Please don’t call Donald Eaton a name-dropper, but when he starts talking about his 30-year career as an assistant director of movies and television series in Hollywood and around the world, his former colleagues just happen to be world-famous.
One of Eaton’s first jobs was working as assistant director on the 1979-1984 TV series “Hart to Hart” starring Stefanie Powers and Robert Wagner on Maui. That led to a friendship with “R.J.” Wagner, who invited Eaton aboard “Splendor,” the yacht he owned with his wife Natalie Wood, just a few weeks before she fell overboard and drowned in 1981.
“R.J. really loved her,” Eaton said. “One time, R.J. came in for an early-morning call and said, ‘You got me out of bed with Natalie Wood for this?’” Eaton also wrote several scripts for “Hart to Hart” and became a member of the Screen Writers Guild.
Eaton began taking production jobs around the world, including Ireland, Australia, Central America and England, as well as all over the U.S. Before their marriage, his wife Darcy was living in Oregon, so they originally kept an apartment on Northwest 23rd in Portland as well as a home in Los Angeles.
“It takes two months to do a TV movie, so when we finished a movie, we would come here to wait for the phone to ring (with a job offer for the next movie),” said Eaton, noting that his shoots were not your typical day at the office.
Eaton was an assistant director on the 1985-89 TV series “Moonlighting” starring Cybill Shepherd and Bruce Willis. “No one knew who Bruce Willis was,” Eaton said. “He had been a bartender. He also was in a blues band. One night, after wrap, Bruce asked me to come over and watch his little group. He said he’d buy me a beer. It was Friday night, and I said, ‘Sorry, Bruno, maybe some other time.’”
Eaton also worked on the 1993 TV movie “Heart of Darkness,” directed by Nicolas Roeg and starring Tim Roth, John Malkovich and Isaach De Bankole. “It was filmed in the jungles of Belize,” Eaton said. “We used a bunch of locals as extras who were positioned up in the trees. They got bored and started shooting arrows at us. I took my family along on shoots, and at that time, my little boy was 6 weeks old when we brought him to the jungle.”
The 2000 television series “Sally Hemings: An American Scandal” about Thomas Jefferson and his slave that Eaton worked on involved logistical challenges. “We had to build Monticello and build it bigger inside and out,” Eaton said. “Jefferson kept adding to it, so we had to keep adding to it to coincide with the time frame in the script.”
Eaton did two movies with Elizabeth Taylor. “She is a very interesting woman,” Eaton said. “Her eyes really are that purple. In 1987 we did a movie called ‘Poker Alice’ in Tucson with George Hamilton. She was very thin and very frail and did her own make-up. The producer decided that every morning when Elizabeth came to the set, we would give her a gift. She got earrings, a beautiful leather chair that had Liz written on the back, which was sent back. She didn’t like being called Liz. George joked that the daily gift was ‘in her contract.’
“Somehow, that caught on with other producers who were doing movies with Elizabeth. I got several phone calls about that.”
In 1989, Eaton and Taylor did another movie together with Mark Harmon, “Sweet Bird of Youth,” about a relationship between a drifter and a faded movie star. “Back then, the actors had dressing rooms,” Eaton said. “Now actors have trailers. Elizabeth’s contract said she could work only eight hours per day. Usually, a day on the set is 12 hours, starting at 7 and going to 7:30 or 8. We would have to wrap when she left, but we would get set up for the next day.
“On occasion, I would go to her trailer and ask her if she would come back to the set for a brief rehearsal to save some time the next day. On several occasions, she would lean close, grab my beard and say, ‘Only for you, Donald, only for you,’ and then kissed me on the lips. She was very sweet.
“Years later I took my first wife to lunch at the Hotel Bel-Air for Easter, and I heard a woman’s voice call my name. It was Elizabeth. She came up to me and said, ‘Don’t you say hello to an old friend?’ That was very nice.”
Eaton worked on the 2003 Civil War drama film “Gods and Generals,” with a cast that included Stephan Lang as Stonewall Jackson, Jeff Daniels as Lt. Col. Joshua Chamberlain and Robert Duvall as Gen. Robert E. Lee. Recalling the fatal shooting on the Alec Baldwin “Rust” set in 2021, he commented, “We had 200 extras in uniform who were trained to fire cannons and rifles, and no one got hurt.”
Referring to show business, W.C. Fields once said, “Never work with children or animals,” and Eaton would certainly agree. If you run into him, ask about John Malkovich’s encounter with a certain monkey in the jungles of Belize or an incident with David McCallum, Tippi Hedren and her not-so-friendly “tigon” (half tiger/half lion) on set.
“My whole career was before CGI (Computer-Generated Imagery),” Eaton said. “It was all for real. Now actors work on a big, empty sound-stage.”
While Eaton worked in Los Angeles and around the world, he and his wife considered Lake Oswego their home base. “We got a house in Lake Oswego, and the kids grew up here,” he said. After their children, Nathan and Annie Rose, were raised, the Eatons lived in Los Angeles for a while until moving to Summerfield in Tigard.
“I never had a real job,” Eaton said. “The movie business is not like having a job. As a member of the Directors Guild, you get first-class airfare, accommodations and per diem when working on a movie. You get time off after you are through working on a movie and still get paid. You meet all kinds of interesting people. And I still get residuals – sometimes for 2 cents.”
Eaton was born in Boston and raised in Salem, Mass. After graduating from high school, he went to Europe, worked in a factory in Vermont and graduated from tiny Marlboro College, majoring in the classics. After teaching English as a second language in Japan from 1970 to 1975 and marrying his first wife, they returned to the U.S. and moved to California, outside Santa Barbara, where he attended photography school.
A friend of Eaton’s saw a poster announcing that the Directors Guild was offering tests to become assistant movie directors and providing training to the winners.
“I didn’t know anything about making movies, and I didn’t know what an assistant director did, but I took the assistant director test,” Eaton said. “Three thousand people took it, and there were 11 positions open. I was one of the 11 to pass it. My wife and I moved to Old Hollywood, and I trained for two years and then worked as a second assistant director for two years. After that, I became a first, the person who schedules the show prior to production and then runs the set during production.”
After 30 years in the business, Eaton retired 14 years ago and wrote five novels.
