I will never forget when I got to play one of the kids on the school bus during the climax situation in the movie ‘Dirty Harry‘. I was so excited! I was always around the set several days before shooting my scene. I was even able to grab Harry Guardino’s copy of the script when we wasn’t looking.
I read that script over and over. Finally we were going to shoot it. The director, Don Siegel, tried to get us to be naive and innocent when we were told to do a sing along by Andy Robinson who played the Scorpio Killer, kidnapping the bus full of school kids.
Andy kept making his way up and down the isle as the driver kept traveling over side roads in San Mateo countryside as we kept doing practice scenes. Each time, the same lines….
Then the director said “mix it up a little, Andy. It’s getting repetitive for the brats”. Andy nodded and went at it again. He opened up “C’mom kids, let’s sing a song”. He turned his head and looked at me, “You wanna sing a song?”
I squinted, set my jaw and kinda talked through my teeth… “Go ahead, make my day!”
Andy snickered, paused and then said “You feel lucky punk? Well do ya?”
“CUT! CUT! CUT!” screamed Siegel.
I was lucky, they kept me in a few scenes but only in the director’s cut, not the theater release.
Incidentally, when I said “Go ahead, make my day“ it seems Charles Pierce, a future Dirty Harry sequel director, heard my comment in the daily ‘rushes’ reviewing current filming. It seems that he liked it because he had Dirty Harry use it as the movie tag line in the 1983 film Sudden Impact.
Someone once said, “Joke ‘em if they can’t take a flock”. I assume they meant Turkeys.