says with comic deadpan, “we didn’t kill it; it’s just asleep.”) For the background, he’ll employ electronic tricks, after the film is transferred to videotape, to wash out the green. Today he’s shooting the lightning strike that sets off the wildfire, and naturally--after weeks of stormy skies when he didn’t need them--the sky is absolutely clear. “Step up here,” he says, pointing to the camera’s eyepiece. Through the lens, it appears that a heavy bank of thunderclouds has descended, threatening cataclysm. “We jigger with the filters,” Milsome says. “Hooray for Hollywood, eh?”

The other overwhelming presence on the set of “Return to Lonesome Dove” is the ghost of the original “Lonesome Dove.” Sequels are like that; they only get made if the original was a success, but if the original is too successful, the pressure to match it can be murder.

“The first time ‘round we had that absolutely fantastic script,” Milsome says. “It was the Gospel According to McMurtry. This one, I don’t know. You never know, really. We have a smashing cast and a big, big story and I think it will be a wonderful movie, but I say that about all my movies, don’t I?”

For Dyson Lovell, the Rhodesian-born producer of “Return to Lonesome Dove,” the big difference between the original and the sequel is that “the first was more character-driven, and this one’s more event-driven. This is a big movie. We have a range war and a ranch burning down and an Indian chase and lots and lots of big action.”

Voight, too, feels the pressure, typical to sequels, of stepping into a role created by another actor.

“No, I haven’t spoken to Tommy (Lee Jones),” who created the character Voight is playing, Voight says during a break. “I’ll find my own way with the character,” he says, toying endlessly with his Colt revolver. “I see it this way; Call is a different man than he was in the first ‘Lonesome Dove.’ He’s a little older, and he’s lost his best friend. I’m taking the character into this next phase of his life.”

Finally, it’s time to film another take. Voight vaults smoothly into the saddle--the result of six weeks of horse-riding coaching before shooting started--gives his pistol a final twirl and slips into one nostril the little plastic thimble that accentuates his flattened, broken nose. “Action,” Robe calls, and Voight angrily whirls his horse to the right.

“How the hell ,” he snaps, “are they going to look after themselves?” The take is supposed to end there, but Robe lets the camera roll as Voight, Petersen and Peeples continue arguing about the Mexican cowboys and their skills at riding and roping. Finally, Robe yells, “Cut!”

“I had to let you keep going,” he says, emerging from behind the camera with a laugh. “It was so good.”

“Return to Lonesome Dove” airs Sunday and Tuesday at 9 p.m. and Thursday at 8 p.m. on CBS.