Wilson gang taking a road less traveled

Granted, it was already 11 a.m., but it was as good a time as any for actor Luke Wilson to vigorously brush his teeth by the wide emerald river that gushes through the thousands of acres on a magnificent private ranch less than an hour out of Austin.

He stood on his tiptoes and spit far into the prairie grass so as not to splatter either his beat-up brown cowboy boots or the dusty, rumpled seersucker suit that had been hanging on his lanky frame for weeks. His shaggy hair lay flat over his forehead, and he showed off his newly acquired, minty-fresh vitality with a piano-key smile.

Wilson was nearly in character for Wendell Baker, his alter ego that few people in Hollywood “got” when the 32-year-old Wilson was shopping “The Wendell Baker Story” last year.

Baker, Wilson explains, is a dreamer in love with quick-riches schemes, and when he gets busted for selling fake IDs he does a year behind bars, where he becomes an enthusiastic joiner and cheerfully coordinates a schedule of chess and card games with other inmates.

“I wanted to play a real upbeat guy. Someone I’d like to be, always looking on the sunny side,” Wilson said. “He’s got great American qualities. He’s an entrepreneur, but he’s also a rebel.”

Once on parole, Baker takes a job at a nursing home and tries to win back his girlfriend. Sound low-key and simple? That was the plan, said Wilson, who admits he went about selling his first script entirely his own way. For one thing, he wanted himself and his older brother, Andrew, as co-directors.

“We had meetings with a lot of people who were interested, and they wanted changes like, ‘Speed up the second act.’ They were lateral notes. They didn’t mean anything. I like specific ideas,” he said. Andrew, a 39-year-old surfer dad with a bushy brown beard who has had small parts in big-budget films like “Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle,” agreed.

Still, one of the criticisms the Wilsons heard from agents was that “The Wendell Baker Story” failed to conform to the traditional three-act structure. For that reason, Andrew Wilson said, Hollywood felt uncomfortable taking a chance on it until Franchise Pictures bought it.

“It’s not idiosyncratic on purpose,” he said.

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A role for the dog

But if mainstream Hollywood thought the script was out there, it probably could not have imagined life on the set. The comedy was shot over the course of 35 days with a budget of under $8 million. Along with the sibling-directors team, the other brother, Owen, plays an evil male nurse in the film. Wilson’s mutt, Brother, plays (a dog) named Junior, but between takes he curled up on his own director’s chair. The Wilson matriarch, Laura, was the set photographer. And the Wilson boys’ “Uncle Joe,” was given the crew moniker of “Director of Special Operations.” (Back in L.A., Luke and Owen live with Uncle Joe, 56, in a three-bedroom house. “I’m a born-again adolescent,” the former carpenter and shipbuilder says with a grin).

Luke Wilson was initially known only for his relation to Owen, a blond Texas native who busted onto the Hollywood scene with “Bottle Rocket,” a short 1994 film he co-wrote with Wes Anderson. The movie was picked up and reshot at full length, with Luke as the star.

But in the last eight years, Luke Wilson has made a career of appearing in off-the-beaten-path films, some of which, like “Legally Blonde” and last year’s “Old School” co-starring Will Ferrell and Vince Vaughn, became accidental blockbusters.

Such success is a blessing and a curse, he said. The industry expects you to follow a certain trajectory of action hero/stud-in-training. If you try to do what you want instead, the pressure can be intimidating. But he prefers filming in his home state and playing characters that are not redundant.

This day’s shoot was in Wemberley, a ranching community 45 miles southwest of Austin. It could be Anywhere Wild West, which is just the point.

“On the practical level, Austin has a terrific crew base, so from a producers’ viewpoint, you don’t have to fly everyone in from L.A. and put them up in hotels and pay them a per diem,” Johnson said.

Wilson began writing “Wendell Baker” in 1999 when he was appearing in “My Dog Skip,” another film that Johnson produced.

Only a few lines in the shooting script were changed over the course of the six-week shoot last fall, but there were last-minute casting decisions, including one on the minor role of a burly federal agent. Wilson took one look at the film’s prop master, Mark Wallace, and hired him for an actor’s day rate.

“I took all my acting cues from Brother,” Wallace said, referring to Wilson’s dog, who could not take his eyes off the fuzzy gray boom mike during filming. “I studied ‘the Brother Method.’ ”

Baker’s quest during most of the movie is to reunite with his ex-girlfriend, Doreen, who works at the water and power department and is played by Eva Mendes.

“She loves the fact that he makes her laugh,” Mendes said from her home in L.A. “He cracks her up.”

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Veterans along for the ride

A major obstacle for Baker, though, is the Head Nurse, played with straight-faced earnestness by Owen Wilson, 34. Also roaming the linoleum hallways of the retirement facility are veteran actors Kris Kristofferson, Harry Dean Stanton and Seymour Cassel -- good buddies who have worked together before.

“Most of the scripts I get these days are not great, but this one knocked me out,” Kristofferson said from Vancouver, B.C., where he’s shooting “Blade: Trinity” with Wesley Snipes. “I don’t get a whole lot of parts....Hollywood is not a great creative atmosphere right now.”

“The Wendell Baker Story” doesn’t have a distributor, and producers are trying to determine if the Wilson brothers’ cachet will attract potential distributors on its own or if they’ll have to shop the film on the festival circuit.

“In some conservative circles it’s considered risky, but the truth is this is what you need to do. Everyone wants to do a ‘Lost in Translation,’ ” said the movie’s producer, Mark Johnson.

And, as far as Wilson is concerned, creative directors must tune out industry pressure if they are going to produce films they are proud of. That entails making authentic -- not derivative -- decisions about casting, about music, about characters.

An admitted music nut, Wilson is inclined to kick back with great artists of the ‘70s, so along with musical heroes like Kristofferson, he also cast “outlaw” songwriter Billy Joe Shaver as one of the nursing home residents.

Kristofferson, Shaver and Eddie Griffin can’t exactly “open” a film, but Wilson did everything he could to finish the shoot on time, on budget and on message: He may yearn to be an individual, but he knows the industry remains a conservative business.

During his lunch break on this day, a slick-looking group of makeup artists and wardrobe consultants crowded around him until the faded seersucker suit had been replaced by blue jeans that seemed custom-shrunk for a leading man. He leaned like a lonely cowboy against a romantically old black Ford pickup truck, wearing the same pair of sunglasses that Wendell Baker wears throughout the film.

As the clear, wide river rushed behind Wilson and photographers fired off shots, producer Dave Bushell explained that Serengeti Eyewear is hoping the ad will tap into a new demographic.

Coming soon to a magazine near you: “Luke Wilson as Wendell Baker for Serengeti.”

It’s exactly the kind of plug a writer would get after delivering a standard, big-budget, three-act screenplay.