Danny Sands

Danny Sands is one of the most unique cowboys who made a living as a stuntman and extra in the golden age of movies and television shows. He started out as a horse exerciser for an old racetrack. It was then that he was spotted by Howard Hawks and developed a friendship that lasted a life time and that also put Sands and various situations that he preferred never to be in. While Sands started in the late 1930s, it wasn't until the late 1940s when Sands started to really receive work both as a stuntman and as an extra in films. He worked for several months on location of Howard Hawks' Red River where he could be seen as one of John Wayne's riders that set out to catch the wagon train. He was so well liked by Hawks that a lot of Sands' work was a mixture of Hawks utilizing Sands' cowboy skills set and just the fact that Hawks liked having Sands around. When Sands wasn't on the film set of a Howard Hawks film somewhere, he would frequently be cast as a posse rider or a townsman in old Monogram films of the late 1940s and early 1950s. By the time Monogram folded, Sands started to appear in any posse scene he could frequently appearing at any studio whenever he was called upon to do so. The coming of television yielded a vast array of employment for Sands. He began an affiliation with Warner Brothers television westerns were he would frequently appear in bar scenes of their various programs and would appear if they needed a posse scene done or just somebody to collect a paycheck. He also managed to do whatever odd jobs were tossed his way and this kept him steadily employed for a few years. He also managed to work on various Disney productions working as a stand-in and occasionally doing a few stunts. the mid 1960s, Warner Brothers stopped making television westerns but Sands was able to obtain the same kind of employment on shows like F-Troop and the few western movies that Warner Brothers made. As time progressed, he appeared in a lot of movies that were made by Howard Hawks. Hawks knew Sands had trouble delivering dialog so it became an onset joke to give Sands little bits of dialog in each movie Hawks and others directed. This could be seen in the special about the making of Rio Lobo where it became a gag that Sands was the dialog coach and where it took many shots for him to get his few simple lines right. Like many other cowboys, Sands sought refuge in the few remaining westerns of the 1970s. He got a regular job on the set of the hit James Garner show Nichols but it eventually came to an end. He managed to appear in a few Gunsmoke episodes with his last hurrah being a regular townsman on Barbary Coast. Danny Sands was truly a jack of all trades. He loved being around on set and people loved interacted with him. It didn't matter to Sands if he appeared as a stuntman, stand-in, wrangler, extra, or an actor, he just loved being on set.