James Arness was no doubt one of the hardest working actors in Hollywood for his 20 years in the industry. He made every episode and did several of his own stunts, which required all kinds of prep work and training. But in the later years of filming, he was dealing with severe arthritis, which made working quite hard on him a lot of the time.
It was apparently so bad at times that producers tried to get all of his scenes for an episode shot in one day. That way, the actor had plenty of recovery time before the next time they needed him.
(Not) Letting Go
After you’ve become so invested in playing a character over the span of several decades, it can’t be easy to just walk away from it. After all, James Arness was Matt Dillon for 20 years. So when the time came to film the follow-up films, of course, he was all in. He wasn’t the only one of the original cast members who was excited about the reunions, either.
Buck Taylor and Amanda Blake both appeared with Arness in the made-for-television film, '"Gunsmoke": Return to Dodge', alongside Arness.
Dirty Sally
The reunion films weren’t the only productions made to try and bring the world of Dodge back to life. In 1974, a year before the original series’ ultimate cancellation, a spinoff show called 'Dirty Sally' was released. It follows a junk collector from Dodge (Jeanette Nolan) who heads west to California in search of gold.
In the series, Nolan plays the title role, an older woman who chews tobacco and meddles in the lives of everyone she encounters on her way west. The show was only on the air for a single season, though Nolan received an Emmy nomination for her work on it.
Who Was On The Other Side?
For nearly the entirety of the show, the opening credits remained the same. Each week, the show opened with a gunfight scene between the leading Marshall and another man. But who was that man, who was there fighting with Marshall every week?
"True West" magazine revealed that the man on the other side of the fight with James Arness happened to be fast draw expert, Arvo Ojala.
Arvo Ojala
The gun pro taught Arness everything he knew about guns, and he also appeared on the opening credits of the show. He first moved to Hollywood early on in the 1950s, during the Golden Age. He opened up a leather shop in town where he patented and sold the first fast-draw holster.
He trained a lot of western stars on how to utilize them for scenes in major hits. Aside from Arness, Ojalla taught James Garner, Paul Newman, Kevin Kline, and Robert Culp to shoot, among several others.