Arizona's Little Hollywood

Sedona's Citizen Welles, Part 3

2012-01-23T09:33:00.000-08:00

Orson Welles and cinematographer Greg Toland at work on Citizen Kane.

Orson Welles lived in Sedona for nearly two years in the ’70s. His daughter, Beatrice Welles, offers a rare glimpse into his private life in the third and final part of our exclusive interview.

SEDONA MONTHLY: Your mom, Paola Mori, was an Italian countess who thought Sedona was beautiful, but what did she think of living in such a rural area?

BEATRICE WELLES: It was difficult for her – more difficult for her than me. I left London for her because she was going to be alone in Sedona. We knew nobody. She got to know people through me. I worked for [Sedona watchmaker] Geoffrey Roth for a while just to have something to do. But it was tough for her. There was nothing.

Did your mom consider coming back to Sedona?

She wanted to, she loved it here, but she didn’t think about coming back. She needed to stay in Vegas.

She painted, right?

She was very artistic.

Did she paint Sedona?

Yes [gestures to room behind her] – they are in there. But there was always a dog in it or me – Sedona was the background. They are very sweet and charming paintings. I come from a very artistic family. And here I am…making handbags [laughs]. I am artistic. I realize that now, but it never dawned on me that I was artistic. It took forever to realize it was there.

Your father seemed to like working with family members. His second wife, Rita Hayworth, was in The Lady From Shaghai. Your half-sister, Christopher, was in Macbeth. Your mother was in Mr. Arkadin and you were in Chimes at Midnight. Did it make him feel more comfortable to be around familiar faces or was it a matter of economics?

I think it was both. He did a lot of adaptations, and he thought of specific people while he was doing the adaptations. Economics was always a huge part because he put all of his money into his movies. Everyone thinks I must be rolling, but they don’t understand. He made all of these movies, put all of his money in, and then it ended up being owned by someone else.

Parts of The Other Side of the Wind, his last, unfinished, film were shot in Carefree [Arizona] just prior to the time he lived in Sedona. Was any filming done in Sedona or other parts of northern Arizona?

No, only Carefree and Los Angeles.

Did he ever mention the possibility of shooting in Sedona?

No. He was home. The moment there was my mother and me, it all changed. Not when we were traveling, but when we settled in London. We didn’t think about making movies. [Editor's note: Welles filmed a conversation with lifelong friends Roger and Hortense Hill in Sedona in June, 1978, that he may have intended to use as a segment in a never-completed self-portrait to be titled Orson Welles Solo. Portions of this footage, renamed Orson Welles Talks With Roger Hill, have been restored and were screened at Switzerland's Locarno International Film Festival in 2005]

You all three left Sedona at the same time?

Yes, and we left because of him. He needed us to be closer, but he really loved it here.

Did he ever express any regrets about leaving?

Yes, because he hated Las Vegas. We all did. He said he wished there was a way we could have stayed. Leaving was purely logistical.

Did he ever return to visit?

Never. My father didn’t vacation – it didn’t exist in his life. Vacation was coming home. At one point we talked about flying here, but the airport was much smaller. You couldn’t get a jet in. He didn’t want to be crammed into a tiny plane – he had a bad back. He said it was the same as driving. There was nothing to do. And I got tired of driving him back and forth. But he loved the drive [from Phoenix]. He loved Bloody Basin Road. He thought it was the most wonderful name. It’s so Southwest. Every time we passed it, he had to say something about [deep male voice] Bloody Basin Road [laughs].

Did you have any involvement in his film projects?

No. I never worked on anything. I was always just with him.

You didn’t appear in any other films?

No.

But you modeled.

I modeled. I did it out of necessity. I had been show jumping – I was short listed for the Olympic games – and then I busted my knee. My whole life stopped. I had four horses. Nobody bought me the horses. I went out and dealt and got the horse and worked on them and made them into jumpers. That was the fun part, more than the competing. They were all ex-racehorses. You could do that in England. Then my whole life stopped. I had been modeling now and again, so I decided to do it. I was so depressed – my life was the horses. So I did a lot of runway work, which was what I enjoyed the most. Unfortunately, I also wanted to make money. In those days, supermodels didn’t exist. I only worked for Vogue, and they paid a flat rate of 25 pounds a day. It didn’t matter how many hours you worked. I didn’t really like it. I wanted to do catalogue work because you would get paid, but you had to be shorter. The clothes were made for shorter people in the early- and mid-’70s. I was almost six feet – nothing fit me. But I did the Milan and Paris shows. It was fun. Angelica Houston was modeling at the time – she was a friend. There wasn’t the snobbism there is now. I think it’s unbearable now.

What did your father think of the modeling?

He was fine with it.

Did he encourage you to be creative?
No. He was the worst father in that sense. He was the most wonderful father in teaching me about the world. I knew things that no one else knew about because he had read about it. He was always interested in learning, and he would talk about what he learned. But he was never the father that guided you. I got no schooling and no guidance. I didn’t know what to do, so modeling seemed right.––Interview by Erika Ayn Finch and Joe McNeill

Sedona's Citizen Welles, Part 2

2012-01-16T08:18:00.000-08:00

1941 Orson Welles publicity portrait for Citizen Kane.

Filmmaker Orson Welles lived in Sedona from 1977 through 1978 with his wife and daughter, Beatrice, who still lives there. Beatrice gives us a glimpse of what life was like with her father.

SEDONA MONTHLY: What was a typical day in Sedona for Orson Welles?

BEATRICE WELLES: Quiet but not quiet. He never slept. He slept when he was tired. He’d be up all night, and then he’d sleep a couple of hours in the afternoon. The typewriter never stopped. He tried to teach me about baseball, which didn’t work. My mom was the cook – everyone was an exceptional cook in my family except me. But I got all of my father’s [traits]. I knew nothing about Thanksgiving until I moved to America. So he had to tell me the story about Thanksgiving – I was 21 years old. So we had Thanksgiving in Sedona. I think my grandmother was here from Italy – she stayed for a few months. I remember my mother made a turkey stuffed with mini tamales. She got the recipe from Sunset Magazine.

Your father said he learned to make movies by watching Stagecoach dozens of times. Did you ever hear him talk about the film?

Yes! He always said Monument Valley was one of the most beautiful places in the world. When he sent us off on the trip that led us to Sedona, he said we had to see Monument Valley. He was in awe of Jack Ford; he saw Stagecoach 33 times. It is an amazing movie. I saw it four or five years ago on the big screen – I’d never seen it on the big screen. It’s extraordinary – it has everything. It’s ageless.

Did he ever express interest in making a Western?

Never that I knew of. He had so many projects – maybe there was a Western in the middle of one. I don’t know.

You mentioned Burt Reynolds. Did any other filmmakers or actors visit him in Sedona?

No, because he didn’t want them to [laughs]. That was the whole point. He had to deal with them in Hollywood, and he didn’t want them coming here. Of course, he was very close to Burt at that time.

Did he ever watch any of his older films on TV?

No. Once something was done, you moved on because you can’t change it. Especially movies. He was in love with movies, but he loved to do theater because he could change it every night. If there was something that wasn’t quite right, he could tweak it. He was a perfectionist, and I get that from him. It’s annoying because you’re never quite happy with what you do, and he never was. The only movie he ever said he loved and the one movie he wanted people to remember him by was Chimes of Midnight, which was the five Shakespeare plays he put together and made into a 90-minute movie. It was first on stage in Dublin and then it was made into a movie backed by Spaniards.

I was in the film. It was my one acting experience. I got rheumatic fever the moment it started, so it was all over. I had to get a double. It was his favorite movie. I remember watching it with him. But he never watched his other movies. God forbid one of his commercials came on. He would instantly change the TV. He never wanted to see himself. Everything that was past was past. It’s what saved him. He had a lot of hardships in his life. He had so much taken away from him – most of his movies. And he moved on.

That’s the side of me that’s hard. If I think about everything I’ve done [to preserve his legacy], I know I’m doing it for my father, but he probably doesn’t care. I’ve spent the last 20 years going through heartbreak – it’s all emotion and I’m the only one who cares about it. That’s logical; I’m the only one who would care. But there’s another side that makes me think he wouldn’t care, and maybe I should stop. But I can’t. I want to leave his films the way they should be left. It’s not about him but what he left and how he made it. They should be left that way.

I’m talking about Othello and all of his films I’ve tried to get my hands on. We stopped Touch of Evil from being screened at the Cannes film festival [in 1998]. They wouldn’t listen to us. We wanted to see what was being done to the movie. It was being restored – footage had been added. As the estate, we wanted to see it. They ignored us like we didn’t exist. We brought in a lawyer who told them the movie wasn’t approved by the estate, and the Cannes festival didn’t show it. I was very unpopular. Chuck Heston called me an idiot on TV. I didn’t want to stop a premier at the Cannes film festival, but we wanted to see what was going on. We wanted to see the script and the movie. Is that so much to ask?

So how much filming did you actually do for Chimes at Midnight?

I was 9. My British accent was dubbed by a boy. I played the part of Falstaff’s page. It was very traumatic. I was 9 years old, I had long hair, I was starting to think about being a girl, and suddenly I had to have my hair all chopped off, looking like a boy. Nobody understands how traumatic that was for me. I was quite feminine, and suddenly I had to have this horrible haircut, which was also bad because he told me during that time nobody had good haircuts, which is a very good point.

I worked on the film quite a lot. They would drag me out of bed. I was in bed for a year. Thank God for that – we had the right doctor. The only way to save your heart is by not moving. I had cortisone injections every day. So I would be put on a pillow for filming. There were parts where they couldn’t use a double. But my part became much smaller because I was sick. The worst of it was that my father hated birthdays, like me. He hated them because on his ninth birthday, his mother died. So my ninth birthday came along. Usually, it wasn’t a big thing for him. Christmas was. But on my ninth birthday, he bought me a horse. But I never got to ride the horse, because I was sick two days later. And we ended up selling the horse. It wasn’t practical.

What were his favorite movies from the late 1970s?

He was a great admirer of Clint Eastwood and Sylvester Stallone – he thought the first Rocky was amazing.

Was there a movie theater in Sedona, and did you go see movies?
There was the Flicker Shack, but we didn’t see any movies. Again, coming home was sacred. In those days, there was no VHS, so it was just TV.––Interview by Erika Ayn Finch and Joe McNeill

Sedona's Citizen Welles, Part 1

2012-01-09T09:34:00.000-08:00

Beatrice Welles on Sedona’s Schnebly Hill, flanked by her father’s 1970 Academy Honorary Award “for superlative artistry and versatility in the creation of motion pictures.”

Most Sedona histories name German-born Dadaist Max Ernst and American Surrealist Dorothea Tanning as the most famous artists to have ever lived in Red Rock Country. But for our money, that honor is owned by Orson Welles, the multi-tasking genius considered the single most influential filmmaker of the sound era, who lived with his third wife and his daughter, Beatrice, in Sedona for nearly two years in the 1970s.

We are proud to claim Orson Welles as one of Sedona’s own. In 1941, at age 25, he directed, produced, starred in and co-wrote Citizen Kane, widely hailed as the greatest film ever made. He went on to direct, write and act in a dozen additional masterful features before his death in 1985 (some of which, unfortunately, he was never able to complete) including The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), The Lady from Shanghai (1947), Othello (1952), Touch of Evil (1958), The Trial (1962), Chimes at Midnight (aka Falstaff, 1965) and F for Fake (1973).

Orson Welles’ association with Arizona dates back to at least 1941, when he scouted locations in Tuscon for Mexican Melodrama, aka The Way to Santiago, his unrealized follow up to Citizen Kane. Today, his daughter, Beatrice Welles, still lives and works in Sedona. Beatrice, who as a child played a small role in Chimes at Midnight, her father's favorite of his own films, is a passionate animal rights advocate and talented artist well known for her innovative handbag and fichu designs. She is also a controversial figure due to her ongoing fight to preserve her father’s artistic legacy. For our annual film issue, Beatrice sat down with Sedona Monthly to reflect on life in the red rocks with her father.

SEDONA MONTHLY: How did your family discover Sedona?

BEATRICE WELLES: We were visiting America from London, and my dad told us we should visit the Grand Canyon. Off [my mom and I] went. Of course, I believed everything my father said. This was in the ’70s, and the speed limit was 55. He told me if I went over 55 in Arizona, I would be put in jail. So here we are in this big car with no one on the roads, and I’m doing 55. It took us a month to do something that would probably take a week [laughs]. Somebody told us we had to see Jerome, but that there was nowhere to stay in Jerome, so we had to stay in a place called Sedona. We looked it up on a map and made a hotel reservation. It took me probably two hours to get down the canyon because I couldn’t see – it was a nightmare. We woke up to this amazing view. Nobody had told us. I was 20 – this was 1976. We toured the Southwest, but we kept on finding ourselves back in Sedona. We felt compelled to be here.

We went back to [Los Angeles] and showed my father 7,000 photographs. Sedona, Sedona, Sedona! We stayed in L.A. for about a month, and as we were packing to go back to London, my father said, Why don’t you pack for Sedona, find a house and we’ll live there. So that’s how it happened. It’s not surprising – that sort of thing happened a million times. He’d never seen Sedona, but he’d seen the photographs, and he saw that we were so happy. He wanted us to move to America anyway because he was working so much in the states. He thought Sedona would be a wonderful place, but it wound up not being a wonderful place because of the distance [between Sedona and L.A.]. He would get two days off, and it was two days to travel here. He was exhausted, but we all loved Sedona.

Where did you live while he was here?

We lived by the creek off Doodlebug Road until it flooded, and we were evacuated. It was such drama. After that, we moved to Sky Mountain Ranch to be as far away from the creek as possible. As much as we liked the creek, Sky Mountain was safer. We lived on Sycamore Road.

So what year did your family move to Sedona?

Early 1977, and then we moved away at the end of 1978. He really loved it – moving away had nothing to do with not liking Sedona. He didn’t get two or three weeks off. It would be two days, and it just didn’t work. We ended up going to Las Vegas, which we all hated. But it was 40 minutes by plane – he could do turnarounds if he had to. I only stayed there less than a year, and then I came rushing back here. When we first moved to Sedona, I was bored out of my mind. I came from London, and I was having a very heavy social life with lots to do. Every night there was an opening or a concert or something you wanted to go to. I was in Sedona writing letters to everybody and thinking I had never written so much in my life.

What did Orson do while he was in Sedona?

Nothing. When he came home, the doors closed, the bathrobe was put on, and it was nothing. He watched TV incessantly. It was the first time we had a remote. In England, he would sit in front of the TV and change channels over and over. And he worked. Even when he was home, he was writing – there would be a table full of papers and a typewriter. He was always working on something. He wasn’t on the phone; it was all creative. He couldn’t stop. He spent time with us, but he wasn’t into the outdoors.

During the period he lived here, there was a thin, locally produced magazine called Sedona Life, and he was listed on its masthead as a member of its board of advisors. How did he come to be involved in the publication?

It was my fault. I knew the woman who ran it, and I asked him to be involved as a favor to her. He didn’t do anything for it. He didn’t write for it. I was always asking him horrible favors for my friends, and he always said yes.

We know you’re an animal lover. Did your family have pets while you lived here?

My parents were huge animal lovers. My dad had Kiki. She was this tiny black teacup poodle. He invented a story that it belonged to a cutter, and he didn’t want it so my dad wound up with the poodle. Of course that isn’t true. He bought the poodle. He refused to admit it. So he and Kiki were inseparable. They went everywhere together. When he arrived home, Kiki was with him. It was bizarre, this large man with this tiny dog. He was mostly a dog person, but he liked cats, too. At the time, we had Kiki and my little Jack Russell terrier, who was 15 by then – she lived to be 22. And there was a Pekinese my mother had. Then there was the dog we got from the humane society here. At the time, it was outdoors where the dog park is now located. This dog was huge. I don’t know what he was – we got him as a puppy. He became so big we had to have a collar made for him. That was our ménage when we were here.

I have this great photo of my dad with a cigar in his mouth, and he’s holding Kiki. He hated to have his photo taken. He didn’t like how he looked, ever. Hence all the false noses while he was making movies. He was always hiding behind makeup. You could never take a picture at home. I have so few pictures because he hated it. But this one time, it was about Kiki.

Do you think of your father as an international globetrotter?

I’d say he was international, but that’s not even right because he was so American. He traveled frequently because he had to. I think you get very used to that way of life, and you like it. I know I do. I miss it terribly. It’s lovely to have a place to come home to, which we didn’t have really. We were living in hotels and rentals – we lived in rentals in Sedona. We had a house in Italy and Spain, but it was mostly hotels. He was a true American, though. He was born in the Midwest. People don’t think of him that way. They think he was English. He traveled to China when he was young. His father was an inventor – quite crazy – and his mother was a suffragist. She died when he was 9, which devastated him. She was the one who brought out his artistic side.

Do you have any great memories of your father in Sedona?

I have a very funny one. When we were in Sky Mountain, we had a pool. That was rare in Sedona, and it was lovely. We were surrounded by national forest, so you felt like you were swimming off a cliff. So I directed a melodrama here in town – it was a huge success. He came to opening night – to my horror – and he brought Burt Reynolds. I got so nervous that I lost my voice. Burt Reynolds was a megastar, and I didn’t know him. Anyway, after this thing, [dad] decided to take a swim. It was pitch dark. Suddenly we hear him roaring, screaming. My mother thought he was drowning. At the time, there was a security service in town. It was the days before alarm systems. A security guard would come check every two hours with a flashlight. So here comes this guy with a flashlight, flashing on my dad who was stark naked because he always went swimming naked. This poor security guard…I thought he was going to die.–– Interview by Erika Ayn Finch and Joe McNeill

Arizona’s Little Hollywood Museum Announces Location

2012-01-02T08:33:00.000-08:00

The future site of Arizona's Little Hollywood Museum.

In spring 2010, plans were announced for the creation of Arizona’s Little Hollywood Museum, a world-class cultural institution focusing on the history of motion pictures, with particular emphasis on the films photographed on location in Sedona and northern Arizona. Now, Arizona’s Little Hollywood Foundation, which received 501(c)(3) nonprofit status from the IRS this fall, is pleased to announce that the museum will be built on the property in Sedona formerly known as Real Estate Central at 700 SR 89A. Appropriately, the 2.25-acre site and the spectacular landscape surrounding it has been used as filming locations, appearing onscreen in such movies as The Last of the Duanes (1930), Mystery Ranch (1932), Der Kaiser von Kalifornien (1936), Two in Revolt (1936), The Gentleman From Arizona (1939), Virginia City (1939), Tall in the Saddle (1944), Leave Her to Heaven (1945), The Strawberry Roan (1948) and Johnny Guitar (1954). The foundation aims to have the new state-of-the-art museum facility open to visitors within three to five years, and ultimately bring a Smithsonian Affiliation designation to Sedona.

Plans call for the 25,000-square-foot Arizona’s Little Hollywood Museum to have several purposes. First and foremost, it will provide a safe place to collect, record and display artifacts from film history and Sedona and northern Arizona’s filmmaking heritage, with thousands of pieces of movie memorabilia and production objects. ALHM will educate and entertain visitors by offering interactive displays, tours, talks, workshops and film screenings. ALHM will also be a philanthropic funding resource for local arts-and-culture community organizations. One of Arizona’s Little Hollywood Foundation’s primary objectives will be to provide financial support to nonprofit organizations that benefit residents of Sedona and the Verde Valley.

Photo (shot at the location where the museum will be built) is from Mystery Ranch, with George O'Brien and Cecilia Parker; film historians consider it one of the best B Westerns ever made.

“There is nothing that exactly compares to the vision for Arizona’s Little Hollywood Museum,” says Joyice Gere, the foundation’s project executive and the co-owner of El Prado Gallery in Sedona. “However, film museums are an up-and-coming cultural phenomenon. San Francisco has a major one currently in the planning stage and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has been working on opening a Hollywood museum in Los Angeles for years. This is a branding opportunity that will benefit all of Sedona and the surrounding area. The value and the opportunity are ready for us to capitalize on now, when Sedona needs it the most.”

Arizona’s Little Hollywood Foundation needs ongoing financial support to reach its goals, and even a small donation will help it move forward. For more information or to make a tax-deductible contribution via PayPal, visit www.ALHMuseum.org. Donors can also email ALHFDevelopment@gmail.com to make tax-deductible monetary or film-related gifts, or to volunteer in the effort.

Selective Short Subject

2011-12-26T07:44:00.000-08:00

MGM sent a film film crew to Sedona—its last to make the trip to Red Rock Country for twenty years—in May 1943 to photograph scenes for Roaming Through Arizona, a one-reel “Traveltalks” short released in 1944 that included Technicolor views of Oak Creek Canyon. An entry in the long-running series produced by James A. FitzPatrick, Roaming Through Arizona is a simple travelogue that extolls the virtues of various state attractions, although the Grand Canyon, filmed during FitzPatrick’s visit to Arizona, isn’t included here; that footage was saved for use in a separate Traveltalk, Grand Canyon, Pride of Creation (1943).

The nine-minute Roaming Through Arizona, silent with a voice-over narration and music, does offer pleasing postcard views of the Mission of San Xavier, south of Tucson, as well as the statues of World War I aviator Frank Luke (on the grounds of the state capitol building in Phoenix) and Captain William “Bucky O’Neill” (organizer of the Arizona unit of Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders) in Prescott, along with Prescott’s Granite Dells. It tells the histories of the cliffside mining town of Jerome, the Petrified Forest National Monument, and Wickenburg’s Hassayampa Well, Rodeo, and wedding chapels.

However, Sedona is the only location visited in Roaming Through Arizona that’s not identified by name, despite the beautiful views of Bell Rock, Capitol Butte, and Gibraltar Rock (near Lee Mountain). The intimidating switchbacks of Oak Creek Canyon are mentioned by name in passing, but FitzPatrick mistakenly gives credit to Mayhew’s Oak Creek Lodge as the place “where Zane Grey wrote his famous book The Call of the Canyon.” The film fades to black as the camera offers a sweeping panoramic shot of Sedona’s anonymous terrain while an offscreen chorus warbles “Home on the Range.”––Joe McNeill

Chief Spokesman?

2011-12-19T08:18:00.000-08:00

To promote Indian Uprising (released in 1951, long before the dawn of political correctness), Columbia Pictures flacks suggested theater owners should “see if you can get a local Indian to act as your special press agent. If so, dress him in ceremonial Indian costume, and have him make personal appearances on local television and radio shows.”

Karolyn Grimes, Part 2

2011-12-12T07:33:00.000-08:00

George “Gabby” Hayes with Karolyn Grimes

(hopefully not too soon after his buttermilk and cornbread lunch)

Now all grown up, actress Karolyn Grimes, Albuquerque’s little “Myrtle Walton,” tells us how much fun she had in the film’s “runaway” stagecoach, and really only got scared by “Gabby” Hayes’ lunch.

SM: As a child actor, were there different directors who would take the time to work with you a lot?

KAROLYN GRIMES: Oh yeah, uh-huh. But some of them were scary. I mean John Ford (Rio Grande, 1950) was. [Laughing]

He was intimidating?

Oh, yeah! Yeah, yeah, yeah!

He didn’t have a lot of time for child actors?

No, no, no, no. And he had a big temper. He didn’t care who was there, whether there was a kid there or not; the words flew. But Leslie Fenton (Pardon My Past, 1945) was a very nice director, I remember him. Henry Koster on The Bishop’s Wife (1947) was super. He’d get on the floor and tell me what to do. Of course, Frank Capra (It’s a Wonderful Life, 1946) was just delightful.

What are your memories of “Gabby” Hayes?

He was fun to be around. When he was off camera he acted totally different [than his screen persona]. He was a very capable man, very smart. One thing I will never, ever forget is his lunch. They had all the food catered, tables and tables of all this delicious food. But every single day, he ate the same thing: buttermilk with cornbread in a glass, and I thought it was the sickest stuff I’d ever seen! It stunk, it was awful, it would get in his beard. [Laughs] And I remember he did not want to ride in that stagecoach. He did not ride in that stagecoach. He had a stunt double, he didn’t get up there. And he thought it was dangerous for me and Catherine Craig to do it. But he didn’t win; we did it.

And you had fun doing it!

I had a blast, I didn’t think of it as dangerous at all. I thought it was great. But anything could have happened. Horses stumble, fall. It wouldn’t have passed today. They had a [prop] stagecoach, with a thing that the men pushed and pulled on either side to make it jump around. They told me the horses were running away with me and I was supposed to hang out the window. They tell you everything you’re supposed to do. So it was fun; I mean, everything I did on that whole set was fun. I loved the western town and all the horses. And to ride on a stagecoach with all those horses? Wow, for goodness sakes! And what’s really funny is there’s [supposed to be] a dead man in the back of that stagecoach. [Laughing] When you think about the whole thing, [Myrtle is] sitting in this stagecoach, just saw this man shot dead – and it didn’t bother me one bit! ––Originally published in the October 2006 issue of Sedona Monthly

Karolyn Grimes, Part 1

2011-12-05T09:01:00.000-08:00

Karolyn Grimes on the Albuquerque set

During the mid- to late 1940s, Karolyn Grimes was one of Hollywood’s busiest child actors. She made her movie debut at age four and achieved pop culture immortality two years later as “Zuzu” in Frank Capra’s 1946 classic It’s a Wonderful Life when she delivered the picture’s unforgettable closing line, “Teacher says, every time a bell rings an angel gets his wings.” A year later, she appeared in Albuquerque, which had some second unit action filmed in Sedona. We chatted with her at the Memphis Film Festival in June 2006. For more on Karolyn's life and career, visit her Website at www.zuzu.net.

SM: Prior to the DVD, had it been a while since you had seen Albuquerque?

KAROLYN GRIMES: I made appointments at UCLA; I saw it maybe four times. I kept trying to figure out who really had the rights and how I could pursue them to get it out again. I wrote to Paramount and all different places. Well, nothing I did did any good. And then it was a miracle. Somebody wrote to me and then I got about ten calls: ‘Did you know...?!’ And I was so thrilled, oh my gosh, it’s out!

It sounds like the movie meant a lot to you.
Well, after seeing it I remembered so much and I loved it! The color is so gorgeous and I just love my part –– I’m hilarious! [Repeating lines from the film] “I’ll be a-knittin’ and a-sittin’”! [Laughs] “Whoa, horses! Whoa!”

What was a typical day like on Albuquerque?

The limo would come and get me at 5 in the morning – it would still be dark – and they’d drive us up to the ranch [outside L.A.]. And there was this one building with a room for makeup and wardrobe and hair, with a big wood stove. And we’d have to spend a long time in makeup. I remember one day I got superheated, I think, and as a little girl I fainted a lot. So they’d done my hair, I had wardrobe on, I was ready to go. I was just walking to go outside and [indicating a fall] right on the floor. Randolph Scott carried me out into the cool air. I think he realized I was overheated. When I woke up, he was looking down into my eyes, saying ‘Are you alright, Karolyn?’ He was so tall. A bit aloof, but he was kind. He was good to me, very easy to work with.

What was Lon Chaney Jr. like?

You know, Lon Chaney was probably friendlier and more personable than any of the rest. He kind of stayed to himself and was so grouchy and grumpy-looking that he fascinated me as a little kid. And the fact that he was The Wolfman and all that stuff, he just scared me. But he seemed so mean that I couldn’t help...it’s like when I did Rio Grande. They told me to stay away from the Indians. Naturally, I just peeked and spied and was there all the time; you know, the opposite of anything they tell you. So you get the impression that Lon Chaney doesn’t want you around and, naturally, I’m going to be around. So I approached him and he turned out to be really nice. But he would try to scare me, in a way. He wanted to be stern and see what he... he loved to play with people. He told me I was very ugly. When I asked why, he said ‘Because you have freckles.’ Well, I felt freckles really were ugly, so I liked that he told me the truth. He was a straight-shooter, and I liked that. We were friends from then on.

He and Randolph Scott have this fight in the film, an unbelievable battle. [Laughing] He took me aside, because everybody was going to watch, and he said, ‘I just want you to know that I’m going to bleed, and I want to show you how I’m going to do this.’ So he had this capsule and he said ‘It’s just like ketchup. I’m going to slip it in my mouth, nobody’s going to know, and I’m going to break it and then I’m going to bleed all over my face. It’s going to run down, but I’m not hurt.’ I watched that fight with eyes peeled, and it went very well!

And how about Catherine Craig?

This was the second movie I’d done with her; we were in The Private Affairs of Bel Ami (1947). She’s very sweet. She married Robert Preston and sort of gave up her career. She told me years later there was a scene cut out [of Albuquerque]; my line was, [perkily] ‘And I’ll help too!’ For the rest of their married life, she and Robert used that phrase. She said they always remembered me because of that. That was kind of neat.––Originally published in the October 2006 issue of Sedona Monthly

German Spectacle

2011-11-28T08:46:00.000-08:00

Since its publication last year, the chapter in my book Arizona’s Little Hollywood that’s raised the most eyebrows is the one that revealed that Der Kaiser von Kalifornien, a German-language Nazi Western, was shot on location in Sedona in September 1935. Readers find it incredible that such an off-the-wall film could have been shot in patriotic Red Rock Country; as pop culture pundit Fern Siegel commented in MediaPost, “Like Woody Allen, my Nazi radar is highly attuned, so Der Kaiser von Kalifornien, a 1936 piece of anti-capitalist propaganda, was a surprise.”

I didn’t believe it either until I tracked down a German DVD copy and saw for myself. Sure enough, local landmarks Schnebly Hill, Oak Creek, Munds Mountain Trail, even the dirt trail that is today’s paved State Route 89A are all easily recognizable locations in the movie. There’s even a slow sweeping panorama of the entire area shot from high atop the Mogollon Rim that is probably the best photographic record we have of the Sedona landscape before development.

The question I'm most frequently asked is “How can I see this movie?” It’s not easy. Der Kaiser has never been released on home video in the United States, but pristinely restored DVD special editions (in German and without English subtitles) are available from Amazon.de in Germany, as well as through international dealers on eBay. Thankfully, because the intent of Der Kaiser was strictly to vilify capitalism and twist the story of Sutter’s Mill and America’s 19th-century belief in Manifest Destiny into an analogy for Hitler’s plan for German expansion into foreign territories, there is no anti-Semetic or racist content in the film. But one word of warning before purchasing a DVD: Because the discs are produced in the European PAL video format, you’ll need a multi-region DVD player to watch it.––Joe McNeill

Dan Gordon, Part 2

2011-11-21T11:20:00.000-08:00

Anthony Edwards and Linda Fiorentino in Gotcha! (1985)

DAN: “The first successful movie I wrote was called Tank. It was with Jim Garner, Tommy Howell, Shirley Jones and Jamie Cromwell. After that, I did a picture called Gotcha! with Anthony Edwards and Linda Fiorentino. Today, if I meet any 45-year-old man, they tell me they were in love with Linda Fiorentino. Evidently it was a big hit for 15-year-old boys, who would ditch school to see the movie. I did one of the first HBO films called Gulag, and then I did Passenger 57.

“Passenger 57 was a really big hit movie. That made me flavor of the month for a while. As a writer, you don’t ever deal with fame like a movie star. No one knows who writers are, which is the joy of being a writer. You make a very good living, and you get the fun of working in movies, but you don’t have to worry about the paparazzi. [Passenger 57] gave me access to any studio for anything that I wanted to do. You can probably get a good two or three years off of a movie like that.

“Character-driven drama at the studios no longer exists, and the movies [today] usually end in the word ‘man.’ Batman, Superman, X-Men. I actually turned down writing Transformers because I said I didn’t have anything to bring to the table. None of the movies that I did, including The Hurricane with Denzel Washington, would be made today. The best you could hope for would be to make the movie as an indie and hope a studio would distribute it.

“Wyatt Earp took a few years to get made. I had pitched it to Kevin Costner when he was editing Dances with Wolves. He was a very bankable actor but not yet the Oscar-winning megastar that he became. It was a very, very easy pitch. The problem was, he got very hot, and Kevin had the habit of immersing himself in a character and not doing any other work while he was working on that particular character.

Wesley Snipes in Passenger 57 (1992)

“I hate Wyatt Earp. When I finished the screenplay, I think it was one of the best Western scripts that anybody had done. I was enormously proud of that screenplay. The idea was to do a Western Godfather and make it the story of two crime families and one law enforcement family. If you saw the movie, you saw it was about one law enforcement family, but there was no crime family. It was really God-awful. When Kevin and I developed it, we talked about Marty Scorsese directing the picture. We wanted it done in black-and-white. Instead of Marty Scorsese, Kevin felt indebted to Larry Kasdan. He became the director of the movie. From what I understand, Larry Kasdan wanted to write the screenplay. Kevin, from what I understand, said he liked the script. Kasdan, I felt, wrote a horrible, God-awful piece of dung. It was so boring and pretentious and wooden and lifeless. The final screenplay became an amalgam of those two screenplays. So anything you like in the movie, I wrote [laughs]. Anything that was long and boring and dull, Kasdan wrote. You watch that movie, you lose the will to live. It’s a heartbreak to me because I know what could and should have been. I was so pissed off about it I wrote the book called Wyatt Earp. That is actually based on my screenplay.

“I was the second writer on Hurricane. Armyan Bernstein, who was and still is the head of Beacon Pictures, wrote a screenplay but felt the material got away from him. He said he needed to bring someone in to do a rewrite, which is an incredibly egoless, wonderful thing for him to have done. I was working on the production draft in New York. My son Zaki had just graduated from NYU, and he was working on an HBO picture as a production assistant. Zaki and I would meet after work around midnight, split a couple of steaks and a bottle of wine, and it was the best. Here was my firstborn, the only one of my three boys who went into the same business as me. There we were in the same business, and I see how mature he is, what a wonderful man he turned out to be. If I had to say what was the happiest time of my life that was it.

“We broke for the holidays. I came back from LA, and Zaki came back from New York to celebrate the holidays. The last in-depth conversation that Zaki and I had, he outlined his vision for a film school. He felt compelled to talk about it. He thought it all out – class size, curriculum. It would be a film school unlike any other – completely for independent filmmakers. The school became the Zaki Gordon Institute for Filmmaking. That was at Hanukkah. We were home, and he was exhausted that night. The next morning, he was killed in a car accident. When that happened, there was no way I could go back and work on [The Hurricane]. At the end of the day, I think the value of that movie is Denzel Washington’s performance more than the screenplay.

“After the accident, I thought I would establish some screenwriting scholarships for Zaki at various schools; that’s how I would memorialize him. About six months after the accident, I was on a plane going to Canada for my cousin’s wedding. I was sitting next to a woman, passing the time. She was going to Calgary to see a cultural park like the one being built in Sedona. Part of the deal with the cultural park was the addition of a film school, but she didn’t know anything about film schools. I told her exactly what the school was going to be: the Zaki Gordon Institute for Independent Filmmaking. I pitched her my son’s vision. She said it sounded great and asked me to be in Sedona in two weeks. I met with the president of Yavapai College, Doreen Dailey. I liked the idea of doing [the school] in Sedona because for years I had a ranch in Colorado, and we actually used to drive through Sedona to get there. I had memories of Zaki in Sedona. The negotiations were very hard because I wanted to make sure academia didn’t screw up Zaki’s vision. I wasn’t going to have my son get rewritten.

“We finally made it happen. About six months after the school opened, Doreen asked if I wondered why she was so good about helping me make it a reality. She said that she had grown up in a challenging environment in Alaska and she owed everything she had become to a mentor who made her college education possible. His name was Zack Gordon.” ––Interview by Erika Ayn Finch. Originally published in the January/February 2011 issue of Sedona Monthly

Dan Gordon, Part 1

2011-11-14T07:23:00.000-08:00

Screenwriter Dan Gordon has written the scripts for some of Hollywood’s most popular films, including Passenger 57, Wyatt Earp, Murder in the First and The Hurricane. He also wrote and directed numerous episodes of the television series Highway to Heaven. But Sedona residents might be more familiar with Dan as the founder of Red Rock Country’s Zaki Gordon Institute for Independent Filmmaking, which is named after Dan’s firstborn son, Zaki, who was killed in a car accident when he was 22. Dan’s life experiences are not unlike those in the character-driven dramas he writes: He had a stint in the Israeli army, lived on a kibbutz, spent a year in New York unknowingly working for the mafia and turned down the opportunity to write the script for Transformers. Dan spoke to us from Los Angeles in an extremely forthright interview. “I’m being more candid with you than most writers would ever be,” he said. Here’s an inside look at what it’s like to write films in Hollywood.––Erika Ayn Finch

DAN: “I was born in a little town called Bell Gardens, California. It was mainly people who came out from the Grapes of Wrath era and stayed. We abounded in churches and bars. We had probably more storefront churches and more honky-tonk bars than anyplace I’ve ever been. It was actually a great place for a writer to grow up because you were around a lot of characters. It was a colorful town. One of my neighbors was Eddie Cochran, who wrote Summertime Blues. I remember my brother and me in his garage listening to him and his pals jam. My friends from my childhood are all still my friends today.

“When I was 16, I more or less ran away from home with my parents’ active encouragement. I went to Israel. I went to a kibbutz and went to high school in a kibbutz. My father was born in 1895 in then czarist Russia. He was 52 when I was born. After his experiences, to expect that he would understand two American teenagers was insane. Everything we did seemed disrespectful to him, and everything he did seemed nuts to us. He and I weren’t getting along, and it was getting physical. I had been raised on Zionist lore, and I had seen Exodus. There was a very fetching young girl who played Paul Newman’s sister. She had these rather fetching kibbutz shorts on, so I decided I’d go and try to find her or her surrogate somewhere in the valley of Jezreel. I fell in love with the lifestyle and people in Israel.

“I came back to the United States to go to college. I went to East Los Angeles College and then UCLA. I worked for a couple of years in the business – I knew I wanted to be a screenwriter/director. I had sold my first screenplay to Universal when I was 20. I sold it as fluke, and I made the princely sum of $1,860. This made me about the richest Jew in LA.

“I worked for a couple of years, and I made one film that, unknown to me, was a money laundering operation for the mob. They were hiring the stupidest kid they could find, and I fit the bill perfectly. They said the budget of the film was $1 million, but they gave me $100,000 assuming I could never make the picture for that. I was closing in on finishing the film, and they told me the film could never be finished because they would be audited. They needed to write off the film as a loss. It was sort of like The Producers. This was 1972, and I was in New York. It was in the middle of the Colombo-Gallo war, and they gave me a bodyguard who was also there to keep me from running because I was getting squirrelly. I lived with these guys in that world for the better part of a year, and I knew I had to get out. I’d been around some very dangerous people and seen some dangerous things. I went back to the kibbutz.

“In 1973, I went into the Israeli army in time to serve in the Yom Kippur War. I was in the army for two years. During that time, on a 48-hour pass, I wrote a screenplay. A friend managed an R&B group and asked me to write a musical for them. Oddly enough, it got financed and that was Train Ride to Hollywood.

“Like everybody of my generation, [the Yom Kippur War] was a traumatic war. So there was a biological response – I assume not unlike what happened after World War II – of everyone who came out of that war wanting to get married and have children. I didn’t know who I was going to marry, but I knew I was going to marry – now. I was discharged in May or June in 1975, and I was married two months later. My oldest boy, Zaki, was born in June 1976. My then wife was an American girl who didn’t take to life on the kibbutz, so we left. We lived outside of Jerusalem, and I worked three jobs. There was no such thing as a screenwriter in Israel. I’d been milking cows on the kibbutz and working in the field. So I taught at a film school and at Tel Aviv University and wrote ad copy for an advertising agency to make ends meet.

“By the time I had two kids, there was no way to make a living at a film studio in Israel. I had a lot of friends tell me if I came back to LA, I could get all the work I wanted. So in 1980, I came back to the United States. That was a heartbreak. I had hoped and planned to live in Israel and put down roots there. I love this country, and I love that country. In short order, I started making a living as a screenwriter. I had a couple of hard years, but then I began selling on an ongoing basis. I had a string of movies that had varying degrees of success, and I went on to work on some very good television series.

“Highway to Heaven was one of my favorites. I’m as proud, if not prouder, of the work I did there as I am of anything else in my career. I had a great time working with Mike Landon. He was another mentor in my life – he and Don Simpson. He was like a big brother to me, and it was great fun to work on that show. I had a degree of freedom that I’ve never had since because Mike was such a big star and powerful force at NBC. I wrote 45 of the first 100 episodes, and I did the rewriting on all the others. Mike would do the final rewrite. It was a great place to learn to be a writer, and he would insist that I direct because he wanted me to learn production. I use what I learned from Mike to this day. – Originally published in the January/February 2011 issue of Sedona Monthly

Coming Attraction 2

2011-11-07T07:07:00.000-08:00

Coming Attraction

2011-10-31T08:06:00.000-07:00

More than a year after the initial application was submitted, the Internal Revenue Service has granted 501(c)3 nonprofit status to Arizona’s Little Hollywood Foundation, Inc. Now fundraising and land aquisition can finally begin in earnest for Arizona’s Little Hollywood Museum, the proposed repository of Sedona’s film history.

During the wait for approval of tax-exempt status, the foundation started planning its first fundraiser, which is shaping up to be one of the biggest events ever held in Sedona. Details are almost finalized, so watch for some exciting announcements!

Quiet on the Set!

2011-10-24T08:06:00.000-07:00

James Stewart confers with Italian-American “Indian” Iron Eyes Cody in Sedona.

Suspicious PR item from the pressbook for Broken Arrow, filmed in Sedona in 1949:

Broken Arrow star Jimmy Stewart was known as a nice guy throughout his life, but he was never much of a talker. While on location in the Coconino National Forest near Sedona, the tall, gangling actor stopped for a moment to admire the magnificent view. An uncredited Apache player, Phillip Sky Bird, sidled up to gaze in the same direction.

Minutes passed and not a word was exchanged between the two. Finally, Stewart, feeling the awkward silence, let himself go and came up with an observation.

“Nice country,” he ventured.

“Yes,” replied Sky Bird, “but don’t spoil it by your idle chatter.”

Crystal Ball

2011-10-17T08:04:00.000-07:00

Silent movie star Richard Dix listens to the radio––still a technological marvel at the time––while filming Redskin on northern Arizona’s remote Navajo reservation in November 1928. Ironically, Redskin sputtered at the box office due to the rising clamor for talkies and was one of Paramount Famous Lasky Corporation’s last completely silent productions.––Joe McNeill

Paid Sedona Vacation

2011-10-10T09:16:00.000-07:00

Ernest Borgnine, Ben Cooper, Frank Marlowe, Royal Dano, Joan Crawford, and Scott Brady in Johnny Guitar (1954).

An unpublished pearl of wisdom from Johnny Guitar co-star Ben Cooper, from a 2004 interview for my book Arizona’s Little Hollywood:

Joe McNeill: “Johnny Guitar may be the greatest film ever made in Sedona, but it was a rather unhappy set – did you think it would turn out so well?”

Ben Cooper: “I was just 20 years old. I had my own horse when I was 12 and didn’t know they had stuntmen in movies. So I used to practice so I could do some of the crazy things they did on horses. Now here I was, 20 years old, working on a Western movie, riding the same horse that Alan Ladd rode in the movie Shane – and they were paying me! Can you picture this kid being unhappy? Not a bit!”––Joe McNeill

'Kingdom of the Spiders' Reunion

2011-10-03T09:03:00.000-07:00

In 1977, spiders – and William Shatner – invaded Camp Verde, Arizona, for the filming of the B horror movie Kingdom of the Spiders. It’s a claim to fame the town embraces, so on Oct. 29, the Second Annual Kingdom of the Spiders Reunion takes place at the ball field behind Camp Verde Town Hall. The fun starts at 3 p.m. with music and a barbecue. At 6:30 p.m., the movie will be shown on a 30-foot screen. Admission is free.

“It’s a really good bad movie,” says Steve Goetting, who organized the reunion along with his wife, Barbara. “It’s very dated, but downtown Camp Verde is recognizable. The scenery is recognizable and the buildings are recognizable. There are even scenes filmed in Sedona, though Sedona is referred to as Camp Verde. This really is a part of the Verde Valley’s history.”

Last year, more than 700 people showed up for the reunion including dozens who were extras in the film. Since Kingdom never played in Camp Verde, many people were seeing themselves on the big screen for the first time. “There was lots of cheering – the crowd was thrilled,” says Steve, who also organizes the Camp Verde Pecan, Wine and Antique Festival and who owns The Horn Fine Wines and Craft Brews. “There were kids from the high school in the movie and now they are adults, but they recognized themselves.”

Though Steve extended invitations to the movie’s stars, including Shatner and Tiffany Bolling, don’t expect any big names at the event. You can, however, expect a mini museum featuring Kingdom memorabilia such as photos, newspaper clippings, stencils used to paint larger-than-life spiders on building walls and plastic spiders. An arachnid-lover will also be on hand with a collection of live spiders. Bring your lawn chair, snacks (no alcohol) and a sweater for the movie screening (popcorn and soda will also be sold). Look for a Kingdom of the Spiders float in this year’s Fort Verde Days Parade on Oct. 8. – Erika Ayn Finch. Originally published in the October 2011 issue of Sedona Monthly

Second Annual Kingdom of the Spiders Reunion, Oct. 29 at the ball field behind Camp Verde Town Hall (395 S. Main St. in Camp Verde). The fun starts at 3 p.m. with a movie screening scheduled for 6:30 p.m. Free. For more info, call 800-827-1160 or visit www.kingdomofthespidersreunion.com.

Sedona: “The Edge of the World?”

2011-09-26T08:30:00.000-07:00

That’s how clever studio flacks (not New Agers fearful of cataclysm in 2012) described the view from Sedona’s Schnebly Hill in the caption of this 1930 publicity still:

ON THE EDGE OF THE WORLD
George O’Brien stops on the edge of the Painted Desert to enjoy the beautiful location selected for his next Fox Film Corporation outdoor romance, adapted from the novel The Last of the Duanes by Zane Grey.

Celebs Celebrate John Mitchum

2011-09-19T07:45:00.000-07:00

John Mitchum in Noises Off.

When Cindy Mitchum Azbill’s father, actor, singer and poet John Mitchum, passed away in 2001, she had the idea of commemorating his life with a memorial website. But a few of John’s celebrity friends, including actor Ernest Borgnine and producer A.C. Lyles, said he deserved something bigger. An idea was born: Contact John’s friends and ask each one to pick their favorite John Mitchum poem and record it. The result is Old Friends, Why I Love Them: a 10-year project of 50 recorded poems featuring some of Hollywood’s brightest stars – many of who have connections to Arizona’s Little Hollywood. (Though John never made a film in Sedona, his brother, Robert Mitchum, starred in Blood on the Moon; John is best known for his role as Clint Eastwood’s partner in three Dirty Harry films.)

Among the talent who have filmed movies in Sedona and recorded John’s poetry, you’ll find Ernest Borgnine and Ben Cooper (Johnny Guitar); James Drury (The Last Wagon); L.Q. Jones (Stay Away, Joe); Jane Russell (actress and former Sedona resident); Morgan Woodward (Firecreek); Bruce Boxleitner (Kenny Rogers as The Gambler, Part III: The Legend Continues); and Ann Rutherford (Out West with the Hardys). Though he doesn’t have a Sedona connection, Academy Award winner Robert Duvall recorded John’s best-known poem, America, Why I Love Her (written at his home in Los Angeles in 1969). John Wayne originally recorded the poem, which became the title track for John Wayne’s only album, released in 1973. John Mitchum was nominated for a Grammy for the record.

“There’s been a remarkable outpouring of love and respect for my father, his poetry and each other,”says Cindy. “I think every Western [film] is represented on this record.”

Though the album won’t be released until the end of this year, at press time plans were in the works to screen a video of Robert Duvall reciting America at the unveiling of the 9/11 memorial in New York City this month. For more info, visit www.johnmitchum.com.––By Erika Ayn Finch. Originally published in the September 2011 issue of Sedona Monthly

Proud Papa

2011-09-12T08:10:00.000-07:00

“Father of Film” D.W. Griffith (right) presents the 1946 Oscar for Best Color Cinematography to Leon Shamroy for his work on Leave Her to Heaven, the first Technicolor film shot in Sedona's Red Rock Country.

Trail to Lone Pine

2011-09-05T08:47:00.000-07:00

Roy Rogers and Trigger greet Dale Evans, Beverly Lloyd and Peggy Stewart
in a scene from Utah (1945) shot in Lone Pine’s Alabama Hills.

Lone Pine is a dot on the California map, but it’s the town where manly movie legends, like John Wayne, Clint Eastwood, Errol Flynn, and Robert Downey Jr., made scenes during visits. Still, even with the cavalcade of stars spied hoofing Lone Pine’s Main Street over the past 90 years, it’s a good bet some people would never make the connection between glamorous Hollywood and the unpretentious hamlet located 177 miles north of Los Angeles (and 65 miles west of arid Death Valley National Park) at the foot of Mount Whitney, the tallest mountain in the lower 48 states. But it’s a completely different story for movie geeks – they get goose bumps at first glimpse of the town’s most distinctive landmarks: those surreal Daliesque boulder formations of the Alabama Hills just outside of town. Pilgrim, this is an iconic pop culture landscape, and not only for big men wearing big hats and riding even bigger horses; just about everyone who’s who in Tinseltown action movies has been captured on film in front of these rocks, from roly-poly silent movie comic Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle to blockbuster comic book hero Iron Man. Not to take anything away from our own beloved Arizona’s Little Hollywood, but with a résumé of almost 400 feature film appearances (including two credits shared with Sedona, Der Kaiser von Kalifornien and Broken Arrow) plus dozens of TV episodes and commercials, Lone Pine is arguably the most popular outdoor location in the history of movies.

That’s a pretty good reason for the town to pat itself on the back, so for more than two decades residents have thrown an annual shindig to commemorate their ongoing cinematic history. And this year’s Lone Pine Film Festival, taking place Oct. 7-9, is shaping up to be a three-day cowboy movie bonanza.

Among the archival films scheduled to be shown are The Stolen Ranch (1926) and Blazing Days (1927), a pair of rarely seen silent Westerns made in Lone Pine by William Wyler, the Oscar-winning director of The Best Years of Our Lives and Ben-Hur. Sam Peckinpah’s 1962 classic Ride the High Country, with Randolph Scott and Joel McCrea, will also be screened, with several people involved in making the film slated to be present.

Jimmy Ellison and William Boyd in a scene from Hop-Along Cassidy (1935).

One of the themes of this year’s festival is a celebration of the 100th birthday of Lone Pine action figure Roy Rogers, and among the gifts to be unwrapped is a rare screening of Macintosh and T.J., the King of the Cowboys’ final film (made in 1975), with some of the cast members scheduled to appear at the party. As usual, there will also be hours of classic Westerns starring other B-movie big shots like Hopalong Cassidy and Gene Autry in picture shows that offer lavish views of Lone Pine, Death Valley and the Eastern Sierra. Best of all – and this is what sets apart the Lone Pine Film Festival from, say, the vastly overrated festivals at Sundance or Cannes – after watching the movies you can take guided tours of the locations you just saw on the big screen. How cool is that?

Festivalgoers won’t just spend the weekend losing their tans in a darkened screening room because there are plenty of other activities going on, like in-person celebrity panels, live Western street theater, musical shows, a rodeo, an arts-and-crafts fair and the Parade of Stars down the main drag. Action scenes won’t be confined to celluloid, either; look for live stunts in a show spotlighting the machismo talents of Diamond Farnsworth, stunt coordinator for TV’s NCIS, and Loren James, the veteran stuntman whose 300-plus film credits include McLintock!, Bullitt and Planet of the Apes. Other notable guests will include Republic Pictures’ leading ladies Peggy Stewart, Donna Martell and Marie Harmon, who’ll recall their days toiling in the Hollywood Thrill Factory. Wyatt McCrea (grandson of actor Joel McCrea), Peter Ford (son of actor Glenn Ford) and Cheryl Rogers-Barnett (daughter of Roy Rogers and Dale Evans) will reminisce about their illustrious family trees.

Screenings and events take place at various venues around town, including at the festival’s most important outgrowth, the Beverly and Jim Rogers Museum of Lone Pine Film History. The 10,500-square-foot nonprofit archive displays Lone Pine movie artifacts, posters, props, costumes and other memorabilia. It also boasts a 85-seat theater that regularly screens hard-to-see films. Most vital, the museum is far more than a depository of black-and-white nostalgia. Since opening in 2006, it has compelled thousands of tourists year-round to visit isolated, dot-on-the-map Lone Pine, and that’s the best legacy movie history can bequeath a location town. Paying attention, Sedona?––Joe McNeill.

The 22nd Annual Lone Pine Film Festival takes place Oct. 7-9, 2011, in Lone Pine, Calif. For info and tickets call 760-876-4301 or visit www.lonepinefilmfestival.org. the Beverly and Jim Rogers Museum of Lone Pine Film History is located at 701 S. Main St. Call 760-876-9909 for information.

'The Call of the Canyon' is Still Lost

2011-08-29T07:52:00.000-07:00

Bad news, Sedona movie fans. The Russian film archive Gosfilmofond’s much-heralded gift to the U.S. of a digital copy of The Call of the Canyon has proven a bust. The long-lost silent film, shot in Oak Creek Canyon in 1923, had its first viewing on June 24 at the Library of Congress Packard Campus for Audio-Visual Conservation in Culpeper, Va.; unfortunately, the copy yielded just four minutes and 10 seconds of footage. Image quality is reportedly good, but scenes are so brief, and interspersed with Russian intertitles, that archivists found it difficult to even tell how they fit into the story.

Quite a disappointment. The Russian archive always promised the best chance that a copy of The Call of the Canyon still existed somewhere. But at least we can see a few short fragments of it now.––Joe McNeill

Monumental Pictures, Part 2

2011-08-22T07:52:00.000-07:00

Even though Monument Valley has less than four minutes of screen time in Stagecoach, it made an indelible impression on Moviegoers in 1939. But it wasn’t the first time they’d seen it in a film. In late August 1938, six weeks before he brought John Ford to Monument Valley to scout locations for Stagecoach, Flagstaff rancher/movie coordinator Lee Doyle arranged for an MGM crew to film exteriors there (and in Sedona) for George B. Seitz’s Out West With the Hardys; inexplicably, the Mickey Rooney-starring sitcom would pull into theaters (more than three months before Stagecoach) with no easy-to-ID Monument Valley real estate in sight. In 1940, Seitz returned to Monument Valley for the third time to direct indie producer Edward Small’s Kit Carson with Jon Hall.

After Stagecoach delivered boffo box office, moviemakers rolled into Monument Valley. Before he was replaced by producer Howard Hughes, Howard Hawks planned to direct a scene or two there for Jane Russell’s controversial “sex Western” The Outlaw at the exact same time in 1940 that MGM had a unit among the buttes shooting action sequences for its competing Billy the Kid. MGM would send a cameraman back in 1945 to film rock eye-candy backdrops for George Sidney’s Judy Garland songfest, The Harvey Girls.

Following the lifting of World War II travel restrictions, a Republic Pictures second unit shot a chase sequence in Monument Valley for its 1946 William Elliott Western, Plainsman and the Lady (aka Drumbeats Over Wyoming). Oh, by the way, Wild Bill’s people beat John Ford to the valley by a few days when he went back (his first visit since Stagecoach) to make My Darling Clementine for Twentieth Century-Fox. Concurrently, Yakima Canutt, Stagecoach’s stunt coordinator, was there too, directing the main title action of John Wayne’s Sedona-based Angel and the Badman for Republic.

Curiously, not every Monument Valley movie was actually filmed in Monument Valley. Then as now, Hollywood producers were quick to pounce on trends, so to cash in on the valley’s post-Stagecoach mythic status, Poverty Row studio Monogram Pictures released King of the Stallions (aka Code of the Red Man) a 1942 obscurity that on-screen credits ballyhooed as being “filmed in Monument Valley, Arizona.” In fact, the “Monument Valley” turf seen in the flick is mostly Sedona’s Red Rock Country, courtesy of extensive footage lifted from Grand National Films’ 1938 King of the Sierras, a slapdash B picture that quickly put fading Rex the Wonder Horse out to permanent show-biz pasture.–– Joe McNeill. Originally published in the July/August 2011 issue of Sedona Monthly

Monumental Pictures, Part 1

2011-08-15T08:21:00.000-07:00

Forget the legend. Monument Valley wasn’t unknown to Hollywood before 1939’s Stagecoach, and director John Ford only “discovered” it in the daydreams of a studio flack. The place was pitched for movie business as early as 1917, when Kayenta, Ariz., trading post owners John and Louisa Wetherill, in cooperation with the Santa Fe Railroad, hyped an “elaborate moving picture advertising scheme of the Monument Valley and Rainbow Natural Bridge country.” Not only that, there’s proof that a Famous Players-Lasky (now Paramount Pictures) camera crew visited the area in 1920, although it’s not known what, if anything, they may have photographed. But it is the same studio’s The Vanishing American, a 1925 silent film based on the novel by Zane Grey and directed by serial auteur George B. Seitz, that holds the honor of being the first to include sequences shot on location in Monument Valley. It was a low-key screen debut: A couple of quickie bits were staged in front of the valley’s distinctive rock skyline, but the bulk of production took place near Tuba City, 90 miles to the southwest. Paramount returned to Monument Valley in June 1928 to take a few shots for The Water Hole, a long-lost silent movie also based on a Zane Grey story.

In September 1929, a company from Fox Film Corp. traveled to Monument Valley to shoot parts of The Lone Star Ranger, the first talkie Zane Grey Western, and the first sound film of any genre made in northern Arizona. Ten years before he blazed into the national consciousness in Stagecoach, John Wayne, still answering to the moniker Duke Morrison, worked in Monument Valley as The Lone Star Ranger‘s prop man. Eleven months later, Fox Film announced it would trot him in front of cameras there as leading man of King of Wild Horses (aka Alcatraz and Wyoming Wonder), a never-completed remake of Tom Mix's silent Just Tony in which the newly anointed actor was set to play opposite the more prominently billed (and much bigger movie star) Rex the Wonder Horse.

When buzz reached Zane Grey in 1931 that Fox Film was prepping a third movie based on his venerable Riders of the Purple Sage, he compiled a list of preferred locations in Utah and Arizona for studio executives to consider. Among his suggestions was Monument Valley, conveniently located, he noted, “one day from Kayenta.” Fox took the hint and declared its intention to stage a cattle stampede in the valley for Riders. But for reasons unknown, the rampage was photographed at the far more easily accessible and equally butte-iful Sedona. Fox Film would likewise announce, but not shoot, a Monument Valley segment for Riders’ 1932 sequel, The Rainbow Trail. The valley did show up briefly on-screen in 1931 in Howard Higgin’s The Painted Desert, made by Pathé Exchange with future Hopalong Cassidy star William Boyd and pre-crowned Hollywood king Clark Gable.

In 1932, Universal Pictures beat the drum for its plan to photograph scenic backgrounds in Monument Valley for William Wyler’s production of Laughing Boy, Oliver La Farge’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of Native American life. Universal abandoned Laughing Boy after just a few days of filming on the Navajo reservation, but MGM scooped up rights to the book and two years later released an adaptation with slumping Latin lover Ramon Novarro in the title role. Monument Valley vistas are briefly spotted in the finished picture (which did its location work near Safford in southeastern Arizona), but facts remain murky about when (or by whom) the footage was photographed.–– Joe McNeill. Originally published in the July/August 2011 issue of Sedona Monthly

Ford's Theatre

2011-08-08T08:39:00.000-07:00

Monument Valley and Sedona share a unique distinction – thanks to the movies, both symbolize “the West” in the American subconscious and to the world at large. But unlike Sedona, Monument Valley was never anonymous. Thanks to its link with director John Ford from 1938 on, there was always a name attached to its iconic buttes. Another difference: If Ford were here today, he’d have no problem recognizing “his” Monument Valley.

Every time the door swings open at Goulding’s Trading Post – man’s tiny contribution to the topography of Monument Valley near the Arizona-Utah border – a cowbell clangs loud enough to make any moo-ver shaky. But, the arrival of any person around here, historically, probably would be an event requiring fanfare – Goulding’s is in what most people would consider the middle of nowhere, except for one thing: Its front step looks out on a view anyone who’s ever seen a Western movie would recognize in a heartbeat.

Such was the power of Monument Valley as defined through the lens of John Ford and his team that for decades, reviewers who saw an unidentified Sedona on screen reflexively assumed our red rocks must be Monument Valley. But one look around at the actual location is all you’d need to see to never make that mistake again. Perhaps the most famous of the buttes – the East and West Mittens, and the Sisters – are set in relief against a vast backdrop of...nothing. Their power, inseparable from the way Ford showed them in the many movies he made here, starting with Stagecoach in 1938 and ending with Cheyenne Autumn in 1964, is timeless.

Monument Valley today is a Navajo Tribal Park. Guided tours are available, which allow access to areas and views closed off to drivers in their own vehicles who choose the self-guided tour along a 17-mile unpaved loop road. Horseback rides are available to fulfill any John Wayne fantasies.

Apart from the Navajo-owned View Hotel, which opened in December 2008 adjacent to the Tribal Visitors Center, there is Goulding’s. Opened as a trading post by Harry Goulding and his wife, known by her nickname “Mike,” in 1928, it is now a museum. Behind it stands a tiny cabin seen as John Wayne’s cavalry headquarters in Ford’s She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949) – “Mike” Goulding used it to store her potatoes – and next door is Goulding’s Lodge, for those who plan to stay.

Ford and his crews were frequent guests, and letters of Thanks from the director, John Wayne (“Harry, you and I both owe these monuments a lot, Duke”), Henry Fonda, and others are framed in the front room of the trading post/museum. You’ll pass through the Ware Room (used to store dry goods, now filled with vintage blankets, riding boots, rugs, and photos), the “Movie Days Film Gallery” (film memorabilia), and the upstairs living quarters, preserved as it was in the Goulding’s day – save for the air conditioner now in the window that frames the classic cinematic view. We trust Harry and “Mike” would concede this one nod to “progress” – at least in the summer. –– Steven Korn. Originally published in the May 2006 issue of Sedona Monthly

Good Mourning!

2011-08-01T08:07:00.000-07:00

In Bernard Eisenschitz’s 1993 biography Nicholas Ray: An American Journey, Johnny Guitar’s credited screenwriter Philip Yordan (who may or may not have actually written the 1954 Sedona-filmed classic) recalled a chat with the director, who was at wit’s end dealing with combative Joan Crawford. “Well, why don’t you do this, Nick?” Yordan suggested. “It’ll only be another six weeks. Get up every morning, look in the mirror, and when you shave, say, ‘Look, I’ve only got five more weeks and I’ll never have to see Joan Crawford again.’ ... He looked at me a long time – I’ll never forget this – and he said, ‘You know, never is a long time.’ ”

Burl Trouble

2011-07-25T10:30:00.000-07:00

In 1948, popular folksinger Burl Ives was one of the main selling points for RKO Radio Pictures when it was promoting Station West, the partly filmed-in-Sedona cowboy film noir; he was fourth-billed in the credits and featured in all promotional materials. But when the film was re-released in 1954, Ives’ name mysteriously vanished, and his screen time greatly reduced. Bizarrely, Ives’ role in Station West seems to have been a little-noticed casualty of Cold War paranoia.

In May 1948, Obsessive-Compulsive millionaire Howard Hughes took control of financially struggling RKO. A virulent anti-Communist, Hughes fired approximately 1,900 of RKO’s 2,500 employees, virtually shutting down production for six months while his investigators dug into remaining workers’ pasts. “It is my determination to make RKO one studio where the work of Communist sympathizers will not be used,” Hughes told the Hollywood Reporter in April 1952. To that end, Hughes set up a “security office” at RKO; one of its tasks was to purge suspected Communists from the credits of older RKO films being re-released to theaters.

Here’s where Ives appears to have run into a problem. In 1950, Counterattack: The Newsletter of Facts To Combat Communism, published a book called Red Channels: The Report of Communist Influence in Radio and Television, which listed 151 people in entertainment and broadcast journalism linked to “subversive” organizations, either at the time or in the past. Red Channels claimed Ives had had past association with three obscure leftist organizations in the early 1940s.

But on Sept. 25, 1952, under the headline “Reds Dupe Artists, Senate Group Says,” The New York Times reported that the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee cited Ives and three other show business personalities as examples of how Communists were using the respected American entertainers to unwittingly strengthen subversive aims. Ives was not accused of being either a Communist or a deliberate “fronter.” In a statement included in the Times story, Ives wanted it on the record that he’d voluntarily gone before the Senate to show he “never knowingly approved anything Un-American.” He closed the statement by saying: “I am not and never have been a Communist.”

By the looks of it, Hughes was not impressed. With no fanfare Ives’ name was erased from posters, ads, and the film’s credits when Station West was re-released to theaters in 1954. Look at the poster from 1948 (at top), which displays Ives’ name and image. This was typical of the film’s entire publicity campaign, which clearly aimed to leverage the folksinger/radio personality’s popularity. In ‘54, however, Ives is conspicuously missing from all promotional materials, such as the poster above– funny that the campaign now sported a “red” color scheme.––Joe McNeill

‘Legion’ of Honor

2011-07-18T08:44:00.000-07:00

I uncovered a lot of obscure facts while researching my book Arizona’s Little Hollywood, but one of the most unexpected finds was a gushing trade review for The Vanishing Legion, the 1931 Mascot Pictures serial that paired cowboy star Harry Carey with Flagstaff’s own Rex, the King of Wild Horses. So now we have confirmation: The Vanishing Legion is American cinema’s most critically lauded examination of an unseen archvillain’s use of radio to command minions to do his evil bidding.––Joe McNeill

ACE SERIAL
“This is probably the best serial ever turned out by an independent. It has everything that a thrill serial can pack into the footage. Harry Carey and Edwina Booth, with the reps they made in Trader Horn, are a strong combination to exploit. Directed by B. Reaves Eason, who has utilized every device to crowd the reels with action, thrills, surprises and some beaucoup camera work that is not often seen in a serial. The story is a hummer, with Harry Carey as the contractor engaged to drill an oil well on a property that seems to have a jinx. Mysterious forces are at work on the oil field. Harry starts with a fleet of trucks loaded with machinery and equipment. Then you see the gang at work, with several different groups all endeavoring to stop the hero, also to get their hands on a certain mysterious person who knows some damaging evidence against them. This person is the father of Frankie Darrow. Frankie and his dad secrete themselves in one of the trucks to escape the sheriff. The trucks are wrecked by the gang, who destroy the brakes, and they go crashing over the side of a precipice. This is a big thrill scene, with the runaway trucks careening down the side of a mountain and the drivers jumping for their lives. This bit has been realistically handled, and packs a terrific wallop. In fact the first two chapters caught are replete with fine bits of this calibre that will have the fans hanging onto their seats. Frankie Darrow does splendid work in a strong part. His acting on the death of his father is as good a bit as any juvenile has ever done on the screen. Can’t miss on this one. It should pack ’em in––kids and grown-ups, who like their thrills fast and plenty.”––The Film Daily, August 2, 1931

Un-dressed

2011-07-11T07:44:00.000-07:00

A sketch of a costume designed by Edith Head and intended to be worn by Hedy Lamarr in a sequence in Paramount's Sedona-filmed Copper Canyon. The scene was deleted and the dress is not seen in the film.––Joe McNeill

Out-Fox Radio

2011-07-04T08:13:00.000-07:00

Don’t tell the top brass at Fox Film, but their 1933 Robbers’ Roost wasn’t the first adaption of Zane Grey’s novel for another medium; listeners in Detroit heard the story acted out on the radio almost two years before the movie hit theaters. Details of the Robbers’ Roost radio play have faded into the ether, but station WWJ aired the program in May 1931, shortly after the story was serialized in Collier’s magazine and a few months before it was published as a book by Harper & Brothers. What can be confirmed is that actor/director Wynn Wright and actress Florence Hedges (seen above in a publicity still for the show) originated the roles George O’Brien and Maureen O’Sullivan played in the Dudley Nichols-scripted B western, which Fox shot on location in Sedona during late 1932. Wright must have been keen on turning pre-sold literary properties into radio shows; in 1941 he created the NBC anthology program Author’s Playhouse, which dramatized the works of famous authors and playwrights.––Joe McNeill

Shameless Self-Promotion: ‘Arizona’s Little Hollywood’ Receives Nod

2011-06-27T08:24:00.000-07:00

Here’s some news that put a hitch in our giddyap this spring: Arizona’s Little Hollywood: Sedona and Northern Arizona’s Forgotten Film History 1923-1973 is a finalist in the Contemporary Nonfiction category for the Western Writers of America 2011 Spur Award. Sedona Monthly’s creative director Joe McNeill wrote the hardcover, 692-page book, which was published in 2010.

Since 1953, the Spur Awards have been given annually for distinguished writing about the American West (www.westernwriters.org). The awards are among the oldest and most prestigious in American literature; past winners include Larry McMurtry for Lonesome Dove, Michael Blake for Dances With Wolves and Tony Hillerman for Skinwalkers. This is the first time a film history book has been nominated.

“To have my name mentioned along with such illustrious company is one of the greatest compliments I could ever receive,” says Joe. “But this is really Sedona’s honor. The town made the history – I was just the messenger who delivered the news.”

Arizona’s Little Hollywood includes numerous revelations about moviemaking in northern Arizona. The book tells the story behind Der Kaiser von Kalifornien, a German-language anti-American Nazi propaganda Western filmed in Sedona in 1935, as well as the true history of filmmaking in Monument Valley including the most detailed account ever published of John Ford’s Stagecoach. Joe devoted seven years of his life to researching and writing the book, so what’s next?

“Arizona’s Little Hollywood is the foundation for the movie museum of the same name that we are working to build here in Sedona,” says Joe. “It’s a laborious process, but it’s going to put Sedona on the map in terms of film history.”––Erika Ayn Finch. Originally published in the June 2010 issue of Sedona Monthly

Sue Ane Langdon Exposes ‘The Rounders’

2011-06-20T08:26:00.000-07:00

Henry Fonda and Glenn Ford tip their hats to Hope Holiday and Sue Ane Langdon.

Despite its “naughty” (for 1965) nude scenes, the biggest taboo The Rounders broke had nothing to do with sex – the lighthearted MGM Western finally ended Hollywood’s longtime view of Sedona as the town that dare not speak its name. Here are a few tidbits taken from a chat I had with Sue Ane Langdon, the film’s still-lovely co-star, during a return visit she made to Sedona in 2004. For more, including the inside scoop on her memorable skinnydipping scene with Glenn Ford and Henry Fonda, check out The Rounders chapter in my book Arizona’s Little Hollywood––Joe McNeill

JM: First off, I want you to know that I get a big kick out of The Rounders...

SUE ANE LANGDON: Oh, thank you! I think it’s a loveable movie. It’s a great movie for horse lovers – although you could learn to hate them, too (laughing). But you can never hate [equine co-star] Ol’ Fooler! It’s a wonderful movie about people, a great study of those two guys.

It really holds up. It’s still funny.

It still plays. I went to a private showing for the Kiwanis Club, I think it was in Thousand Oaks, California. And Peter Ford, Glenn’s son was there and I didn’t realize that he and Peter Fonda (Henry’s son) were in the movie. They’re in the big barroom fight scene; they hit each other. So next time you see it, if you see a fella that looks like Glenn Ford, but younger, that’s his son. He looks just like him. And Peter Fonda you may know from his other movies.

What are your memories of Burt Kennedy, The Rounders’ director?

Oh, I loved Burt. Fortunately, I was able to spend a lot more time with him later. We would see each other throughout the years, at parties and things. We began to go every year to his birthday party. Burt did some very nice things for me and he was just a darling man. He was a dear man – almost the “king of the Westerns,” next to John Ford. He made so many Westerns. I miss him very much.

When you were in Sedona, did you get a chance to sightsee or was it just all work?

I think it was mostly just work, work, work – but where we worked was sightseeable. Where is there a place [in Sedona] that’s not sightseeable? As we drove in today, I remembered the scene where Hope Holiday and I are leaning over the car, the scene where Glenn and Henry first spot us and they skid to a halt. We’re leaning over, looking under the hood because the vehicle has stopped and I say something like “I think it’s the carburetor or the brakes,” whatever that infamous line was. But that’s no longer a two lane highway. That’s all it was when we shot there.

‘California’ Gold

2011-06-13T08:26:00.000-07:00

There’s no record of any complaints from Golden State historical societies or politicians when most of the advertising materials Paramount created for its 1947 gold rush epic California featured Sedona’s recognizable red rocks, but studio honchos must have liked the imagery; after a long absence, over the next decade, the studio would release six films shot on location in Red Rock Country, including Copper Canyon (1950) which reteamed California’s lead actor Ray Milland and director John Farrow.

Mystery Girl

2011-06-06T08:02:00.000-07:00

The Outlaw’s Daughter is easily the most obscure Hollywood movie made in Sedona after 1950 – to this day most people have not seen it and, frankly, few moviegoers in 1954 did either. It effectively ended the short film career of its star, Kelly Ryan – mainly because there was no “Kelly Ryan.” It was a screen name assigned by the movie’s producers to Sheila Connolly, an American-born Irish model-turned-actress – remarkably, they felt “Sheila Connolly” didn’t sound Irish enough. Connolly is pictured above wearing a sexy cowgirl outfit that, apart from not being very practical for ranch work, you never see her wear in the film.

Jerry Hartleben: From 'Yuma' to Sedona

2011-05-30T08:50:00.000-07:00

10-year-old Jerry Hartleben in 3:10 to Yuma with Van Heflin and Leora Dana.

The original version of 3:10 to Yuma spent two days in Sedona in late 1956 filming a few exterior scenes. Jerry Hartleben, who played costar Van Heflin’s son as a 10-year-old, didn’t have any scenes here then – but he now calls Sedona home. While he acted in a few films (most notably, he played Lon Chaney as a boy in 1957’s The Man of a Thousand Faces), it was never his passion—that was photography. He went on to become a respected cinematographer, working on feature films (Wilder Napalm, 1993), television series (thirtysomething), and commercials. Over lunch in September 2007, Jerry talked about working on Yuma, and how acting prepared him for a career behind the camera.–Joe McNeill

JM: Did you like working with director Delmer Daves on 3:10 to Yuma?

JERRY HARTLEBEN: He was great. He included me in... every night before the next day’s filming he would get the actors together and have a little rehearsal for the next day. He got me involved, and I thought that showed a lot of respect. He listened to me, I still remember that. He, as a director, gave me respect as a kid. I sure liked him.

Did you ever see Glenn Ford again after 3:10?

No. Over the years I wanted so much to film Glenn Ford because he did a series of [car] commercials in the late ’80s-early ’90s, and a big, big part of my career was commercial photography. I did major big-budget commercials all over the world and my specialty was cars. So I always wanted to do a project with Glenn Ford; I thought it would be really great to film him. But it never happened.

Did the Sedona connection with Yuma come to mind when you moved there?

I don’t think I knew 3:10 to Yuma was shot in Sedona until the first time I saw the DVD. Maybe I knew, but I didn’t put it together; Sedona standing in for Bisbee is kind of weird. I knew they filmed at different parts of the state; I was only in the scenes that took place in an area called Texas Canyon, that’s where the ranch was. There wasn’t too much shot [in Sedona]. A couple of pan-bys, a couple of shots of the swinging doors, and then they would cut to the stage in Hollywood on the reverse side. Sedona was intercut with parts of southern Arizona. They go through the Sedona forest, the junipers and the pines and then the cactus and big boulder rocks [down south]. It wasn’t jarring, they were able to make it seamless.

What did you think of the remake of 3:10 to Yuma?

I think the new 3:10 to Yuma is a fantastic film, but there’s a shot in the original movie that [remake director] James Mangold didn’t get anywhere near. It’s the scene in the bar. Probably because he was restricted and couldn’t take them into bed back then, all Delmer Daves had to deal with was The Look. If you watch the film again, there’s a shot where she [Farr] turns and looks into his [Ford’s] eyes. It’s an extremely close shot of her face, and her eyes are tracking back and forth and the music hits it. It’s the sexiest scene. I didn’t find the scenes with the bar lady [in the 2007 version] done with any of the import that Delmer Daves got out of that one close shot, which was an extremely unusual shot for its time. But the ending of the new movie blew me away. It transcended the original idea and became something else. It’s a real shocker.

When you were on the set as a kid, were you interested in photography?

I was always interested in the camera. On The Buccaneer [1958; starring Yul Brynner, supervised by Cecil B. DeMille and directed by Anthony Quinn] because I had so much time – it was, like, six months – if I wasn’t needed that day, I’d still go there to school, or I’d have to wait maybe [to do] one scene at the end of the day. So I had free time. The studio had a photographer – and these were all master photographers assigned to each production on the lot – who would record the shoot all day, and when he saw that I was interested in what he was doing, I started to basically take a course from him for six months. We would go out to the backlot every day when I finished filming. The backlot had everything; there was a western street, there were pirate sets, you name it. And we would just shoot. [Photography] became my career. I always loved it. ––Originally published in the November 2007 issue of Sedona Monthly

Designing ‘3:10 to Yuma’

2011-05-23T07:37:00.000-07:00

Russell Crowe (as outlaw Ben Wade) and Peter Fonda in 2007’s 3:10 to Yuma.

"You know, I think Sedona was considered as one of our locations,” says Andrew Menzies, production designer on director James Mangold’s remake of 3:10 to Yuma, based on the Delmer Daves-directed Glenn Ford western that spent a couple of days filming in Sedona in December 1956. “It was a very close contender, but it was very hard,” Menzies explained in a phone chat in early August 2007. “Films are dictated not only by the look, but by the finances. So when you have New Mexico offering [big rebates] of the money you spend in the region, it’s very hard to turn that down.”

But that’s not to say Sedona’s look didn’t influence the film, which centers on a battle of wits and wills in the old West between charismatic outlaw Ben Wade (Russell Crowe) and his captor, struggling but principled rancher Dan Evans (Christian Bale). In his job, Menzies was responsible for the look of the movie, working with Mangold to create a visual style and setting to support the storytelling. “There’s a place called Ghost Ranch, two or three hours from Santa Fe (where Yuma’s location shoot was based), which actually has a similar landscape to Sedona, with beautiful pink and peach rocks.

How do the two films compare? One difference between 1957 and 2007 Menzies mentions is today’s realism vs. 1950s’ theatricality. “We were very concerned with research,” he says. “We had thousands of pictures [as reference for] buildings, colors, wardrobe. It was a major concern of mine and James Mangold’s. Obviously, the movie has to be entertaining, so we break from [reality] for some of the action, but it was cool. It was very exciting.”

How exciting? Yuma was Menzies’ first western, but “I would cut my rate to do another.” Note to producers: He was chuckling as he said that.––Steven Korn. Originally published in the September 2007 issue of Sedona Monthly

Getting ‘3:10 to Yuma’ Remake on Track

2011-05-16T07:58:00.000-07:00

Christian Bale (left) and Russell Crowe in the 2007 3:10 to Yuma.

In 3:10 to Yuma, the 2007 western directed by James Mangold, the title refers to the train that will carry charismatic outlaw Ben Wade (Russell Crowe) to face justice – if his captor, financially struggling but principled rancher Dan Evans (Christian Bale), can put him on it without either a) giving in to the smoothtalking Wade’s efforts to convince him to take the easy way out, accept a payoff, and walk away, or b) getting killed by the bandit’s gang en route. But this wasn’t the first time movie fans boarded the 3:10 to Yuma – in 1957, Glenn Ford and Van Heflin matched wits as Wade and Evans. Mangold’s version was filmed in New Mexico, but the original 3:10 to Yuma made several stops in Arizona, including a quick one in Sedona in December 1956.

After the commercial and critical success of Walk the Line, their 2005 Oscar-winning Johnny Cash biopic, a report in Variety on Feb. 21, 2006, revealed that director Mangold and his producer-wife Cathy Konrad planned to remake 3:10 to Yuma for Sony/Columbia Pictures as their next project. Shooting was to begin in summer 2006 from a script by Stuart Beattie, screenwriter of Michael Mann’s 2004 Collateral, that was based on earlier drafts by writing team Michael Brandt and Derek Haas (2003’s 2 Fast 2 Furious). The following day Variety broke the news that actors Tom Cruise and Eric Bana (2005’s Munich) were negotiating to star in the remake; Cruise planned to play the Glenn Ford role in 3:10 as his followup to Mission: Impossible III.

But four months later, despite having spent four years developing the project, Sony put 3:10 on ice, reportedly because Cruise had changed his mind about the project, even though Oscar-winner Russell Crowe had come on board in his place. There was industry speculation that Sony was shopping the property to other studios or looking for a financing partner.

“This is deja vu all over again,” Mangold told Variety, recalling that Walk the Line had also been set at Sony until the studio suddenly pulled the plug and he brought it to Fox. He and Konrad planned to start talks with other studios immediately and still hoped to begin filming Yuma in October.

“This is a very middle-priced movie,” Mangold said. “I’ve never made a movie that has exceeded $60 million, and this one won't either.” Variety indicated Sony may have had concerns about the money it would owe $20 million star Crowe if he got a share of the movie’s back-end profit, and how the western would play internationally.

“Westerns have come to mean a kind of narcissistic, ponderous film –– and that ain't what we're making," Mangold told the industry newspaper at the time. "We’re making something with balls, taste, and emotion. And I think it’s something that’s an answer to the kind of saturated, digital overload we’re seeing on screens. This is about real people and real action.”

Shortly afterward, Relativity Media agreed to finance the film and by August 4, The Hollywood Reporter disclosed that Christian Bale (2005’s Batman Begins) was close to signing on to co-star and the movie was on track for a fall start. A few weeks later, Peter Fonda (Easy Rider, 1969), Gretchen Mol (The Notorious Bettie Page, 2005), Ben Foster (X-Men: The Last Stand, 2006), Vinessa Shaw (The Hills Have Eyes, 2006), and Dallas Roberts (Walk the Line, 2005) joined the cast.

By Sept. 17, 2006, The Hollywood Reporter announced that Lionsgate would distribute the 3:10 to Yuma remake. With a budget now reportedly swollen to close to $80 million, Yuma was a bigger risk than usual for Lionsgate, known for inexpensive hits like the Saw and Madea franchises. The long journey for the 3:10 to Yuma remake finally ended when shooting began on Oct. 23, 2006.

The weekend before filming was scheduled to finish, a freak storm dumped nearly two feet of snow on the set of the supposedly drought-ravaged town. But still, after almost three months of shooting at locations around New Mexico, filming of 3:10 to Yuma wrapped on Jan. 20, 2007, exactly 50 years and three days after the original did.––Joe McNeill; originally published in the September 2007 issue of Sedona Monthly

Dick Jones Revisits ‘Virginia City’

2011-05-09T09:00:00.000-07:00

Dickie Jones (bandaged) with Errol Flynn in Virginia City.

Dick Jones was one of Golden Age Hollywood’s busiest kid actors. At age four he began his career as the “World's Youngest Trick Rider and Trick Roper,” performing roping and riding tricks in “B” movie cowboy star Hoot Gibson’s rodeo. In the early ‘30’s he appeared in a few “Our Gang" shorts and by decade’s end had amassed dozens of credits in both "A" and "B" productions, such as John Ford’s Young Mr. Lincoln and Frank Capra’s Mr. Smith Goes To Washington (both 1939). In 1940 Jones gained movie immortality as the voice of Pinocchio in Walt Disney's animated classic; later that same year, he appeared in Virginia City, a western starring Errol Flynn and Humphrey Bogart that filmed scenes on location in Sedona. In a 2005 chat, Jones remembered Flynn’s pet tricks, Bogart’s quick exits, and Curtiz’s ‘goobers’––Joe McNeill

JM: Did you stay in Flagstaff while filming Virginia City?

DICK JONES: Oh yeah, I remember it real well. I just about ate myself to death with trout. I loved it. I actually came back to Flagstaff later that year to do The Outlaw.

What can you tell us about the personal appearance you made at Flagstaff’s Orpheum Theater while filming here?

I don’t remember it at all. I probably did a trick roping act, because that was the only thing I knew. (Laughing) I could strum a ukulele but that wouldn’t have been much!

Do you have memories of working with Errol Flynn in Virginia City?

The one thing I can remember was that he had this standard-sized schnauzer. He had that dog trained. [Flynn] had this swagger stick and he’d be slapping his boot with it, then he’d stop to talk to somebody and he’d slap them on their boot with that swagger stick. Then when he walked away the dog would come up and lift its leg up on them. I think [co-star] “Big Boy” Williams almost wanted to kill him!

I really enjoyed working with Errol Flynn. I worked with him again on Rocky Mountain (1950); that was my favorite of all the films I ever made. [Flynn] was one of the best journeyman actors. He knew his trade and worked his craft real well. What he did afterwards, that’s another story.

What do you remember of Humphrey Bogart?

I worked with him again after Virginia City, but he was very quiet and didn’t mess around with kids. It was always very much just work; you’d come in, the director would say ‘I want this, I want that,’ we’d rehearse our lines together one time, then boom – we’d do it and that’s it. I’d go back to school and he’d go back to his dressing room. So I didn’t spend much time with him. I’d have liked to.

What about Michael Curtiz, Virginia City’s director?

I loved him; he was a great director and I got along with him fine. I remember he’d say [in Hungarian accent], “I got to vait for der ‘goobers.’ “ He wanted to match the scenes and have the clouds look the same. And sure enough, ten, 15 minutes later, he’d say, “Here comes der ‘goobers,’ ” and we’d say, OK, let’s go do it.

Old Tucson Studios––Arizona's BIG Hollywood

2011-05-02T09:14:00.000-07:00

“When in Southern California, visit Universal Studios.” That was the pitch Universal used back in the 1960s to cross-promote its La-La Land backlot tour in print ads, and later (to the chagrin of some of its snootier directors) in the end titles of its movies. Since 1915, the allure of making the scene at a working film studio has provided a cushy side business for Universal, but if you have a hankering to visit a movie factory, head to southern Arizona’s very own historic studio, Old Tucson.

Old Tucson Studios was originally a western town set built by Columbia Pictures in 1939 for its $2.5 million Oscar-nominated epic, Arizona, which starred Jean Arthur and William Holden (in his cowboy movie debut). The structures were left standing after the completion of shooting and were reused sporadically – at the bargain basement rate of $60 per day – for cowboy extravaganzas like the partly filmed-in-Sedona 3:10 to Yuma (1957), The Lone Ranger and the Lost City of Gold (1958) and Rio Bravo (1959). Midwestern businessman Robert Shelton leased the property (John Wayne, who would shoot four Westerns at Old Tucson, was reportedly among his silent partners) and opened it to the public in 1960 as a movie studio/mini-amusement park, offering set tours, live stunt and musical shows, gunfights and a small area with rides and attractions. Shelton eventually built “Arizona’s Hollywood in the Desert” into what was dubbed the second-most-visited tourist destination in Arizona after the Grand Canyon. In 1968, a 13,000-square-foot soundstage was opened to allow Old Tucson to provide its Hollywood clients complete on-site filmmaking facilities. Later pictures shot at the studio ran the gamut from the avant-garde (Andy Warhol’s Lonesome Cowboys, 1968) to blockbuster actioners (Tombstone, 1993). In 1970, Wild Rovers, another partly made-in-Sedona Western, did a single day of exterior filming at Old Tucson, with William Holden making his first return visit 31 years after he helped open the studio.

Only Los Angeles and New York could brag louder than Old Tucson about being the most popular filming location in America until real-life disaster struck in 1995, when approximately 40 percent of the original movie buildings were destroyed in a fire that investigators labeled “suspicious.” But, just like in the movies, good triumphed over evil; the studio soon reopened for business (albeit at three-quarters of its original size) and it remains a working film location today. Since 1939, more than 500 movie and television projects as well as dozens of TV commercials, music videos, industrial films and print photo shoots have been made at Old Tucson Studios.

Getting there is half the fun. The studio lies within Tucson Mountain Park, which borders the biologically diverse (and awesome looking) Saguaro National Park, so the drive through the lush Sonoran Desert provides an eyepopping look at the never-ending forest of ginormous cacti. Even there you’ll find a movie connection: The 2009 dramedy Away We Go, with John Krasinski and Maya Rudolph, filmed a sequence at this scenic spot.

Once inside the studio walls, you’re standing in the dusty bootprints of cowboy movie Shangri-la, so the 30-minute historic walking tour is highly recommended as the ideal way to soak it all in. On the day we visited, we were fortunate to have our tour conducted by the very knowledgeable historian Paul J. Lawton, who could write a book on the place (actually, he did: Old Tucson Studios, Arcadia Publishing, $21.99).

Among the movie-related attractions is a 20-minute film commemorating John Wayne’s connection to the studio, a continuously running video history of Old Tucson, and a mini-museum that displays posters, props and costumes from many of the movies and TV shows shot there. Also on the lot is the Reno, a 34-ton locomotive built in 1872 that has been used in dozens of films and is considered to be the most photographed train engine in the history of motion pictures. Red Rock Country film fans please take note: Just beyond the Reno stands the actual “Contention” train station that the original 3:10 to Yuma pulled into in 1957. This hitch means there is exactly one more historic Sedona movie set at Old Tucson Studios than the former “Arizona’s Little Hollywood” has within its entire city limits.––Joe McNeill; originally published in the January/February issue of Sedona Monthly. Photographs © 2011 by Debbie Weinkauff

Total Pre-Call, Part 11

2011-04-25T08:12:00.000-07:00

Paramount Pictures went on to make 52 more films based on Zane Grey stories over the next 17 years, but To the Last Man, unlike The Vanishing American and the recently rediscovered The Call of the Canyon, is among the missing; however, some of its footage has survived. Paramount-Publix, another of the later manifestations of Famous Players-Lasky, saved a few dollars during the Great Depression by recycling some of its Payson location scenes as stock footage for its 1933 talkie remake with Randolph Scott. This version, filmed mostly at Big Bear Lake, Calif., is easy to find on DVD and was one of the early directorial efforts of Henry Hathaway, who’d worked as prop man in 1923 on both To the Last Man and The Call of the Canyon; he would later direct John Wayne’s Oscar-winning performance in True Grit (1969). To the Last Man was remade one more time – so loosely that its plot was almost unrecognizable – by RKO Radio Pictures as Thunder Mountain. This 1947 B Western starred Tim Holt and Martha Hyer and was shot on location in Lone Pine, Calif.

Richard Dix (center) and Lois Wilson in Zane Grey's The Vanishing American.

Barring the discovery of a print someday (it’s still not known if Gosfilmofond, the Russian film archive that surrendered the only existing copy of Call to the Library of Congress, has one), modern audiences will never get to see Victor Fleming’s original To the Last Man and its imagery of the virgin Mogollon Rim landscape. Lois Wilson may have summed up the loss best when she lamented to Filmograph that To the Last Man was “shot in northern Arizona, beautiful country and at that time quite wild. I am sorry to hear that, what with a railroad and new roads, it is no longer so wildly beautiful.”–––Joe McNeill © 2011 Bar 225 Media Ltd.

Total Pre-Call, Part 10

2011-04-17T10:10:00.000-07:00

Famous Players-Lasky PR claimed that while filming To the Last Man in Tonto Basin “Richard Dix hunted down a wildcat that had been harassing the camp for two weeks.” Here’s the photographic proof suplied by the studio.

To the Last Man was booked to open at Manhattan’s Rialto theater on Sept. 23, 1923, so Famous Players–Lasky applied for an exhibition license from the New York State Motion Picture Commission – a less ominous name for the state censorship board – which, as was usually the case, ordered cuts to make the picture suitable for delicate Big Apple sensibilities. Offending bits included banal lines of dialogue on subtitle cards, like “I’m a hussy” and “Since your kisses are so free,” and the scissoring of images of “forced kisses” and “scenes of stabbing with the knife after the subtitle: ‘This is for Isbel and this is for Tad, you dog.’” Famous Players-Lasky knew that resistance was futile and bowed to the demands of the state; it snipped the offending material and Last Man premiered on schedule.

Critics feuded over their opinions of the film. While The New York Times described it as “one of those pictures that give one a fit of yawning,” Hallett Abend of the Los Angeles Times raved deliriously, describing it as “the most Western ‘Western’ I have ever seen” but added the warning that it “lives up to the title. Every man is killed off on both sides except the hero, and even he is badly wounded. The mortality is really shocking in this play and those who are not shot or stabbed are ground to a pulp when a dynamited cliff topples over on to them. I started to keep count of the killings, but gave it up as a hopeless job when I found in my absorption in the plot that I had missed a few of the homicides.”

To the last of her days, Lois Wilson considered To the Last Man one of the most satisfying experiences of her movie career, proudly recalling to writer Murray Summers in a 1970 issue of Filmograph magazine, “I received a most flattering letter from one of my bosses, Mr. Jesse Lasky, on the completion of the picture.”–––Joe McNeill © 2011 Bar 225 Media Ltd.

Total Pre-Call, Part 9

2011-04-11T08:03:00.000-07:00

Richard Dix stands triumphant following a Last Man barroom brawl, as uncredited Charles Ogle (far right) looks on. Ogle was the first actor to play the Frankenstein monster on film (in Thomas Edison's 1910 Frankenstein) and starred in the forerunner to the first movie serial, What Happened to Mary? (1912).

In those early days of filmmaking, bulky electric generators were never lugged to remote locations, so scenes had to be lit with sunlight. In the 1986 book Film Lighting: Talks with Hollywood’s Cinematographers and Gaffers, cameraman James Wong Howe told how he had to improvise the lighting of one sequence in To the Last Man. “Victor Fleming wanted to go up the side of a mountain to get a full-figure shot of an actor on horseback looking down into the valley. He said to me, ‘Jimmy, leave the reflectors here; we will just get a long shot silhouetted against the sky. We will take only the camera and our lunches up there.’ So we did. We went with a reduced crew and we shot the silhouette of the rider. But the director said, ‘Oh, Jimmy, I am sorry, but I’ve got to have a close-up of him and a shot of the valley where he is looking. It wasn’t in the script but action dictates it.’ So I said, ‘Well, look, we left all the reflectors down there and I don’t have any lights.’ ‘Will it take long to get them up here?’ he asked. I said, ‘Yes, we have to send the men down and the reflectors are very heavy to carry up. Do you have to get this close-up?’ He said, ‘Yes, I have to have it.’ I suggested that he could shoot the close-up later somewhere else, but the director insisted on having it done up there.

“This was in the days before we had paper cups and there were a lot of tin cups in which we were drinking coffee. This gave me an idea. I asked [one of the crew], ‘Vic, how many tin cups can you pick up and hold in your hand?’ ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘I can hold maybe four or five.’ I said, ‘Fine, see if you can hold eight or 10 cups and reflect the sun on the face. And I need four or five fellows over here with cups doing the same thing.’

“They couldn’t hold the cups still but it was all right, and on the screen it looked like the sunlight was coming through the leaves and giving an unsteady broken pattern.”–––Joe McNeill © 2011 Bar 225 Media Ltd.

Total Pre-Call, Part 8

2011-04-04T07:40:00.000-07:00

Last Man mountain girl Ellen Jorth (Lois Wilson) gets a kick out of store-bought footwear.

Working in the great outdoors can be hazardous to the health of city slickers, as Lois Wilson achingly discovered on To the Last Man. On one occasion a sturdy tree saved her from being thrown from her horse while riding to a location. The close call was the result of an unsecured saddle cinch. As Wilson felt the saddle slipping sideways, she grabbed a willow branch above her head, which broke her fall, and she escaped with just a few nicks and bruises. Later on, she received some minor scratches on her face and neck while playing with a bear cub in a scene.

Richard Dix suffered a bad case of bruised ego working on Last Man, dishing to Los Angeles Times columnist Grace Kingsley in 1928, “I got a spill off a horse for fair. I wasn’t much of a horseman but I wanted to make sure I made a good impression on the director, Victor Fleming. He gave me a half-broken horse off the range. He was a photographic horse, black and white spots. And what else, quoth he, mattered? I had to run the animal around in a circle and there was a ditch a foot deep. About the fourth time around the horse stuck a foot in a bush and I went with him. I had more than 8,000 thorns in me. I got up and laughed it off, because I wanted to impress the director.”

Besides the minor risks (which generated a steady stream of human interest items like the ones repeated above for Sunday newspapers), there were a few moments of real white-knuckle danger during the Last Man shoot. One brave crewman had to scale the dizzyingly high face of the Mogollon Rim to set explosive charges for the cliff dynamiting sequence. The mountain face was blown away by the force of the explosion and the blast dropped thousands of tons of rocks, trees and debris nearly 1,000 feet. Cameramen filmed the explosion from below before running for their lives away from flying rubble.–––Joe McNeill © 2011 Bar 225 Media Ltd.

Arizona's Little Hollywood Honored by Western Writers of America

2011-03-30T18:44:00.000-07:00

Exciting news! I just learned that my book Arizona's Little Hollywood is a finalist in the Contemporary Nonfiction category for the 2011 Western Writers of America Spur Award, among the oldest and most prestigious in American literature. Congratulations to all finalists and winners!––Joe McNeill

Check out the full list here: http://www.westernwriters.org/spur_award_history.htm#2011

Total Pre-Call, Part 7

2011-03-28T07:36:00.000-07:00

To the Last Man began approximately four weeks of location filming in spring 1923. The company of 49 film workers and 53 pack animals arrived at the Tonto Basin location after traveling 60 miles by car from Phoenix, where the nearest railroad station was, and then riding more than 30 miles of steep rock-strewn trails on horseback into the rugged Mogollon Rim country. Luggage, props, costumes, living necessities and filming equipment were carried to the location by mules; it took five of them just to tote the more than 10,000 rounds of ammunition said to be used in making the picture.

Filming began in the canyon east of Zane Grey’s lodge, and for two weeks the company climbed each morning to locations as high as 2,500 feet above base camp. A number of other important scenes were photographed at Sheep Basin Mountain, a deeply isolated spot in the wilderness about 60 miles east of Payson near the town of Young; previously known as Pleasant Valley, Young had been the actual site of the Graham-Tewksbury feud. Lois Wilson may have received a firsthand sense of the area’s isolation when she was reported by the Seattle Times to be the first woman Mrs. James Benson, a local rancher’s wife, had seen in two years. When introduced, Wilson was wearing her costume of rough homespun, and the rancher’s wife assumed these were her everyday clothes.–––Joe McNeill © 2011 Bar 225 Media Ltd.

Total Pre-Call, Part 6

2011-03-21T08:23:00.000-07:00

In 1921, Zane Grey bought three acres of land on Anderson Lee “Babe” Haught’s homestead in Arizona’s Tonto Basin to build a hunting cabin. “This is where I want my lodge so I can see as far as the eye can see,” Grey wrote. “Beautiful country! And this is where I am going to write a lot of my books.” Haught, who’d worked as Grey’s wilderness guide on the Mogollon Rim since 1918, built the lodge on the designated spot, which lies today within the gated Zane Grey Ranch subdivision in Payson; Grey’s cabin burned to the ground in 1990, but a replica was reconstructed in Payson’s Green Valley Park 15 years later.

The Los Angeles Times reported on April 16, 1923, that Victor Fleming and Famous Players-Lasky production executive Lucien Hubbard (who would oversee most of the company’s silent Zane Grey productions and be credited for writing the scenarios of seven of them) left Hollywood for Tonto Basin to scout filming locations for To the Last Man. At the same time, Grey wrote to Babe Haught, telling him he’d leased his cabin to the film company and requesting that he give the crew a hand with the production. Haught would service Last Man filmmakers by supplying local laborers, extras, horses and location expertise in the same way that Flagstaff rancher Lee Doyle, Grey’s trusted wilderness guide in northern Arizona, would for The Call of the Canyon, The Vanishing American and the dozens of films made in Sedona into the late 1950s.

Haught and his men went to work right away, building a camp of tent houses to lodge the film company and a log cabin that would be used for a few scenes in the picture. An exact reproduction of a pioneer settlement was also built “down below Payson” by Famous Players-Lasky carpenters assisted by a group of local axmen who hewed logs. The lower stories of the 12 buildings were built of stone; logs and rough hewn boards and shingles were used to complete the structures.

Last Man would be hyped by the studio with claims that some of the Tonto Basin residents hired as extras were descendants of the Pleasant Valley War’s “real last man” and that these mountaineers actually looked their parts before cameras started cranking. Arriving on location with period clothing to dress up the locals as 1880s pioneers, studio costumers were dismayed to discover that the everyday clothes worn by some of the extras looked more authentic than the actors’ costumes, claiming “from high-heeled riding boots, to sombreros, each man looked as if he might have stepped off a Broadway stage where some play of frontier days was being produced.”–––Joe McNeill © 2011 Bar 225 Media Ltd.

Total Pre-Call, Part 5

2011-03-14T08:44:00.000-07:00

Lois Wilson and Richard Dix on location at Tonto Basin.

Surviving Famous Players-Lasky press materials have left us with a pretty good idea of what Roaring Twenties audiences saw in To the Last Man. As the picture opens, Gaston Isbel (Robert Edeson) accuses Lee Jorth (Fred Huntley) of cattle rustling and threatens the latter with punishment when his son, Jean (Richard Dix), arrives from Oregon. Jean, he says, has no equal when it comes to tracking down cattle thieves.

On the way to his father’s ranch, Jean meets Jorth’s daughter, Ellen (Lois Wilson), and smitten in a flash, impulsively kisses her. When Ellen learns the stranger is Jean Isbel, forgiveness becomes an impossibility – a Jorth can’t cozy up to an Isbel. Nevertheless, Ellen soon realizes she loves Jean, despite the conflict between their families.

Meanwhile, back at the Jorth ranch, Lee Jorth and his men, Diggs (Edward Brady), Colter (Noah Beery), Queen (player unknown) and others, discuss Jean’s coming and see trouble brewing. Simms Bruce (gravelly voiced character actor Eugene Palette, billed here as “Jean Palette”) starts the feud anew by shooting at Gaston Isbel. Some of Isbel’s cattle are stolen, among them Jean’s horse, Whiteface. It is upon meeting Jean, who recognizes his mount, which has been given to the girl by her father, that Ellen realizes that Jorth is in reality a horse thief. She returns to the ranch denouncing her father and his men. They learn of Jean’s tracking them and immediately set out to raid the Isbels.

Guy Isbel (Leonard Clapham, later known as Tom London) is shot down and a siege follows. At last, Gaston Isbel realizes the awful consequences of his selfish hate. As the Jorths start to leave, Gaston tells of his decision to follow Jorth, kill him and put an end to the feud, fighting to the last man.

Isbel is tricked and shot down by one of the Jorth men. Blue (Frank Campeau), a confederate, takes command, killing Jorth. A chase ensues, ending in the huge explosion of a planted mine at the foot of the painted cliffs. After this calamity, the only Isbel remaining alive is Jean, who, badly injured, makes his way to a cabin, where he hides in the loft.

Meanwhile, news of her father’s death at the hands of the Isbels has reached Ellen. She goes with Colter to find her father’s body, but Colter, who has less than honorable intentions, leads her to a lonely cabin where, unknown to him, Jean has found shelter. Ellen sees blood on the rung of the ladder leading up to the loft, and becomes aware of Jean’s presence. She tries to conceal this from Colter, and when he discovers her trick she offers herself in exchange for Jean’s life. She confesses her love for Jean.

Jean’s presence is discovered by Colter and as he is about to climb the ladder Ellen shoots and kills Colter. Jean’s pursuers arrive and for a time Jean and Ellen are at their mercy. But at the critical moment, a posse arrives and the gang is forced to surrender. Jean tells Ellen that the feud is over. True love prevails and they embrace at fade-out.–––Joe McNeill © 2011 Bar 225 Media Ltd.

Total Pre-Call, Part 4

2011-03-07T08:09:00.000-08:00

Lois Wilson in costume for To the Last Man.

To the Last Man’s top-billed Lois Wilson would also play the lead female roles in The Call of the Canyon and The Vanishing American. She became a major star in the late silent period; some of her other significant roles were in Monsieur Beaucaire (1924) opposite Rudolph Valentino, and as Daisy Buchanan in the first film version of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1926). Besides starring in To the Last Man and The Call of the Canyon, Richard Dix had major roles in six other films released during 1923 and would star in The Vanishing American two years later. Before filming began on Last Man, Zane Grey took his children to see a film in which Dix appeared and he later wrote to his wife, “we went to the movies last night, and took the kids. Luckily the show was decent. We saw Richard Dix (the man who’s playing Jean Isbel in my forest story) and I must say that I like him very much.”

During Last Man filming, gossip columnists began to link Dix and Wilson romantically and for a few months they apparently did have an off-screen relationship. “Why didn’t I marry him in real life?” a pensive Lois Wilson reflected to author John Tuska for his 1976 book The Filming of the West. “Maybe, ultimately, because I was so very close to my family. But I didn’t think so at the time. I remember while we were shooting To the Last Man, Vic Fleming wanted to go to the Grand Canyon for some scenic locations. We were camped on the floor and had to ride these small but wiry little mountain ponies up a steep path carved out of the side of the canyon wall. There was scarcely enough room for one horse; one slip, and rider and horse would plunge over the side.

“Well, I was a good rider. I went up that narrow trail with the others and enjoyed it. After a couple of days, I figured, I could do it without holding my breath. Dick didn’t want me to make the ride. But I went anyway. Then, when we got to the top, he came over to where I was sitting on my horse and he asked me if I had been afraid.

“‘Not at all,’ I told him bravely.

“‘I don’t think I could love a woman who wasn’t afraid of a thing like that ride,’ he said.

“‘You can’t love me,’ I returned, ‘because I wasn’t afraid.’

“By the time we made our next picture, he was right; the romance had cooled.”

Half a century later, catty silent movie queen Leatrice Joy bared her claws when she suggested a less sentimental reason for the demise of her old friend’s affair with Dix. “I think it was the drinking that ruined them,” she gossiped to Talking to the Piano Player author Stuart Oderman in 1970. “They were never drunk at the same time. In Hollywood, everything is timing.”

Supporting actors Noah Beery, Fred Huntley and Leonard Clapham would appear in To the Last Man and The Call of the Canyon, and both films would have at least two crew members in common. Cameraman James Wong Howe, billed as James Howe, was a pioneer, a Chinese-American working on major Hollywood productions. He would go on to earn 10 career Oscar nominations, winning twice. Although some modern sources name Bert Baldridge as Last Man’s co-cameraman, contemporary crew lists don’t mention him, so it’s more likely that he worked as Howe’s assistant.

Scenario writer Doris Schroeder was assigned to adapt Last Man for the screen, and curiously, a studio-generated news item seems to badmouth Grey’s writing ability to build up hers, insisting that not only did she incorporate the major elements of his story “but also, where good judgement decreed, inserted certain scenes or revised others as her experience as an adaptor dictated.” Schroeder would be credited (with Edfrid A. Bingham) as co-writer of the movie version of The Call of the Canyon.–––Joe McNeill © 2011 Bar 225 Media Ltd.

Total Pre-Call, Part 3

2011-02-28T09:07:00.000-08:00

Filming To the Last Man at Tonto Basin in 1923 are (standing, from left) unknown, James Wong Howe, Richard Dix, Lois Wilson and Victor Fleming.

By November 1922, Zane Grey had reached his boiling point over the movie industry’s “creative accounting” practices (net profit deals in Hollywood are still a sucker’s bet) and filed suit against his partners in Zane Grey Pictures, charging them with fraud and diversion of funds. He alleged that most of the profits from the seven films made by the company had been pocketed by Hampton and Warner and that he had not received the 25 percent share stipulated in his contract.

Declaring Zane Grey Pictures a bust, he sold the bones of the business a month later to Famous Players-Lasky Corporation, the earliest incarnation of Hollywood titan Paramount Pictures. It was a good deal for both sides: Grey would be paid $25,000 upfront for a seven-year option on each title, with a share in the pictures’ profits; in return, the studio could prominently promote Grey’s name on its Westerns, which would help ensure big box-office returns.

Reporting on the Grey/Famous Players–Lasky deal in January 1923, The New York Times correctly noted that Grey would “collaborate actively” on the “picturization” of his stories. Three months later, the Times mistakenly claimed that Grey would direct To the Last Man, the first of his books to be filmed under the arrangement, when in fact, the studio planned to assign the job to contract director Victor Fleming. The idea was to have Fleming shoot Last Man in Tonto Basin, then take the identical cast and crew in quick succession to Oak Creek Canyon to film Grey’s The Call of the Canyon and then to Tuba City for Grey’s The Vanishing American, each location the actual setting of the novel. Fleming was already familiar with the Arizona landscape, having directed parts of The Mollycoddle, a 1920 comedy with Douglas Fairbanks, on the Hopi reservation. As it happened, things didn’t pan out in quite the way the studio had hoped; after two years of production delays, Fleming became involved with other projects and The Vanishing American was directed by serial veteran George B. Seitz. Fleming would later achieve silver screen immortality by directing both The Wizard of Oz and Gone with the Wind in 1939.

Richard Dix and Lois Wilson pose on the Mogollon Rim.

Studio production chief Jesse L. Lasky himself made the announcement that Lois Wilson and Richard Dix, two of his company’s hottest up-and-coming young stars, would be teamed for the first Zane Grey pictures. At the same time, he loudly tooted his horn about how Last Man would be photographed at the book’s backdrop of Tonto Basin, about 90 miles northeast of Phoenix, which he dramatically described as “one of the most difficult spots of access in the entire United States.” Lasky wasn’t just whistling Dixie about the tough commute facing his film crew; as late as the early 1950s, it was still a 10-hour car trek on mostly unpaved roads from Phoenix to Tonto Basin.–––Joe McNeill © 2011 Bar 225 Media Ltd.

Total Pre-Call, Part 2

2011-02-21T08:47:00.000-08:00

To the Last Man star Richard Dix at Arizona's Mogollon Rim.

It was probably in the late teens that Zane Grey began work on what would become To the Last Man, his fictionalized account of the real-life Graham-Tewksbury feud, aka the Pleasant Valley War, the bloodiest conflict between cattlemen and sheepmen in the history of the West. The violence began in 1886 in central Arizona’s Tonto Basin region (today a district within Gila County) and reached a deadly climax when the last of the Graham family was murdered in Tempe in 1892. Historians estimate that about 20 deaths can be directly linked to the vendetta.

According to an item in the March 18, 1922, issue of the American Library Association Booklist magazine, Grey made three trips to Tonto Basin to dig out “the truth” about the feud. In an October 1930 letter to Flagstaff’s Coconino Sun newspaper, he estimated he’d spent $30,000 – a king’s ransom in those days – just on research.

Dying on his feet, Blue (Frank Campeau) tells Jean Isbel (Richard Dix) that he has killed two enemies in Last Man.

Grey titled his novel Tonto Basin and added a fabricated backstory that revolved around the illegitimate birth of heroine Ellen Jorth. In his reimagined version of history (so much for “the truth”), it is the lustful behavior of her parents, members of opposing clans who live together without ever marrying, that triggers the bad blood between the two families. The Country Gentleman magazine paid Grey $30,000 for serialization rights to the novel, but nervous editors cut out every last trace of hanky-panky and retitled it the ballsier-sounding To the Last Man when they rolled out the story in 10 parts during 1921. Harper and Brothers later published The Country Gentleman version as a book, and it went on to become, according to Publishers Weekly, the ninth biggest selling American novel of 1922. The sexy plot elements homogenized by The Country Gentleman would finally be restored when the novel was reissued in 2004 under Grey’s original title, Tonto Basin.–––Joe McNeill © 2011 Bar 225 Media Ltd.

Total Pre-Call, Part 1

2011-02-14T07:32:00.000-08:00

Arizona’s Little Hollywood, the definitive history of the starring role Sedona played in the movies, focuses on the high desert country that stretches from Oak Creek Canyon to Monument Valley to the Grand Canyon (ground zero for filmmaking in northern Arizona), which effectively put the kibosh on detailed coverage of any films photographed in other parts of the state. So the making of 1923’s To the Last Man – big brother movie to The Call of the Canyon, the first one to have a Sedona pedigree – is given just a quick once-over because it was shot in central Arizona, about 50 miles southeast of Red Rock Country. This long-lost silent film may be a ghost, but it didn’t take all its secrets to the grave. The backstory of To the Last Man, which hit theaters while virtually the identical cast and crew was in Oak Creek Canyon to shoot The Call of the Canyon, deserves to be remembered as the prequel to Sedona’s rise as a popular movie location. Consider it the lost chapter of Arizona’s Little Hollywood; here’s the first of an 11-part series that completes the story.

Last Man, like Call, was based on a novel by Zane Grey, and it kickstarted a long-term deal with Paramount Pictures that would, in the minds of some critics, result in the best films ever made from his writings. But for Grey, a former dentist who became one of the most popular authors of the 20th century, success in the movies didn’t come painlessly. In 1916, after two years of trying to rustle up interest for his books in Hollywood, he sold all rights forever – including for television, which may have seemed about as likely to ever happen as landing a man on the moon – to Riders of the Purple Sage, The Rainbow Trail, The Last of the Duanes and The Lone Star Ranger to Fox Film Corporation. But it wasn’t long before he was kicking himself for having let them go for a measly $2,500 apiece. It was crystal clear that there was a lot of money to be made adapting his work to the movies, so in 1918 he decided to cut out the middleman and make the films himself, forming Zane Grey Pictures Inc. in partnership with producers Benjamin B. Hampton and Eltinge F. Warner. It must have struck Grey as a no-lose proposition; he would retain ownership of his stories, oversee the content of the films and share in their profits, but not have to actively participate in making them.

Audiences lined up to see Zane Grey Pictures’ first release, Desert Gold (1919), based on his 1915 novel; Motion Picture News reported it did such boffo business that a few sly exhibitors took advantage of public demand to see it as a sneaky way to permanently raise ticket prices. Mysteriously, even though Grey was now calling the shots, his longstanding wish to have his novels filmed at the exact locations he wrote about (a request that consistently fell on deaf ears at Fox Film) was ignored for this one, too; most of Desert Gold was photographed in Palm Springs, Calif., even though his original story was set on the Arizona-Mexico border. Still, Grey seemed to be satisfied with the way his initial dabbling into the movie business had turned out. Advertising included his portrait and signed testimony that “The producer has put the spirit, the action and the truth of Desert Gold on the screen. My ideas, my wishes – even my hopes – have been fulfilled.”–––Joe McNeill © 2011 Bar 225 Media Ltd.

Shirley, You’re Mistaken...

2011-02-07T14:13:00.000-08:00

Heroic George O'Brien protects Shirley Nail in Riders of the Purple Sage.

Over the years, a number of reports in the Arizona press have repeated a fanciful tale of curly-haired moppet Shirley Temple going to Sedona in 1931 for a role in Fox Film’s second remake of Zane Grey’s Riders of the Purple Sage. Cute, but not true. Temple, the most famous child star in movie history, never made a film in Sedona; the little girl who played in Riders was a 3-year-old named Shirley Nail.

Riders was filmed in 1931; Temple did not make her screen debut until the following year, an uncredited appearance in The Runt Page, a 1932 Educational Pictures “Baby Burlesks” short directed by Ray Nazarro, who also helmed the Sedona-made 1952 Indian Uprising starring George Montgomery. In 1933, Temple had an uncredited bit in a Randolph Scott western based on Zane Grey’s To The Last Man, filmed at Big Bear Lake, Calif. Her one pertinent link to Riders of the Purple Sage: Its director, Hamilton MacFadden, directed Temple’s star-making turn in Fox’s 1934 musical comedy Stand Up and Cheer. Temple appeared in only one Western after To The Last Man, John Ford’s 1948 Fort Apache, when she was 19.

Not much is known about Shirley Nail, who seems never to have been in another film. Critics of the day took note of the little platinum blonde haired girl, although even then there was some confusion about her name. Nelson B. Bell wrote in The Washington Post that Riders’ supporting cast “...all contribute effective support, but none with quite the charm of little Shirley Nails, a precocious and precious baby.” Variety’s “Sid” noted the film is “...entirely void of comedy other than for the antics of the diminutive Miss Niles.”––Joe McNeill

Dressed for Duress

2011-01-31T17:54:00.000-08:00

Studios would take still photos of their actors in costumes to test the look of the wardrobe; here, we see Jane Wyman in one such test as Warner Bros. decides on dresses for her character, Ann Kincaid, in the Raoul Walsh-directed Cheyenne. Wyman, then Mrs. Ronald Reagan and an Academy Award nominee for The Yearling, came to Sedona in April ’46 to film under duress. A year later, she was a Best Actress Oscar winner for Johnny Belinda, he was in his first elected post as president of the Screen Actors Guild, their marriage would be ending – and Cheyenne was still unreleased.

Love, the Second and Third Time Around

2011-01-25T07:27:00.000-08:00

Chill Wills

Max Evans' 1960 novel The Rounders, filmed in Sedona by director Burt Kennedy and released by MGM in 1965, was the first of a trilogy of books following the antics of ne'er-do-well cowpokes Ben Jones and Marion "Howdy" Lewis. Neither sequel was ever made into a movie, but the Jim Ed Love character originated by foghorn-voiced actor Chill Wills, reappeared in 1998’s The Hi-Lo Country, directed by Stephan Frears. Based on Evans’ 1961 book, Sam Elliott took the part of Jim Ed. The Rounders spun off a 1966-’67 ABC-TV series with Ron Hayes and Patrick (son of John) Wayne taking over the roles originated by Glenn Ford and Henry Fonda. Chill Wills returned as Jim Ed Love.

Correction, Please

2011-01-18T08:19:00.000-08:00

His baby blues made playing a full-blooded Native American a concern when Burt Lancaster came to Sedona in ‘53 for Robert Aldrich’s Apache, but what really upset his vision was a failure to see eye-to-eye with the studio on a “happy ending.” Adding insult to injury, United Artists claimed Apache was filmed entirely in the “High Sierras” (as claimed in the trade ad above), ignoring its six-day detour to Sedona.

Morgan Woodward Revisits 'Firecreek'

2011-01-11T08:30:00.000-08:00

Firecreek gang Morgan Woodward, James Best, Jack Elam, and Gary Lockwood.

During his 2005 visit to Sedona, I caught up with perennial movie bad guy Morgan Woodward, who is best remembered as Cool Hand Luke’s “man with no eyes.” Woodward reminisced about 1968's Firecreek (partly filmed in Sedona) and its stars, Henry Fonda and James Stewart, as well as his moviemaking career.––Joe McNeill

JM: Let’s talk about Firecreek.

MORGAN WOODWARD: I just saw a copy of the local press and they quoted me saying it was “absolutely the greatest cast I ever worked with.” Well look at the cast, for God’s sake. This started out as, I think, a CBS-Warner movie or something like that; and there was Jimmy Stewart, Henry Fonda, Jack Elam, Inger Stevens, Jimmy Best and on and on and on. You know, I looked at that cast and thought, “Jesus, I’ll be lucky to get billing above Glen Glenn Sound!”

They [Stewart and Fonda] were two top leading men; of course, at that time they were in kind of the sunset of their careers. Except Fonda came back real big with Katherine Hepburn in On Golden Pond [winning his first and only best actor Oscar in 1981]. They were old friends but had worked together in a picture only once before, and that had been many years earlier. They were available at that time and that’s the reason they got to work together. And I got to work with them.

How did you get into films?

With Walt Disney, in The Great Locomotive Chase. There was a great part in it, this wild-ass Confederate Master Sergeant––a bad guy––who threatened James J. Andrews, who was played by Fess Parker. Fess and I went to the University of Texas together, we were fraternity brothers. Fess told Walt, I know a genuine redneck that can come out here. He’s an actor, he’s been on stage before, he can do that part. Walt told him to have me come test for it. I did the test and got it, and then did two more pictures for Disney. That was 1955.

Do you have a favorite role that you’ve done?

Well, I would say my favorite roles were on Gunsmoke. Of course, Cool Hand Luke was an absolute giant step for me. I think it was Bosley Crowther in The New York Times who wrote ‘Morgan Woodward may be the only actor since Jane Wyman in Johnny Belinda to get an Academy Award for never speaking a word.’ If you remember, she couldn’t hear or speak in that. So that quote made it into the trade papers.

One more question; I read somewhere that your uncle was a doctor and that he delivered Tex Ritter, the singing cowboy and John Ritter’s father. Is this true?

Uh huh. All my uncles were doctors. You know Tex Ritter’s real name? It was Woodward Ritter. Tex Ritter’s father named him after my uncle, Dr. Samuel Andrew Woodward, who delivered him. Let me tell you how impressed John was with that. His dad got the Golden Boot award posthumously. I’d never met John before and I walked up to him and said, “John, my name’s Morgan Woodward; my uncle, Dr. Samuel Andrew Woodward, delivered your father.” He said, “Oh.” Then he turned and walked away. Sometimes I’m surprised at the reaction I get from people.

Brand Renewed

2011-01-04T07:27:00.000-08:00

Max Brand’s Singing Guns first appeared in a weekly pulp magazine, Western Story, serialized in six installments between Dec. 15, 1928 and Jan. 19, 1929.

In 1938, it was published as a novel.

Returning to its pulp roots, a Singing Guns movie comic book was published in 1950 to tie-in with Republic’s partly-filmed in Sedona movie adaption.––Joe McNeill

How to Stampede

2010-12-27T10:49:00.000-08:00

Stampeding hundreds of wild horses for a movie is a piece of cake, right? Spook them with the sound of a sharp bang and away they go. But how do you stop the rampage once it has started? For an answer, check out this fascinating article from the January 1933 issue of Popular Science magazine that reveals the amazing amount of intricate planning it took to run a herd through northern Arizona’s remote Blue Canyon for King of Wild Horses, a long-forgotten outdoor adventure filmed by Columbia Pictures as Wild Horse Stampede.

Blue Canyon, located on what is today the Hopi reservation, was no stranger to the rumble of thundering hooves. Paramount staged a cattle stampede there for the Zane Grey silent Sunset Pass, which was released in 1929 and starred granite-jawed Jack Holt. Later on, rampaging horses raised the dust of Blue Canyon for Universal's Stormy (1935) and Hoppy’s Texas Trail (1937).

Popular Science put the number of horses running amuck in King of the Wild Horses at 1800, but a Flagstaff newspaper report claimed it was a slightly more manageable stampede of just 700 broncos. Hyperbole aside (the higher number probably originated with an overzealous Columbia PR flack), the article will be of interest to anyone curious about what goes on behind the scenes of movies. You can read it in its entirety at Popular Science’s Website:

http://www.popsci.com/archive-viewer?id=yCgDAAAAMBAJ&pg=32&query=wild+horses

By the way, despite the unsubstantiated claims of a few amateur “movie historians” (and IMDB), there is no evidence to prove that any King of Wild Horses filming took place in the Sedona area.

Blake Edwards: That’s Life!

2010-12-21T07:05:00.000-08:00

Cattlemen Karl Malden, Charles Grey and William C. Bryant (rear) go gunning for sheepherders – and maybe a few MGM suits – in Wild Rovers.

Screenwriter/producer/director Blake Edwards, who died December 15 at age 88, was known as much for his battles with studio executives as he was for the movies he made.

His feud with MGM began with the 1971 western Wild Rovers, which photographed scenes at Sedona, Flagstaff, Monument Valley and 46 other Arizona locations. Edwards maintained that he conceived the film as a “classic Greek tragedy,” but after the studio arbitrarily chopped 40 minutes from his cut, it left nothing, he lamented, but a prototypical cowboy movie.

“There was no discussion; an integral part was simply removed” Edwards griped to The New York Times in 1972. “If I take a chair and remove one leg, you still have a chair,” he said to rationalize his anger with the tampering, “but it won’t stand up, will it?”

Blake Edwards

Ten years later, Edwards was still steaming over the way Wild Rovers was manhandled by MGM, telling Playboy magazine in 1982, “I’d survived what was done to Darling Lili, but what happened to Wild Rovers really broke my heart, because that was the first time I began wanting to say something in the same way that 10, S.O.B. and Victor/Victoria would all become personal statements. Up until then, if somebody wanted a TV show about a slick private eye, I’d come up with a Peter Gunn or a Mr. Lucky. And if somebody wanted a movie director whose work had a certain gloss or sophistication, he’d get me to do films such as Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Operation Petticoat. I’d never consciously tried to do anything different until I wrote this tragedy about two cowboys who stick up a bank and are eventually hunted down and shot to death. William Holden and Ryan O’Neal played those roles, and we went out and made a very fine movie –– and then James Aubrey, who’d just become head of MGM, personally destroyed it. Aubrey took about a two-and-a-half-hour film and cut out something like 40 minutes by changing the ending and a lot of the relationships. The sad part of the whole thing was that we all enjoyed making it, and I’d become convinced I was back on the road to having autonomy on my films and to making good money again.”

But Edwards had the last laugh on MGM. Most of Wild Rovers’ deleted footage was restored for the film’s 1986 home video release, which resulted in a critical reevaluation of the film’s many merits. Unfortunately, Edwards’ cut of Wild Rovers, which can be seen occasionally on Turner Classic Movies, has yet to be released on DVD.––Joe McNeill

Kayenta, Ariz., P.O. [was] Beside Itself With Arrival of Players

2010-12-14T09:13:00.000-08:00

Movies weren’t the only fantasies churned out by Hollywood dream factories. Here’s a PR story issued by Fox Film (with factual annotations added) for 1930’s The Lone Star Ranger, the first sound film photographed on location in northern Arizona. A sequel released later that same year, The Last of the Duanes, would be the first talkie made in Sedona.––Joe McNeill

The most remote post office in the United States was discovered by George O’Brien and other members of the company making The Lone Star Ranger, Fox Movietone's all-talking romance of the southwest.

The post office is located in Kayenta, 175 miles from the nearest railroad station [and 26 miles from Monument Valley, where some scenes were filmed]. The postmaster is an old miner and the post office comprises four compartments in an old soap box. [The Kayenta postmaster was actually southwest explorer John Wetherill, who led the first party of white men to Rainbow Bridge in 1909 and served as first custodian of the Navajo National Monument from 1909 to 1938. He was also partner in the Wetherill and Colville Trading Post and Lodge, where the Lone Star Ranger company bunked during location filming.] While the Fox Movietone company was in that vicinity, the postmaster did a flourishing business in outgoing mail and he was one proud individual.

[Co-starring actress] Sue Carol was the only member of the company who received mail. She had two letters –– from Nick Stuart [the actor/ orchestra leader she was married to at the time; Carol would marry third husband Alan Ladd in 1942].

Another interesting discovery was made at Rainbow Arch [now known as Rainbow Bridge, it is located near Page, Ariz., in the Glen Canyon National Recreation Area]. This was a large register, encased in a metal box, set in a huge rock. The book was placed there by the Federal Government and nearby is a printed request for every visitor to register. As the Fox company numbered some 200 people, [reports published in Flagstaff’s Coconino Sun newspaper put the number at 75] they came close to filling the book.

It is interesting to record that the last visitor to register before George O’Brien and Sue Carol inscribed their names was Zane Grey [author of The Lone Star Ranger] and the one just ahead of his was Harold Bell Wright [a novelist best known for The Shepherd of the Hills; O’Brien would star in a film adaption of another of his books, When a Man’s a Man, in 1935].

They had visited the same spot some weeks before, both accompanied by several fellow travelers. Grey’s number on the register was 1175.

Gloria Henry: Catching Up with a Strawberry Gal

2010-12-07T08:52:00.000-08:00

Gloria Henry spent a week in Sedona filming 1948's The Strawberry Roan with singing cowboy Gene Autry. Henry, familiar to baby boomers as mom Alice Mitchell on TV’s Dennis The Menace, was asked in 2005 to share a few of her Roan memories.––Joe McNeill

Did you ever get to ride Gene Autry’s horse, Champion?

Oh, good God, no! Champ absolutely hated me; I think Champ was jealous of any of Gene Autry’s leading ladies unless they really loved horses and I was afraid of horses. I remember we were shooting some beautiful scenery up on top of a hill, on a beautiful day. We were sort of right on the edge of the hill and the cameraman went down on a little hognose area below us, looking up at us and taking these romantic shots. Gene was on one side of Champ, and I’m on the other side and we’re all facing out. Champ looked at me; I could see that his eyes looked funny. He put his head over toward Gene and suddenly he turned it toward me and wonked me as hard as he could with his head, which nearly knocked me over the side. I wouldn’t have died or anything. Another time he looked at me and took his hoof and stepped right on my foot as hard as he could. Luckily, I was wearing good stiff boots. He did his best to get me out of the picture, that’s all I remember.

What was it like being the only woman in the cast of The Strawberry Roan?

Well, you’re not the only woman on the set; there are makeup people, wardrobe people, and the script girl – in those days, it was usually always the script girl – so there were always other women around. But I don’t think it was anything special one way or the other to be the only actress on the set. I mean, it would be different had it been George Clooney (laughing). Then it would have been divine to be the only girl on the set!

Love on the Rocks?

2010-11-30T09:39:00.000-08:00

The most enduring Sedona legend surrounding Angel and the Badman is that John Wayne and Gail Russell had a love affair during local filming in spring 1946, but no evidence has ever surfaced to prove this story. The world will never know what really happened, but consider that, at the time, Wayne was a newlywed, having married second wife Esperanza “Chata” Baur Diaz Ceballos on Jan. 17, 1946. And, he was said to be a micromanager involved in every detail of production. With the responsibilty to be the film’s producer, act in almost every scene, and keep an eye on novice director James Edward Grant, would Wayne have added the pressure of a clandestine tryst?.

The Wayne-Russell rumors became an issue in Wayne and Chata’s scandalous October 1953 divorce. During the trial, the Los Angeles Herald Express reported Russell threatening legal action against Chata because of several inflammatory accusations about her relationship with Wayne. Russell, who was married to actor Guy Madison, issued a statement saying that “It is upsetting to me that an appearance of impropriety has been placed by some upon the events of the day.” The report added that she’d instructed her attorney to “demand a full and complete retraction under penalty of suit for defamation of character.” Ultimately, the frail Russell checked into a Seattle sanitarium to begin intensive psychotherapy. Wayne’s divorce from Chata became final on Nov. 1, 1954; he married Pilar Pallette that same day.

“Why did Chata have to drag that poor kid’s name into this?” Wayne reportedly asked friends when the story broke. “I never had anything to do with Miss Russell except to make a couple of pictures with her.”

Chata testified in the trial that Wayne refused to allow her to attend Angel’s wrap party being held at a restaurant across the street from the nearby Republic Studios lot, but assured her he’d be home in time for dinner. When he hadn’t returned by 10 p.m., she called the restaurant and was told the party had ended four hours earlier. When a drunken Wayne finally arrived home at 1 a.m., the distrustful Chata, who was also drunk, almost shot him with a .45 handgun when he broke a window to gain entrance into the locked house.

Wayne explained away the incident by telling the court that “We [he and Russell] were following some friends who wanted to stop in a bar for a drink. We lost them in traffic and couldn’t find them again. We looked in several bars, then wound up at Carl’s Café on the beachfront.

“We had some food. I saw some old friends from Glendale who called me ‘Marion,’ as I was known in grammar school days [Wayne’s birth name was Marion Robert Morrison]. An artist did a charcoal drawing of Miss Russell, and I drove her home at about 11:30 p.m. Her mother was there and we talked. I took a cab home around 1 a.m.”

Chata also testified that a few days after this incident, she found out Wayne had bought Russell a car. “I wondered why unless there was some relation between them, some friendship or closeness,” she said.

In rebuttal, Wayne explained that Russell was under contract to Paramount, and while he paid the studio $30,000 for her services, she only received her regular $125 weekly salary to make the picture. So he and Grant chipped in $500 each to give her a bonus she could use as down payment on a new car. “I gave $2,500 in gifts after that picture,” he added. It was my first production effort.” Wayne’s attorney asked him under oath if he had an affair with Russell and he replied firmly: “Absolutely not.”

And yet, Wayne and Russell did ignite sparks. Harry Carey Jr. is quoted by author Herb Fagen in his 1996 book Duke, We’re Glad We Knew You as saying, “I think [Wayne’s onscreen chemistry] was most special with Gail Russell in Angel and the Badman. My father was in the picture, and my mother was there with him while they were filming in Sedona. My mother said he and Gail definitely had tremendous chemistry between them. Yet I don’t think it ever got into a big affair.... But according to my mother, he had a definite attraction to Gail.”––Joe McNeill

Sedona Movie Alert!

2010-11-28T08:35:00.000-08:00

Throughout the 1930s, Sedona was seen on screen as the setting for low-budget "B" Westerns. That all changed with 1940's Virginia City, the first high-gloss, big-name studio production to feature Red Rock backgrounds in the sound era.

Starring Errol Flynn, Miriam Hopkins, Randolph Scott and Humphrey Bogart, Virginia City will air on Turner Classic Movies November 30 at 1:15 p.m. Eastern Time.

Unsung Heroes

2010-11-22T15:09:00.000-08:00

Paramount Pictures staff songwriters Jay Livingston and Ray Evans, who would pen the Doris Day hit “Que Será Será” and hummable theme songs for TV’s Bonanza and Mr. Ed, were ordered to write a theme song for Copper Canyon, the Ray Milland/Hedy Lamarr Western filmed in Sedona in 1949. The pair dusted off an old melody and refit with new lyrics a tune written for Bob Hope’s 1948 Western spoof The Paleface and shelved. The song they replaced it with, “Buttons and Bows,” won them an Oscar.

But by the time Copper Canyon’s February 1950 premiere was pushed back to November, Paramount Music Co. had already contracted for the song’s release, and five recordings of it were on the radio. Teresa Brewer’s version cracked the Top 40 in March. By November, Paramount dropped it from the film in favor of an orchestral theme by musical director Daniele Amfitheatrof.––Joe McNeill

Sedona Movie Alert!

2010-11-20T06:40:00.000-08:00

The woman some call the most beautiful in movie history earned her only Best Actress Academy Award nomination in 1945's Leave her to Heaven: her best scene was shot on Sedona's Schnebly Hill.

Co-starring Cornel Wilde, Jeanne Crain and Vincent Price, Leave her to Heaven will air on Turner Classic Movies November 22 at 11 a.m. Eastern Time.

Family Ties

2010-11-15T18:39:00.000-08:00

Chances are good that if you live in Sedona, you don’t believe in coincidence. Just ask Jayne and Phil Feiner, who have lived in the Village of Oak Creek for two years. Phil lost touch with his grandfather after his mom passed away, and for the past 14 years, Jayne has been on a mission to find out anything she can about James (Jimmy) Phillips. Imagine her surprise when she opened Arizona’s Little Hollywood: Sedona and Northern Arizona’s Forgotten Film History 1923-1973 and found a photo of Jimmy Phillips staring back at her.

Jimmy Phillips worked at Universal Pictures until he retired in 1959. Jimmy was a livestock wrangler and extra who eventually became head animal wrangler for Universal; according to Jayne, he taught Francis the Talking Mule how to talk and Clint Eastwood how to ride a horse for TV's Rawhide. His wife worked as a stuntwoman. “We knew little things about him, and about five or six years ago, I started researching him on IMDB [Internet Movie Database],” says Jayne. “That’s when I realized that he worked under the name Jimmy.”

This past Father’s Day weekend, Jayne and Phil sat down to watch Broken Arrow, filmed in Sedona in 1949, and followed along with Arizona’s Little Hollywood. On a whim, Jayne looked up Universal Pictures in the book’s index, and then opened to the chapter on Stormy, filmed by Universal in 1935. That’s when she found the photo of Jimmy, who had an uncredited role as a cowhand. “He must have been about 35 at the time, and he looks exactly like my husband,” she says.

That’s Jimmy Phillips clapping behind the guitar player.

While Jayne and Phil, who own PJF Productions – a post-production company in Studio City, Calif. – have letters Jimmy wrote to family members while he was on location along with a few black-and-white photos, they never realized he filmed a movie in Sedona until they were already living in Red Rock Country. Jimmy died in 1974, and Jayne is still trying to track down information about his ethnic heritage. Until then, the couple takes heart in knowing “Grandpa” once looked at the same red-rock vistas that are now out the Feiners’ back door.

“It’s a weird connection,” says Jayne, “and it’s even more bizarre that out of all the stills taken from Stormy, Joe chose the one that includes Jimmy.” – Erika Ayn Finch. Originally published in the November 2010 issue of Sedona Monthly

Truth or Dare?

2010-11-09T08:38:00.000-08:00

“When I read Roy Chanslor’s turbulent drama of the legendary woman known as Vienna and her Johnny Guitar, I wanted to do it on the screen. For me there was a special excitement in the role of this fascinating woman and in the fast-paced drama of this story of the West. Republic brought it to the screen in a Trucolor film I think you’ll enjoy.” – Joan Crawford’s introduction to Pocket Books' 1954 movie tie-in edition of Johnny Guitar.

“I should have had my head examined. No excuse for a picture being this bad or for me making it.”– Joan Crawford, Conversations with Joan Crawford by Roy Newquist (Citadel Press, 1980)

'The Call of the Canyon' Found!

2010-11-03T16:34:00.000-07:00

The Call of the Canyon, the long-missing first film ever photographed in Oak Creek Canyon and the touchstone of Sedona film history, was one of 10 digitally preserved copies of previously lost American silent films presented to the Library of Congress by the Russian film archive Gosfilmofond on Oct. 21. These are the first of some 200 missing silent films that ultimately will be returned to the United States by the Russian archive. “This is the mother lode of lost U.S. silent films and is an important archaeological discovery for American cinema,” said Patrick Loughney, chief of the Library of Congress’ Packard Campus for Audio Visual Conservation, at the ceremony where the digital copies were formally presented to Librarian of Congress James H. Billington by Vladimir I. Kozhin, head of Russia’s Presidential Management and Administration Department. The digital copies will be made available for public viewing at the Packard Campus in Culpeper, Va; the films had been given Russian-language intertitles for showing in Russian cinemas.

Of all the films made in the Sedona area over the years, The Call of the Canyon, directed by Gone with the Wind’s Victor Fleming and photographed by legendary cinematographer James Wong Howe, has cast the longest shadow. It had previously been believed that just a single reel was in Gosfilmofond’s possession; repeated attempts over the years to contact them for verification went unanswered, including one made in 2005 on behalf of Sedona Monthly by Kevin Brownlow, the pre-eminent historian and preservationist of the silent film era.

You Can’t Please Everyone

2010-11-01T08:49:00.000-07:00

Claiming Warner Bros.’ Mission to Moscow “is a lie by the GPU” (the Soviet state security organization), members of the Socialist Labor Party picket in front of Chicago’s Roosevelt Theater on June 16, 1943. Four years later, Mission to Moscow was one of three Hollywood films targeted as pro-Soviet propaganda by the House Committee on Un-American Activities. It was produced by Robert Buckner, who also made the filmed-in-Sedona Cheyenne with Jane Wyman, who was married at the time to Ronald Reagan. Ironically, it was testifying in October 1947 before HUAC investigating communist influence in the motion picture industry that Reagan began developing the political persona and contacts that would lead him to the California governorship in 1966.––Joe McNeill

Redhead Alert, Part 2

2010-10-25T10:13:00.000-07:00

Rhonda Fleming starred in two westerns filmed in Sedona – The Eagle and the Hawk (1950) and The Redhead and the Cowboy (1951). In part two of our edited 2007 chat, the 1950s’ movie queen recalls working with John Payne, Glenn Ford and Ronald Reagan, her problem with horses, and the charitable causes she’s made her focus in recent years. For more on Rhonda's life and work, visit her Website at www.rhondafleming.com.––Joe McNeill

JM: You made quite a few pictures with [Eagle and the Hawk costar] John Payne.

RHONDA FLEMING: I did four films with him. I think The Eagle and the Hawk was the first. I did Tennessee’s Partner [1955] with John and Ronnie [Reagan], who was just a wonderful, nice actor when I worked with him. [Fleming and Reagan made four movies together in the 1950s] We had some wonderful love scenes. I had no idea I was kissing the 40th President of the United States!

In looking back, I recognize the peacemaker he was to become. In one of our films together, as we were rehearsing a scene, the director for some reason became very rude to me. Whatever he said upset me terribly – I started to cry and had to go to my dressing room and my makeup was ruined. I’d never had that happen in my life. Pretty soon, Ronnie came around and said “Rhonda, just put yourself together – I’ve taken care of it and he’ll never act like that again.” He did it in such a quiet, nice way. I returned to the set and [the director] never behaved like that to me again.

Fleming with Eagle and Hawk co-star John Payne.

You were friendly with Glenn Ford, your Redhead and the Cowboy co-star; what was it like to work with him?

Oh, Glenn and I were just wonderful friends. He was great to work with. We remained friends for years, and even now I’m friends with his son, Peter, his wife, and their daughter. Glenn and I had kind of a little crush on each other – he was a darling guy.

You appeared in a number of Westerns: were you experienced on a horse?

No, I wasn’t. My mother got me a beautiful English riding outfit when I was little; she just forgot to give me the training on a horse. We went to the stables down in Malibu with a young boy who wanted to go horseback riding. They saw me in my riding outfit and must have thought I knew what I was doing, so I got a pretty strong horse. We started out and the boy’s horse just took off and ran, and my horse took off after this kid’s horse. I’m hanging on for dear life when all of a sudden the horse veers to the left and begins galloping as fast as he can with my foot stuck in the stirrup and dragging me along. The next thing I know, I’m waking up in someone’s car after having been knocked unconscious. I was petrified, and my clothes were torn and I remember the young boy looking for me and making me get back on the horse to ride back to the stables.

I looked good on a horse [on screen], but the horses knew better. [On a movie set,] you didn’t have time to get to know the horse and the horse didn’t have time to get to know you. You just got on. I remember one time a horse took off with me on him; I was side-saddled, and everybody’s trying to catch me. I stayed on that time, but the horse kept wanting to get rid of me on a tree somewhere. I love horses, they are so beautiful, but I never want to get on one again.

For many years now, you've been focused on charitable work; please tell me a little about the cancer center you founded at UCLA.

Charitable work is where my heart is. My sister and her husband both died of cancer. She lived with me after he passed away. When she was diagnosed, I called [industrialist] Armand Hammer and asked where can I take her to get the help she needs. He lined it all up for me at UCLA. When we got there, I saw such a need there for a place where women and their families could go to find some peace and some help. I started the Rhonda Fleming Clinic for Women’s Comprehensive Care at UCLA, and about a year later we opened the Rhonda Fleming Resource Center for Women with Cancer. Back then, doctors would not give you any hope, they’d say there’s no more that we can do for you, you have to go home and die. I went all over UCLA and said, Don’t you ever say that! You’re never going to say that again! We’re there for them, you send them to us. My sister said to me before she died, “Honey, always make it a place for hope.” Those were her last words to me and that is what we did.

Redhead Alert, Part 1

2010-10-18T16:05:00.000-07:00

1950s movie queen Rhonda Fleming made her mark in Hollywood quickly, turning heads with her first high-profile role in Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound in 1945, followed by striking character roles in enduring thrillers The Spiral Staircase in 1946, and Out of the Past in 1947. Lead roles in films with Bing Crosby and Bob Hope followed, and she’s been Hollywood royalty ever since. She starred in two westerns in Sedona – The Eagle and the Hawk (1950) and The Redhead and the Cowboy (1951). I chatted with her in 2007 about how she went from jittery teen running late for school to a featured role in a Hitchcock classic. For more on her life and ongoing charitable works, visit her Website at www.rhondafleming.com.––Joe McNeill

JM: Your “discovery” is the stuff of Hollywood legend; is the story true?

RHONDA FLEMING: It’s a Cinderella story. I was about 15, 16 years old. It was early in the morning, there wasn’t anybody around. I was running because I was late for school in Beverly Hills. I noticed a big black car with a man inside who kept looking at me. It scared the heck out of me, and I ran faster. By the third block he got out and I froze. He came up to me and said, “Young lady” – and this sounds so silly now, but it’s exactly what he said – “have you ever thought of being in motion pictures?” I said, “No sir, I haven’t and I’m late for school.” Mother warned me about men like that! [Laughing] So I said, “I have to go.” He asked “Where do you live?” I said, “I live with my mother.” I told him the address, and I ran. By the time I got home he’d already been to see my mother. The man was Henry Willson, a very famous agent. In those days an agent would find a “would-be/could-be” actress or actor, get them under contract, and get their ten percent. Later, Henry became David O. Selznick’s right arm. He called me and said, “I want you to meet Mr. Selznick.” I didn't know who Mr. Selznick was. Of course, I was to learn he made some of the biggest pictures ever.

Like Gone With the Wind...

I have to give Henry all the credit, because he saw something in me I didn’t even know I had. I went to meet Mr. Selznick, he asked me a few questions, and I left. About a week later, Henry called and said they wanted me to do a cold reading. They handed me a paper and I read the lines. Then he said they’d probably want to give me a screen test.

This is so funny. We went down to the commissary for lunch; I was wearing a cute little skirt with a little off-the-shoulder blouse. Pretty soon a group of men came in and sat at a table. I was trying to eat, but they all kept looking at me. I said to Henry, “I can’t eat [with them staring].”

He said, “Just keep eating…keep eating.”

“Well, what are they looking at?”

“Just keep eating…”

Pretty soon, they got up, came over to us and one man leaned down and whispered into Henry’s ear. Afterward, I asked Henry what the man said. He told Henry, “Never mind the screen test, we’ll just sign her.”

Later, Henry called me and said, “Well, you've got your first part.”

I said, “I did? Well, what is it?”

“It's a film called Spellbound and you are going to have a top featured role with Ingrid Bergman and Gregory Peck. You’re going to play a nymphomaniac." What on earth did they see in me?

I didn't even know what a nymphomaniac was. My mother had to look it up in the dictionary! From a cute, youthful summer outfit, they saw a nymphomaniac? Maybe it was the way I read the lines. I don’t know. But Spellbound was incredible. The part was strong and ahead of its time. It was a great start for my career and I went on to make over 40 films.

‘Arrow’ Misses the Point

2010-10-12T14:28:00.000-07:00

Over the years, the multiple working titles of the obscure 1952 shoot ‘em up Flaming Feather have been a source of confusion to a bunch of well-meaning but misguided Sedona filmographers. At various times during its planning and production, the film ultimately released by Paramount Pictures as Flaming Feather was known as Canyon Diablo, Devil’s Canyon, and Fort Savage. Almost 60 years later, those temporary names still haunt, and distort, Sedona movie history.

A contributor to the Internet Movie Database picked up on a connection between the title Devil’s Canyon and Sedona, but wrongly assumed it meant the 1953 Howard Hughes-produced 3-D Western with that name was filmed here. Not so – it was almost entirely shot on a Hollywood soundstage. Similarly, the Sedona Heritage Museum’s error-riddled filmography wrongly lists the 1947 Red Ryder series “B” western Rustlers of Devil’s Canyon, which was filmed entirely in California, as a local product.

At least two online filmographies compiled by amateur Sedona movie buffs list Fort Savage and Flaming Feather as two different movies made in the area (one also mistakenly lists The Bowie Knife, the working title of 1950’s Comanche Territory, as a separate film). The simple fact is, no Hollywood sound film has ever been released by the name Fort Savage; the closest match is the 1951 Durango Kid “B” western Fort Savage Raiders – which has no Sedona connection.

But the most lasting, glaring misrepresentation of Flaming Feather dates back to its erroneous listing as “Flaming Arrow” in a May 1959 Arizona Highways story about Sedona’s movie history. This mistake was formalized with the naming of the street “Flaming Arrow Way” in the Sedona West subdivision, where roads such as Johnny Guitar St., Pony Soldier Rd., and Last Wagon Dr. honor Westerns made in the vicinity. For the record, no movie filmed in Sedona – or anywhere else in the talkie era – was ever released with the name “Flaming Arrow.”––Joe McNeill

Touched by an 'Angel'

2010-10-06T13:15:00.000-07:00

Behind the Scenes Photo Number Two: It’s hard to overstate the significance of John Wayne’s 1946 visit to Sedona to film Angel and the Badman, which helped give life to the Sedona Lodge movie camp (the only permanent complex ever built in the United States specifically to service movie companies on remote location), and left the town a Western street set, two keys to the boom years of local movie production to follow.

Pictured above is Angel’s key personnel on location in Sedona. From left: Cameraman Archie Stout, producer-star John Wayne, second unit director Yakima Canutt, and director James Edward Grant.

Film Rouge (Rocks) No. 3

2010-10-02T08:24:00.000-07:00

While the bulk of Desert Fury’s exteriors were filmed in Sedona and other scenic spots around northern Arizona (with a quick detour to Palmdale, California, for a short bronc riding sequence), most principal photography took place on Paramount soundstages in the City of Angels. Which makes this staged promotional still (the kind of lurid hoopla studios don’t produce anymore, but should) an entirely appropriate peek at the over-the top tone of the movie. That’s John Hodiak on the receiving end of a whack from Burt Lancaster, with film noir goddess Lizabeth Scott being restrained by Wendell Corey.––Joe McNeill

Maureen O’Hara Jumped Out of the 'Saddle'

2010-09-27T19:41:00.000-07:00

When RKO Radio Pictures began promoting its upcoming films for the 1944 season, Maureen O’Hara was announced as John Wayne’s Tall In The Saddle co-star (this ad spread from the studio's exhibitor book confirms it). But by the time shooting began, O’Hara was out and Ella Raines was in as the female lead. Tall, shot partially on location in Sedona, would have been the first teaming of the soon-to-be legendary screen couple; they eventually made five films together, starting with Rio Grande in 1950 and ending with 1971’s Big Jake.––Joe McNeill

Sedona Movie Alert!

2010-09-25T18:28:00.000-07:00

Blood on the Moon launched Robert Wise onto the “A” list of Hollywood film directors in 1948. The Western noir starring Robert Mitchum gave the Sedona terrain a darkly sinister look, though some credit must go to Mother Nature, who sent in the ominous clouds that provided the familiar scenery a chill unique in its on-screen history.

Co-starring Barbara Bel Geddes, Robert Preston, Phyllis Thaxter and Walter Brennan, Blood on the Moon will air on Turner Classic Movies September 28 at 4 a.m. Eastern Time.

Mrs. Hopalong Cassidy

2010-09-23T19:20:00.000-07:00

Grace Bradley Boyd stepped off a train in Flagstaff on July 15, 1937, having just barely missed out on a rare treat in those days – a Sedona honeymoon. Greeting her at the station was her husband of five weeks, actor William Boyd – better known to a legion of young fans as cowboy hero Hopalong Cassidy – who had just spent six days filming scenes for his 14th Hoppy picture, Texas Trail, at Foxboro Ranches, which sat on a rim above Sedona’s Schnebly Hill.

Mrs. Boyd was sparkling and mischievous during a memorable 2005 phone interview about Texas Trail that turned into a three-hour chat covering, among other things, Brooklyn, kids, home invasions, and the benefits of a Tai Chi workout. She died at age 97 on September 21, 2010. Here’s a sampling of some of the many things Grace Bradley Boyd told me that afternoon.––Joe McNeill

"Bill had a career of marrying his leading ladies; I was number 5. He said to me, 'Why didn’t you grow up a little faster, it would have saved me an awful lot of trouble!' And I said, 'Well, I grew up as fast as I could!'

"I fell in love with him when I was 12 years old and saw him in The Volga Boatman. We only knew each other three weeks when we married. We met and he proposed on the third night. But we had to wait three weeks because he was that far away from getting a divorce. In those days, it was a year. It turned out we were married on his birthday, June 5th 1937; he was on a picture, Hopalong Rides Again. And when it came out in the papers that we were married, they headlined the story with the title of the picture, Hopalong Rides Again. Everybody said, 'Oh my God!' because they didn’t even know we knew each other.

"People said it wouldn’t last six months, but of course, it turned out to be just perfect. We were married 35 years and were only separated two nights, and both times he had very serious accidents. So he said, 'OK, that’s it. I’m not going to go for that third time!' So I stayed real close.

"Judith Allen [Texas Trail's leading lady] was at Paramount when I was, but I didn’t know her too well. When I first came out to California from New York in ‘33, they picked me up in Pasadena and took me right to the studio and ushered me into Cecil B. DeMille’s office; DeMille was casting for this picture he was going to do about a young girl coming into womanhood (This Day and Age, 1933). So he was insisting upon hiring a virgin. Well, I had come out with my teddy bear and my mother!

"He sat me down and looked at me and said, 'No. You don’t look like a virgin. I see you on a couch with a tiger skin and two Nubian slaves, one on each side, both with a big fan.' I said, 'Oh, sure!' I did not get that part, but DeMille did pick Judith to be the virgin. Then it came out, maybe a few weeks later, that she was married to the top professional wrestler at the time!”

‘Stay Away’ WAS a Play

2010-09-20T10:21:00.000-07:00

Elvis Presley made his comeback in Las Vegas but he had a comedown in Sedona, where most of Stay Away, Joe, arguably the bottom of the barrel of his film career, was shot in 1967. The most unfortunate side effect of decades of critical trash talk is that the movie hides one of the most beautiful Sedona moments ever filmed: The main title sequence features Elvis singing “Stay Away” while you see a breathtaking aerial sweep over the open spaces and jagged peaks of the red rock landscape play out on the screen.

But Elvis’ flop Sedona film was a flop on the Great White Way first. When I reported that the novel Stay Away, Joe previously had been the basis of a Broadway bomb entitled Whoop-Up, some people accused me of putting them on. As this theatrical footnote has rarely ever been acknowledged in accounts of the movie, I was challenged to provide proof; after much coast-to-coast rummaging, behold the Whoop-Up smoking gun: a Playbill from Jan. 12, 1959.

Somewhat familiar names involved in the musical comedy included Ralph Young as Joe (the role later played by Elvis), who would go on to co-star in sexploitation auteur Doris Wishman’s Blaze Starr Goes Nudist in 1960 before gaining renown in Vegas and supper clubs as half of the duo Sandler and Young; and Norman Gimbel, who would later compose the themes for TV’s Happy Days and Laverne and Shirley.

Alas, despite the bounding enthusiasm of the “Native American” chorus boys you see on the Playbill cover, the show closed after only 56 performances. If I hear about any 52nd anniversary celebrations in January 2011, I’ll let you know. In the meantime, there’s a full account of this long-forgotten Broadway dud in the Stay Away, Joe chapter of Arizona’s Little Hollywood.––Joe McNeill

Kevin McCarthy: A Flashback to 'Horseback'

2010-09-14T17:10:00.000-07:00

Smug murderer Tom Bannerman (Kevin McCarthy, right) taunts crusading Judge Thorne (Joel McCrea) in Stranger on Horseback.

Actor Kevin McCarthy passed away on September 11, 2010 at age 96. His film career began with an Oscar nomination for his first major big-screen role in 1951’s Death of a Salesman, and by 1956 included the key performance in a defining – and enduring – sci-fi movie of the era, Invasion of the Body Snatchers. In between, in 1954, he visited Sedona to film Stranger on Horseback. Sedona Monthly spoke to him in July 2006 about the film and excerpts from that interview can be found in Arizona’s Little Hollywood. Here are a couple of things he told us that didn’t make it into the book.

KEVIN MCCARTHY I was so glad I did [Stranger on Horseback]. I got to know [lead actor Joel] McCrea, he was very gracious to me. I remember he called a producer at Fox about me [getting a part] in a film he knew about. He recommended me. [Co-star] John Carradine was something – a lot of stories he told. My agent then was Ingo Preminger, [film director] Otto's brother, and he was as nice as Otto was unnice [laughs]. Ingo, who passed away just recently, within the past month or so [Ingo Preminger died on June 7, 2006], he said, well, Mr. McCrea is recommending you for a part in a film at Fox, I was working for a Fox subsidiary at the time, and so I went and talked to the people at Fox. And they said [to Ingo], “No, no! McCarthy? No, we don't think he's right.”
So, Ingo says, “What do you mean he's not right? Joel McCrea thinks he’s terrific.”
“Yes, but he didn't get the girl.”
“What do you mean he didn't get the girl?”
“He didn't get the girl in Death of a Salesman.”
And Ingo says, “There isn't any girl in Death of a Salesman!”
“Just the same, he didn't get her.”
They’d decided I wasn't the romantic type. So I didn't get the job.

SEDONA MONTHLY: You mentioned that you weren’t familiar with Stranger on Horseback director Jacques Tourneur prior to working with him, but what did you think of him when you began working with him?

Well, I guess I didn't think much against him. And I didn't think, Gosh, this guy's brilliant. He was a worker there and we were all working together, and trying to make the most of it. I haven't seen the film in a long time. I didn't know at the time that he was a famous French director – I was pretty much a new guy, it was my second, maybe third picture, I did Drive a Crooked Road (1954) with Mickey Rooney, and Stranger on Horseback it seems to me was maybe the next one.

Republic Pictures Celebrates 75 Years

2010-09-10T14:59:00.000-07:00

Forget MGM – how many tapdancers have you noticed bucking and winging across the screens of your local multiplex lately? The Golden Age movie studio that has really had the biggest influence on modern-day Hollywood is Republic Pictures, the legendary B-picture factory once located in the Studio City district of Los Angeles’ San Fernando Valley. Republic specialized in pop escapism decades before the phrase “summer blockbuster” was invented, mass-producing a steady stream of serials, Westerns, action adventures, sci-fi flicks, mysteries, melodramas and yes, even musicals, between the mid-1930s and the late-1950s. In that dinosaur era before computers and green screens, Republic’s films boasted the best special effects in the business; and in 1941 the studio even made the first live-action movie based on a comic book superhero, The Adventures of Captain Marvel. But it wasn’t all explosions, masked heroes and cliffhangers. Republic had more sedate moments, too, releasing critical darlings like Orson Welles’ Macbeth (1948) and John Ford’s The Quiet Man (1952).

The “Thrill Factory” has faded into history, but on Sept. 25 movie fans will have the rare opportunity to walk where cowboys Gene Autry and Roy Rogers rode when the Cultural Affairs Committee of the Studio City Neighborhood Council and Museum of the San Fernando Valley salute the 75th anniversary of Republic Pictures with a celebration on its former lot, now CBS Studio Center.

The Republic Pictures lot, circa the early 1950s.

The festivities will include appearances by Republic stars Adrian Booth, Anne Jeffreys, Hugh O'Brian, Jane Withers and Theodore Bikel; screenings of classic Republic films; stunt shows; fast-draw demonstrations; rope twirlers; trick horses; lectures; book signings; live musical performances and on-site cancellation of the United States Postal Service’s Cowboys of the Silver Screen commemorative postage stamps. Best of all, admission to the shindig is free. John Wayne, Republic’s biggest contract star, would have been mighty pleased.

The 40-acre Republic/CBS Studio Center lot has seen its fair share of Hollywood history. Opened in 1928 as Mack Sennett Studios, it was built by the King of Comedy as an assembly line to churn out two-reel slapstick shorts. Sennett went bankrupt five years later, and the property became an independent production facility for low-budget filmmakers. Mascot Pictures, which specialized in Saturday matinee serials like The Phantom Empire (1935), took over most of the space and the lot became known as Mascot Studios.

In 1935, Mascot merged with three other Poverty Row companies along with film-processing laboratory Consolidated Film Industries to form Republic Pictures. Over the next 25 years, 1,081 features, serials, animated cartoons, short subjects and training films were produced on studio grounds, some even starring A-listers like Errol Flynn, Barbara Stanwyck, Myrna Loy and Robert Mitchum.

Sedona and Republic are historically joined at the hip. In 1946, the studio built a Western street set for John Wayne’s Angel and the Badman near Coffee Pot Rock that was left standing at the end of filming and became a major enticement for other companies to shoot their movies there. The Fabulous Texan, a Republic A-Western starring B-cowboy William Elliott, was partially photographed around the area in 1947 and was soon followed by a pair of experimental two-day location shoots Republic saw as a way to keep production values high and costs low for its mid-budget Western opuses, Hellfire and Singing Guns.

Without question, the greatest collaboration between Republic and Sedona was Johnny Guitar, Nicholas Ray’s over-the-top 1954 Truecolor Western starring adversaries Joan Crawford and Mercedes McCambridge. The film, a critical dud when originally released, is now considered a masterpiece and listed on the Library of Congress’ National Film Registry as an American cultural treasure.

Despite its later acclaim, by 1963 Republic was under siege. CBS leased the studio lot from the ailing company, which by then was reduced to surviving by renting its old film library to TV stations, and the lot was formally renamed CBS Studio Center. (The network bought the property in 1967.) Today, CBS Studio Center is one of the busiest sitcom production facilities in Los Angeles.

CBS Studio Center is one of the few lots in Hollywood that doesn’t offer tours, and it isn’t open to the public. So don’t miss this rare opportunity to celebrate the late, great Republic Pictures on its home turf. Who knows? You might have to hang on for 75 years to get another chance – and time is the only cliffhanger with no chance of an escape.

Director Nicholas Ray (kneeling) and Joan Crawford check out Johnny Guitar’s script during filming at Republic studio.

Republic Pictures’ 75th Anniversary Celebration will take place Sept. 25 from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. at CBS Studio Center, 4024 Radford Ave., in Studio City, Calif. Admission is free. For more info, call the Studio City Neighborhood Council at 818-655-5400, e-mail republicpictures75@gmail.com or visit www.republicpictures75th.com.

Rocky Road to Rome

2010-09-03T08:04:00.000-07:00

Obsessiveness, madness, and an immoral female hellbent on destruction were the signature themes of film noir, and in 1945’s Leave Her To Heaven (“the first psychological drama to be shot in color”), Gene Tierney, the woman Darryl F. Zanuck once called the most beautiful in movie history, earned her only Best Actress Oscar nomination for portraying a sociopath with a deep-rooted Oedipal complex. After World War II, American films made during the conflict received belated distribution in Europe, and Leave Her To Heaven finally reached overseas screens in 1948. This Italian photobusta boasts a stunning view from Sedona’s Schnebly Hill; the title literally translated means “Crazy Female.”

John M. Stahl’s Leave Her To Heaven, starring Gene Tierney, Cornel Wilde, and Jeanne Crain, will air on Turner Classic Movies September 10 at 10 p.m. Eastern Time.

Champion of the West

2010-08-25T19:44:00.000-07:00

Marge Champion is on the fence with Bob Baker in Honor of the West.

91 year-old dance legend Marge Champion will join Turner Classic Movies host Robert Osborne in Sedona to present George Sidney’s Show Boat on September 7 as part of the Sedona International Film Festival’s Living Legends series. Ms. Champion, an acclaimed choreographer, director, teacher and actress, is perhaps best known for working as a dancing team with her former husband, Gower Champion, and the duo will be seen tripping the light fantastic in the 1951 MGM adaption of Jerome Kern’s classic musical play showing in Sedona. My colleague, Erika Ayn Finch, had the chance to interview Ms. Champion before her visit and they discussed, among other things, her early film work for Walt Disney Studios as live action model for the title character in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), the Blue Fairy in Pinocchio (1940) and the ballet dancing hippopotamus in Fantasia (1942). You can read the interview in the September issue of Sedona Monthly, on sale at Barnes and Noble, Borders Books, and independent booksellers across the country.

I couldn’t resist asking Erika to include a few questions for Ms. Champion about the most obscure job of her distinguished career, playing the heroine in Honor of the West, a 1939 B-Western starring forgotten singing cowboy Bob Baker. Billed as Marjorie Bell (she was born Marjorie Celeste Belcher), the seventeen year-old Champion had her first credited movie role in the picture, which was filmed on location in Kernville, California, about three hours north of Los Angeles.

Bob Baker (left) and Forrest Taylor
defend the Honor of the West.

Her ridin’, ropin’, vocalizin’ leading man, Bob Baker, had been a singer on WLS’ Chicago-based National Barn Dance radio show in 1935 (billed as “Tumble” Weed; his real name was Stanley Leland Weed) and was a longtime resident of northern Arizona. He’d been employed in the license division of the Arizona State Highway Department and worked for “Shirley’s Cowboy Guides and Entertainers” at the Grand Canyon prior to going to Hollywood in 1937.

Baker starred in twelve B Westerns for Universal Pictures (and was demoted to Johnny Mack Brown’s second banana for a final six); after playing a few small roles for Monogram and United Artists he quit the movies in 1944 and returned to Flagstaff to work as a police officer. Baker died in 1975 and is buried in Clear Creek Cemetery in Camp Verde, Arizona, about 40 miles from Sedona.––Joe McNeill

ERIKA AYN FINCH: How were you cast in Honor of the West?

MARGE CHAMPION: I had just graduated from Hollywood High School and had a great friend, one of [character actor] Fred Stone’s daughters, and they had a friend named Henry Willson, who was an agent. He took me on because he said I was right for certain kinds of movies. He sent me out to Universal to audition for Honor of the West. And I was terrible. I was 17 and had no acting experience except through pantomime and dancing. Its a hilarious movie but not because it’s any good (laughing).

You’ve seen the movie?

Oh, yes! They’ve shown it at Film Forum [a repertory movie house in New York City] and a few other places and I’m always embarrassed. They invite me to come and talk about it.

Why didn’t you make another Western?

Because I was not exactly trained in horsemanship (laughing). I went over to Griffith Park and took six horseback riding lessons when I knew I had the part.

In the movie I had to lead the posse to rescue the hero, which was kind of a twist, but I was nearly brushed off the horse on the very first day of shooting. They gave me the fastest horse and it was sheer terror. If not for one of the extremely talented cowboys who saw what was going to happen I wouldn’t be here to tell the tale. That was the only time a second shot was taken by the director [George Waggner] because they never took more than one.

In the film Bob Baker never takes his hat off, the reason being that he didn’t have any hair. I had only seen him on the set with his hat on and when I met him in the evening (everybody had supper together) he had his hat off and I didn’t know who he was!

Do you have any other memories of Bob Baker?

No, I never saw him again. He did quite a few of those one week [Westerns] and he would have a different leading lady every week.

He made three pictures in three weeks and it took seven days to make that picture. The scripts were done just about as fast as they do a television show now. They were filmed on location with not one indoor shot. And you had to supply your own jeans or whatever costume you had to wear. In those days they didn’t make girls’ jeans so I had to buy boys’ jeans, the kind with the buttons on the wrong side––I still have them, as a matter of fact. You learn some things along the way and one thing I learned is that if you’re not right for Western movies you’d better stick to what you know how to do. Copyright © by Bar 225 Media Ltd.

That’s My Pup!

2010-08-23T07:48:00.000-07:00

Behind the Scenes Photo Number One: Bright-eyed and bushy-haired Marion Morrison––who was just starting to answer to the name “John Wayne”––gladhands a pooch he and Marguerite Churchill (his first-ever screen leading lady) chanced to encounter while strolling the Fox Movietone lot with a publicity cameraman in 1930. Wayne and Churchill, reportedly an item at the time, were toplining Raoul Walsh’s The Big Trail, which did some location filming at the Grand Canyon. Three years later Churchill married actor George O’Brien, who starred in four Westerns filmed in Sedona.––Joe McNeill

Sedona Movie Alert!

2010-08-19T06:40:00.001-07:00

Catch a film featuring our red rock scenery on TV: The Strawberry Roan (1948, filmed in Sedona) starring Gene Autry, Gloria Henry and Jack Holt; directed by John English. Airing on Encore Westerns August 22 and August 25 at 12 p.m. Eastern time.

Republic Pictures Birthday Bash

2010-08-14T16:30:00.000-07:00

The Republic lot in the 1950s. Photograph courtesy of Marc Wanamaker, Bison Archives

Don’t miss this one! The Cultural Affairs Committee of the Studio City Neighborhood Council and the Museum of the San Fernando Valley will salute the 75th Anniversary of Republic Pictures with a free event on Saturday, September 25, 2010. The celebration will take place at the former Republic studio lot, now CBS Studio Center (4204 Radford Ave., Studio City, California) from 11 a.m.-5 p.m., and stars like Joan Leslie, Adrian Booth, Hugh O’Brien, Anne Jeffreys, Peggy Stewart, and Jane Withers are slated to attend.

The big blowout will feature screenings of Republic films, serials and trailers; memorabilia exhibitions; live performances of swing and western music, and entertainment by gun spinners, rope twirlers, trick horses and cowboy poets. There will be panels of industry experts and celebrities talking about everything from the early days of movie special effects to what it was like to work at the studio; film historian/critic Leonard Maltin will moderate one of the star panels. A special Republic Pictures commemorative cancellation for the U.S. Postal Service’s "Cowboys of the Silver Screen” stamps will be available onsite, and I’ll be there signing copies of my book Arizona’s Little Hollywood, too.

There will also be a pair of warm-up acts commemorating Republic Pictures prior to the main event in Studio City. On Sept. 15, the Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood (6712 Hollywood Blvd.; 323-466-3456) will screen a double feature of Republic films, and on Sept. 21 at 7 p.m., film historian Marc Wanamaker will give a free talk about the history of Studio City and Republic Pictures at the Studio City Library (12511 Moorpark St.; 818-755-7873).

Republic’s backlot western street. Photograph courtesy of Marc Wanamaker, Bison Archives

Founded in 1935, Republic Pictures specialized in B-movies heavy on action and adventure, the twin staples of Saturday afternoon matinees. The studio launched the careers of American icons John Wayne, Gene Autry, and Roy Rogers, and rocketed cliffhangers like 1941's The Adventures of Captain Marvel into the pop culture stratosphere during its 24 years of active production. Other classic Republic films include Under Western Stars (1938), Macbeth (1948), Sands of Iwo Jima (1949), The Quiet Man (1952), and the Sedona-filmed Johnny Guitar (1954).––Joe McNeill

Visit www.republicpictures75th.com for more information.

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Sedona Movie Alert!

2010-08-13T07:17:00.000-07:00

Catch a film featuring our red rock scenery on TV: Leave Her to Heaven (1945, filmed in Sedona, Flagstaff and Prescott) starring Gene Tierney, Cornel Wilde and Jeanne Crain; directed by John M. Stahl. Airing on Turner Classic Movies August 14 at 8 p.m. Eastern time.

Republic Tries to Draw Kids to the Matinee

2010-08-09T08:13:00.000-07:00

To promote 1950’s Singing Guns, Republic Pictures had crooning star Vaughn “Old Leather Tonsils” Monroe pitch cereal in an ad that ran in Sunday Comics sections and urged theater managers to hold coloring contests for kids with art that prominently featured Sedona’s red rocks. Prior to taming the celluloid West, Monroe scored Hit Parade smashes with “Mule Train,” “Riders in the Sky,” and the traditional campfire ditty “Let it Snow! Let it Snow! Let it Snow!”––Joe McNeill