How A Wyoming Kid Became That Other Guy On Screen With Cruise, Swayze And Lowe

The red dirt of Wyoming still calls to Darren Dalton even more than four decades after he left.

"I can just smell it," Dalton told Cowboy State Daily. "That red dirt, it was a big part of me, a big part of my formative years."

Now the kid from Worland is bringing his Hollywood experience full circle. 

He's working on a documentary about the making of the 1983 hit movie "The Outsiders" with his longtime friend and co-star C. Thomas Howell.

It will dive deep into the film that launched both their careers along with a constellation of future superstars. 

At the same time, Dalton is developing a Western screenplay set in 1860s Wyoming, a project inspired by his enduring love for the state that raised and shaped him.

Born in Powell and raised in Worland, Dalton spent his childhood doing what small-town Wyoming kids do — riding bikes through alleys, chasing sugar beet trucks until he discovered "it doesn't really taste like sugar," and following the mosquito fogger on summer evenings. 

"That probably wasn't the best thing in the world," he said.

The heart of his Wyoming story beats strongest at Big Trails Ranch outside Ten Sleep, where his grandparents raised cattle along the Nowood River. 

There, young Dalton learned to cowboy, riding horses and exploring caves with what he imagined were conquistador inscriptions.

"It was such a magical place," he recalled. "Every chance I got, I would go out there to be part of the world."

Caught The Bug

His mother, a schoolteacher in Powell before having children, is from Sheridan. His father grew up around Cowley and worked as a mason and contractor who laid brick for a school in Powell and built houses around Ten Sleep. 

On a family trip to West Yellowstone, Montana, Dalton attended a summer performance at the Playmill Theater, and it left an impression. 

Then at 13, when Worland's brutal winters finally drove the family to Albuquerque, Dalton discovered his high school offered a stagecraft elective. 

The builder's son figured he'd construct sets. But when the drama department needed actors for smaller roles performing Shakespeare, he auditioned and got hooked. 

Soon he was performing in summer repertory companies and high school productions.

Then came the day that changed everything. 

Two friends needed a ride to the Albuquerque Hilton for an audition, the first in what would become a nationwide casting search for Francis Ford Coppola's adaptation of "The Outsiders." 

Dalton, the lucky owner of a "$500 off-white Toyota Corolla" that "smelled like cigarettes from the last owner," obliged.

"I had no idea what it was," he said.

As Dalton waited for his friends, the casting director approached him.

"She goes, 'Well, what about you?'" Dalton remembered. "And I was like, 'Well, I'm just the ride.'"

She insisted he come back the next day. 

He did, reading for parts and making it through multiple rounds of auditions.

Eventually, the process took him to New York, where he found himself in serious contention for the role of Dallas Winston, the tough greaser with a heart.

“This is starting to look kind of good," Dalton said of his New York audition for Dallas. "And then Matt Dillon walked in."

Dillon got Dallas, but the casting directors weren't done with the Wyoming kid. 

They asked him to read for Randy Anderson, the conflicted preppy kid — known as a “Soc” — who questions the senseless violence between his clique and the greasers. 

Randy’s moral awakening becomes pivotal to the story, and Dalton delivered his lines with haunting authenticity, telling Howell’s greaser character Ponyboy Curtis, “It doesn't matter if you whip us, you'll still be where you were before at the bottom, it will still be the lucky ones at the top with all the breaks.”

Dalton found himself in Tulsa, Oklahoma, working alongside a cast of unknowns who would become some of the world’s biggest movie stars: Tom Cruise, Rob Lowe, Patrick Swayze, Ralph Macchio, Emilio Estevez and Diane Lane.

"It's hard to consider yourself a heartthrob when you're hanging out with Rob Lowe," Dalton joked about that era when teen magazines crowned them all as part of the Brat Pack. "Wingman at best, you know?"

Inside 'The Outsiders'

The film's origin story — a Fresno, California, librarian and her students petitioning Coppola to adapt S.E. Hinton's beloved novel — has become part of Hollywood lore. 

Hinton herself collaborated on the screenplay and even appeared in a cameo during the hospital scene.

After "The Outsiders," Dalton landed the role of Daryl Bates in 1984’s "Red Dawn" (originally titled "Ten Soldiers"), cementing his place in 1980s pop culture. 

"The late '80s, early '90s was such an amazing time to be a young actor," he said, observing how the explosion of video stores created an insatiable demand for content. 

"People were making a lot of movies," Dalton said. "Video stores came around, had to fill the shelves."

His acting credits expanded to include "National Lampoon's Joy of Sex," the TV drama "The Best Times," and TV movies like "Brotherhood of Justice." 

He made guest appearances on popular television series like "Quantum Leap," "Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman" and "Highway to Heaven."

Eventually, Dalton branched into screenwriting and producing, often collaborating with his "Outsiders" cast-mate Howell. 

He wrote and produced films like "War of the Worlds 2: The Next Wave" and "The Day the Earth Stopped," adapted "The Land That Time Forgot" for the screen, and directed the H.P. Lovecraft adaptation "The Lurking Fear" in 2019. 

Full Circle In The Classroom

Today, Dalton lives outside Los Angeles in a place he said reminds him of Wyoming. 

“I lived in that whole world of Beverly Hills for a few decades. But my family, I moved us up to a place called Wrightwood,” said Dalton. “It’s up in the mountains above Los Angeles. 

"It's kind of like the closest thing I could find, probably, to Wyoming here.”

These days, when he isn’t tied up with another project, he commutes into the city four days a week to teach screenwriting and film production at the Los Angeles County High School for the Arts, where he's spent the past seven years helping teenagers find their voices — kids the same age he was when he stumbled into that Albuquerque hotel.

"This is the age I was when that all went down," he said about looking at his students and marveling at their youth. "Man, that's young to be stepping into that."

Dalton said he feels right at home at a school that embraces working professionals as teachers. 

"We're really giving them some practical knowledge into the business. It's not theory,” he said. 

His students, most of whom have read the book and seen "The Outsiders," connect with his journey. 

"It's an opportunity for me to share my love for story and for helping them find their voice, their unique voice," he said. "I get to be the teacher that I kind of wish I had."

His documentary about "The Outsiders" promises to capture the magic of that moment when lightning struck for so many young actors. His Wyoming Western screenplay could bring him back to the landscape that shaped him, set in the 1860s, out on the frontier he explored as a boy. 

"One of my favorite things to do in Worland was go to the little library and fill up a wagon with books and bring it home — and just think of all the possibilities that the books held,” he said. 

“Within those endless volumes, a thin paperback found its way; ‘Secrets of Movie Makeup.’ I was hooked,” writes Dalton on his website. 

"I feel very lucky to be from that part of the world,” he said. “It just sticks with you."

Contact David Madison at david@cowboystatedaily.com

David Madison can be reached at david@cowboystatedaily.com.