"Lightning" Deal

Smoke Lightning had a two day run at Fredonia, New York’s Winter Garden Theatre in May 1933, but the headline attraction wasn’t all-American George O’Brien. Topping the bill that week was Mussolini Speaks!, A six-reel documentary produced by Columbia Pictures and promoted with ad art showing a crowd of Blackshirts giving “today’s man of the hour” the fascist salute. Cult director Edgar G. Ulmer (Detour) reportedly worked on it as a director.

When Hollywood cowboy George O’Brien left Flagstaff for Los Angeles in October 1932, having completed three weeks of filming in and around Sedona for Robbers’ Roost, he had good reason to expect he’d be back. Before Roost’s cast and crew departed, Fox Film representatives told The Coconino Sun that David Howard (who’d directed O’Brien’s Mystery Ranch in Sedona six months earlier) was coming back soon to film the Zane Grey story Canyon Walls. Beyond that, Fox intended to shoot one or two unspecified Zane Grey stories in the area immediately afterward. Local rancher Lee Doyle was already engaged to help select locales and, as usual, handle transportation and supplies. O’Brien, whom Fox was now declaring the “most popular Western actor in pictures” had every reason to expect he’d be back on the train soon to star in one or all of these pictures.

But it didn’t turn out that way. While O’Brien did star in Canyon Walls, it wasn’t in Sedona. When the project was released on February 17, 1933, it was retitled Smoke Lightning, bore little resemblance to Grey’s story and was filmed entirely in California. Fox cameras would return to Red Rock Country, but not until almost a year later, in August 1933. And then it was not for an O’Brien/Grey western, but for Smoky, based on a best seller by cowboy author/illustrator Will James and starring Victor Jory. Given that Fox would chalk up a devastating $19.96 million loss in 1932, and surely had an inkling of that by the time the Roost company left town, it’s not such a leap to imagine that filming a low-return Western in Arizona had become a luxury Fox decided it could no longer afford; the three post-Roost Grey adaptations starring O’Brien (Smoke Lightning, Life in the Raw, and The Last Trail), were filmed entirely in California, a sign of the changes to come that would contribute to O’Brien and Fox parting ways.

Stock Answers

Richard Dix and Lois Wilson in 1925's The Vanishing American...

Between 1923 and 1928, Paramount Pictures released almost a dozen films based on Zane Grey stories that were photographed on Arizona locations, including To the Last Man, The Call of the Canyon (1923), The Heritage of the Desert (1924), The Light of Western Stars, Code of the West, Wild Horse Mesa, The Vanishing American, (1925), The Last Frontier (1926), Drums of the Desert (1927), Under the Tonto Rim, Avalanche, The Water Hole and Sunset Pass (1928). But when talkies took the movie business by storm the studio decided to cut costs by shooting its Zane Grey westerns close to home in California.

However, Paramount continued to churn out low budget movies in the 1930s based (sometimes barely) on novels written by Grey, and by cleverly stitching in footage lifted from the silents, these also appear to have sequences photographed in Arizona. Some of the film shot on location in Payson for the lost silent version of To the Last Man has survived because cash-stricken Paramount saved a few dollars during the Great Depression by recycling scenes from it for the 1933 sound remake with Randolph Scott. A few glimpses of the silent Heritage of  the Desert (filmed north of Flagstaff at Cameron) can still be seen because Paramount plundered it as economy footage for its 1939 remake.

... and Buster Crabbe wearing Dix's duds in 1936.

Even The Vanishing American, the only northern Arizona-lensed silent Grey adaption that still exists in good condition, was mined for stock. The 1936 remake of Desert Gold had star Buster Crabbe dressed identically to Vanishing’s Richard Dix, which made a reasonable enough illusion in longshot to fool unsuspecting matinee crowds into thinking that the California production had crossed the state line into Arizona.––Joe McNeill

Sedona's Citizen Welles, Part 2

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

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

Selective Short Subject

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?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Quiet on the Set!

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

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

'Kingdom of the Spiders' Reunion

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?”

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

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

“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.

'The Call of the Canyon' is Still Lost

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

Ford's Theatre

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!

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.’ ”