Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon is a parlor game where players challenge each other to arbitrarily choose an actor and then connect them to another actor via a film in which both actors have appeared. After reading Tim Matheson’s memoir “Damn Glad To Meet You: My Seven Decades in the Hollywood Trenches,” the argument can be made that the California native could just have easily been the subject of this exercise.
Starting as a child actor guesting on “Leave It to Beaver” and the 1961 Robert Young sitcom “Window on Main Street,” Matheson would also go on to get animation voice-over work as the title character of “Jonny Quest” in addition to other Hanna-Barbera shows including “Space Ghost.”
By early adulthood, he’d appeared alongside Henry Fonda and Lucille Ball in 1968’s “Yours, Mine and Ours” before landing a recurring role on the NBC western “The Virginian.” It was all a very heady experience for an avowed film fan who first discovered the magic of movies enthralled by Charles Laugton’s performance in “Witness For the Prosecution.”
“I’m grateful I had the chance to work with the greats I worked with when I was a teenager—Lucy, Henry and Jackie Gleason,” Matheson said. “I was treated as an equal by that generation of people and didn’t get slack from any of them because I was a teenager. You had to perform on the same level they were performing on with the same professionalism.”
Another major inflection point for Matheson was working with the slightly younger Kurt Russell sharing co-billing on the 1976 NBC western “The Quest,” where they played siblings trying to reunite with their sister who had been abducted by the Cheyenne (shades of “The Searchers”). While the show lasted one season, it gave Matheson plenty of life lessons, particularly after his co-start lit into the show’s PR man after the L.A. Times ran a story on “The Quest” that only had Russell featured in the accompanying press photo.
“I was disappointed and hurt when I saw the story,” Matheson recalled. “I go to work on Monday and I hear Kurt berating the PR guy and shouting, ‘Don’t you EVER do that again. This is a show about two brothers and it’s both of us or none of us’ [that gets promoted in the press]. I was so impressed and so touched. I don’t know another actor alive that would do that. And it was from Kurt that I learned so much about how you’ve gotta be tough, gotta be a teammate and you’ve got to give it your all. Lucille Ball and Kurt taught me a similar lesson—that acting is a full-contact sport. But you shouldn’t take yourself so damn seriously.”
It would be in 1978’s classic National Lampoon’s “Animal House” where Matheson made his name playing smooth-talking ladies’ man Eric “Otter” Stratton. For his upcoming appearance at Cinema Arts Centre, the septuagenarian writer-actor will be screening the aforementioned John Landis-directed masterpiece along with indulging in some juicy anecdotes.
“I want to share what that experience was like if that’s of interest because there’s a whole story in of itself,” he said. “The studio hated the film and did not want to make it. We had one-third of the budget for the lowest-budgeted movie of the year that Universal made. Studio execs stopped, blocked and short-cut every aspect of that movie. Ivan Reitman and John Landis worked around everything and fought to get the film released wide. And of course, when it became a success, the studio took all the credit.”
In the four decades since he shared the screen with his Delta House brethren, Matheson has secured several high-profile roles in film (“Fletch” and “A Very Brady Sequel”) and television (“The West Wing” and “Burn Notice”) as well as indulging in his passion for directing. He’s gotten behind the camera to shoot several made-for-television projects along with several series including “Psych” and “Suits.” He’s also been a director for the two most recent shows he’s been a regular on, “Hart of Dixie” (2012-2015) and Netflix’s “Virgin River,” which is entering its seventh season. This part of his creative toolkit is all a part of Matheson reinventing himself as he’s gotten older.
“It’s that Kurt Russell thing—it’s baseball—you keep going,” Matheson said. “That’s why I kept looking into different techniques of acting and trying to find what spoke for me. And part of what I love about directing is that you get paid to study movies.”
Tim Matheson will be appearing on Tuesday, Nov. 12, hosting a screening of “Animal House” at Cinema Arts Centre, 423 Park Ave., in Huntington. For more information, visit www.cinemartscentre.org or call 631-423-7610.
