February 8, 1969

February 8, 1969, is the Saturday on which Rick Dalton begins work on the Lancer pilot, a day that links the still-sleeping streets of Los Angeles to his uneasy return to a television set. The date also frames his detailed reading of the pilot’s story and of the changing Western genre: the part he has been given is the villain’s, while the series’ most unconventional figure is its young, shadowed hero.

A city before dawn

At 6:30 a.m., Cliff Booth drives his Karmann Ghia down the nearly empty Sunset Strip on the way to collect Rick and take him to 20th Century Fox Studios for an eight o’clock call. The quiet suggests Los Angeles returning, briefly, to the desert beneath its paved streets; a coyote rooting through a public garbage pail makes that image concrete. On KHJ, morning disc jockey Robert W. Morgan greets the early risers with the station’s exuberant Boss Radio catchphrase.

The radio sound establishes the day’s particular Los Angeles atmosphere, but it also gives way to another city in miniature: the studio Western that will occupy Rick. The contrast is between the open, almost deserted boulevard at dawn and a scripted range organized around ranch ownership, family claims, and armed conflict.

Rick’s first day on Lancer

At 6:45 a.m., Rick wakes to the same morning broadcast and finds his pillow cold and damp with alcohol sweat. It is his first day working on a new CBS Western pilot, Lancer, and he has the role of the heavy: a kidnapper and cold-blooded killer who leads cattle rustlers described in the script as land pirates. The part has substantial dialogue, and Rick has stayed up late rehearsing it with his tape recorder.

Rick considers the script strong and the role worthwhile, but he would rather have played the lead, Johnny Lancer. That part has gone to James Stacy, whom CBS had previously seen guest-star on Gunsmoke. The pilot’s central family includes Andrew Duggan as the hard-edged father, Murdock Lancer, and Wayne Maunder as Scott, the other son. Rick’s response to the casting is colored by his awareness that a familiar television lead has been assigned to the villain opposite a younger actor playing the hero.

The pilot’s darker Western

As Rick reads the Lancer story, he sees a premise built around Murdock’s offer to share his ranching empire with his two sons if they help defend it from Caleb DeCoteau and his killers. The inheritance is not a gift: the men must survive the fight and prove themselves through the work of the ranch. The potential reward is both material and familial, the chance for a father and his long-lost sons to become a family at last.

The arrangement recalls Bonanza and The High Chaparral, but Rick judges Lancer darker, more violent, and more cynical. Murdock is no kindly patriarch; Scott occupies the more familiar good-guy role, though his Eastern-dandy clothing and history as a Bengal Lancer distinguish him. Johnny Lancer, also known as Johnny Madrid, breaks more sharply with the usual pattern. He has the air of the suspicious guest character who arrives with a concealed past, except that here this enigmatic, potentially dangerous figure is the series lead. In the pilot’s backstory, Johnny and Caleb were friends, adding a personal connection to the threat surrounding the ranch.

A changing genre and a calculated casting choice

The choice to cast Rick as Caleb makes his television-star identity part of the pilot’s design. Director Sam Wanamaker considered Rick against Joe Don Baker, but preferred the opportunity to turn a recognizable Western television hero into the heavy confronting Johnny. The decision was intended to distinguish Lancer from the more conventional Western series of the 1960s and to bring the harder, more antiheroic flavor associated with Italian Westerns into a network production.

That ambition had limits. Wanamaker could not give a CBS series airing on Sunday evening the full violence of contemporary theatrical Westerns, so he pursued the new style through its look and through Johnny’s characterization. Stacy and Wanamaker wanted Johnny to wear a mustache, both to reinforce his ambiguous persona and to set him apart from his blond half-brother. The network refused: if a character was to have a mustache, it said, it should be the heavy. The decision left Rick’s villain in the visual position that Johnny’s creators had wanted their hero to occupy, neatly echoing the pilot’s reversal of familiar Western roles.