Trail to Lone Pine

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.

Monumental Pictures, Part 2

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

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

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

Old Tucson Studios––Arizona's BIG Hollywood

“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

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.

Love, the Second and Third Time Around

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.

Love on the Rocks?

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

Touched by an 'Angel'

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.

Maureen O’Hara Jumped Out of the 'Saddle'

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

Republic Pictures Celebrates 75 Years

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.

That’s My Pup!

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

Untrue West

The Criterion Collection’s Blu-ray release of John Ford’s Stagecoach is a keeper––the film looks better than it has in decades and the disc comes fully loaded with a strongbox full of terrific special features. Unfortunately, the old hash about John Ford’s “discovery” of what would become his favorite filming location is reheated once again in the ironically titled video supplement True West: Harry Goulding and Monument Valley.

You know the story: Indian trader Goulding, worried by the plight of his starving Navajo friends, drives 650 miles to Los Angeles in a rickety old pickup truck––much of the trip on bumpy, unpaved dirt roads, mind you––armed with snapshots of the completely unknown Monument Valley to insist that Ford shoot his new Western there. Ford immediately snaps at the bait, flying pronto to Arizona with a crew of dozens of people–– in one version of the tale he even beat Goulding back to Monument Valley––to heroically save the Navajo and create an iconic American movie location.




At least that's the way it happened inside the brain of an ingenious studio flack. After spending more than seven years delving into the movies made in northern Arizona I haven’t uncovered a shred of proof that Harry Goulding had anything more to do with Stagecoach than renting the basement of his trading post as dorm room for a handful of crew laborers. Ford and the movie’s other top dogs didn’t even bunk in Monument Valley during filming, they stayed at the actual base of operations, the Wetherill and Colville Trading Post and Lodge in Kayenta, twenty-five miles away. So if Harry Goulding brought together John Ford and Monument Valley, why wasn’t his trading post leased as company headquarters? That seems to be the least Ford could have done to reward Goulding for the trouble he had allegedly taken to broker the deal. What’s more, if Goulding had played such a vital role in bringing Ford to Monument Valley, why was his Navajo rescue mission––surely a press agent's dream story––not mentioned in print until 1953, fourteen years after Stagecoach rolled into theaters and, conveniently, both Wetherill and Colville were dead?

Stagecoach is one of the great Hollywood films, written about and analyzed since the day it hit theaters in 1939, so it boggles the mind that no historian has taken the time to sniff around Flagstaff to dig up the truth about how it was created. The Coconino Sun, the town’s only newspaper in those days, covered Stagecoach‘s production from the moment Ford first came to northern Arizona to scout locations right up to its world premiere engagement––in Flagstaff, by the way, and not Los Angeles (that’s another reality long ignored by historians, but a story to save for another time).




So here are a few documentable, but less than legendary facts: In late September 1938, Flagstaff rancher Lee Doyle, who’d worked as Hollywood’s northern Arizona contact man since 1923, received a telegram from Stagecoach’s production manager asking him to help “look for locations in the Painted Desert and in Monument Valley.”

A week later The Coconino Sun reported that Ford and his associates met Doyle in Flagstaff to begin selecting locations and to make arrangements for bringing in a company of actors and technicians. Ford, Doyle and the rest of the Hollywood group checked into Wetherill and Colville’s in Kayenta; their signatures in the Lodge’s guest register, which survives in the Wetherill family archive, prove the scouting party stayed there for the remainder of their three day visit and not at Goulding’s in Monument Valley. Ford returned to Wetherill and Colville’s when filming began and he shacked there for the entire time he was on location. It's interesting to note that even though some spillover crew members were housed at his trading post, Harry Goulding wasn’t once mentioned by name during the three weeks The Coconino Sun covered Arizona filming.

There are a few other pesky details about the making of Stagecoach that have been ignored by the Ford/Goulding/Monument Valley mythologizers, including MGM records that confirm the studio had a film crew shooting second unit exteriors in Monument Valley for its Mickey Rooney sitcom Out West with the Hardys five weeks before Ford ever laid eyes on the place. What’s more, according to multiple Coconino Sun reports, Sedona was included as one of Stagecoach’s Arizona filming locations, chosen after Ford and his party made “motor trips over the Indian reservation and through Oak Creek Canyon, selecting sites for the different phases of the contemplated picture.” Sorry, movie fans, this buzz isn’t just spin–– it’s fact.––Joe McNeill

The Rex Files

Rex, a.k.a. “King of the Wild Horses,” was a lot like human movie royalty: Captivating onscreen, out of ­control off it. His name may not be on the tips of people’s tongues these days, but Rex was a Roaring Twenties superstar, the first horse to get billing over human actors and a major box office draw in the late-silent period; his biggest hit, Black Cyclone (1925), was a blockbuster that reportedly grossed the then-astonishing sum of four million dollars. But Rex was also Hollywood’s original wild child, by all accounts one cantankerous critter, and stardom never reigned in his antisocial––okay, make that psycho––personality.

Beastly Rex had a tendency to violently assault any human that got too close and sensible actors refused to go anywhere near him, even though he always had a restraining rope tied around his foreleg out of camera view while filming. Years after their encounter, one old wrangler who’d worked with the Wonder Horse sputtered with awe, “I seen him throw an actor twen’y feet, once, an’ then tear his clothes right off him with his teeth!” Legendary stuntman Yakima Canutt, who had a chunk of his face removed by Rex while filming The Devil Horse in 1926, remembered his co-star as “a big, beautiful well-trained black, but every so often he would get mad and try to kill anyone near him.”

Rex was the blue-ribbon celeb in the movie livestock company owned by Flagstaff rancher/studio contact man Lee Doyle that included most of his regular four-hoofed co-stars: Lady, the heroine; Marquis, the villain; Paris, suspiciously described in a contemporary press report as “the juvenile and female impersonator,” and Moe and Eva, low comedy relief burros. Rex sired four look-alike offspring and he and his family appeared in almost half the movies made in Sedona during the 1930s, low budget kid pictures like Stormy and King of the Sierras that helped keep the area on Holly­wood’s radar until more expensive “A” Westerns made a comeback at the tail end of the decade.





Doyle bought Rex from Fox Film in 1931, but the “King of Wild Horses” was no stranger to Arizona. He’d filmed Universal Pictures’ Wild Beauty in Stafford, southeast of Phoenix, in 1927, and in August 1930, Fox began shooting a remake of Tom Mix’s Just Tony that it first titled Alcatraz, then changed to Wyoming Wonder and finally to King of Wild Horses that was to team Rex with newcomer John Wayne, fresh off his first starring role in The Big Trail. Unfortunately, the Rex/Duke team-up–– the “Star Steed” had more prominent billing in trade ads than Wayne––was permanently shut down after two days of second unit filming in Flagstaff.

Three years later, Rex had the lead in another picture titled King of the Wild Horses that has long been listed by some Sedona movie buffs as part of the area filmography––a few amateur historians even name local beauty spot Red Rock Crossing as a specific location site––but solid evidence that the Wild Horses production spent any time in Sedona has yet to surface. On the contrary, contemporary newspaper reports, Columbia Pictures’ publicity materials, and the American Film Institute Catalog all say that King of the Wild Horses was filmed on locations north of Flagstaff, primarily on the Navajo and Hopi reservations, as well as at Blue Canyon near Tuba City, and Fredonia in Coconino County. No existing print of King of the Wild Horses is available for viewing and not a single photograph or contemporary reference has been uncovered indicating any scenes from the film were shot in Sedona.




14 year-old Frankie Darro rides a chillin’ stand-in for the chilling Rex in the 1931 Mascot Pictures serial The Vanishing Legion.

Unstable Rex has been stabled in the Great Beyond since the 1940’s, but his superstardom was permanently memorialized in a kitschy painting created by child actor-turned-artist Charles de Ravenne that hung for years in the lobby of the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel in Los Angeles. Titled “Hollywood Comes to Napoleon’s Aid, ” it depicts Napoleon riding across a wheat field followed by his staff, impersonated by some of the most recognizable Hollywood VIPs of the day. Rex is portrayed as a horse of a different color, docilely carrying natty character actor Adolphe Menjou (depicted as French military commander Marshal Ney) astride him. Also in the painting is another picture show stallion with a Sedona connection, silent cowboy star Fred Thomson’s Silver King, carrying United Artists head Joseph M. Schenck as a colonel of the Cuirassiers (artist De Ravenne appeared in Thomson’s 1924 FBO Western Thundering Hoofs when he was seven years-old). Other Tinseltown notables in the painting include Douglas Fairbanks Sr., who is pictured as a member of the Hussards de la Garde; le Maréchal Sid Grauman, Hollywood’s Chinese Theatre showman; William Powell as a Napoleon aide de camp; Ronald Colman, Clive Brook, John Gilbert and Erich Von Stroheim as Grenadiers; Groucho Marx as a dead trumpeter; and Charlie Chaplin as a drunken priest, clutching a bottle of champagne and refusing a drink of brandy from vivandière Marion Davies. It’s a sure bet that in real life bad boy Rex would have been vexed by the lot of them.––Joe McNeill

Sedona Fashion Gets Back in the Saddle!

A lot has changed in Sedona, including fashion, since Zane Grey’s The Call of the Canyon was filmed in the area in 1923, but the red rock skylines aren’t really fazed by the years. While Arizona’s Little Hollywood was in the works it was exciting to find that many of the backdrops from some of Red Rock Country’s most famous films are still accessible and unimpeded by houses and strip malls – what better locations for showcasing hot Western wear? Paris and New York may have the runways, but we have the red rocks. Even our well-heeled models agreed: Nothing compares to Sedona’s natural beauty (not even the chunky turquoise jewelry that had everyone at the photo shoot making their Christmas wish lists early). So saddle up and take a look at Sedona scenery and fashion, then and now. What would you rather be wearing?––Erika Ayn Finch




Inset: George O’Brien and Noble Johnson fight to the finish in Mystery Ranch (1932, Fox Film Corp.). Photographed in Sedona in 1932.




Inset: Gene Autry (l), Dick Jones (c) and Jack Holt in The Strawberry Roan (1948, Columbia Pictures). Photographed in Sedona in 1947.




Inset: Elvis Presley and unknown starlets in a publicity shot from Stay Away, Joe (1968, MGM). Photographed in Sedona in 1967.




Inset: Randolph Scott and Dorothy Hart in Gunfighters (1947, Columbia Pictures). Filmed in Sedona in 1946.




Inset: John Wayne and Gail Russell in Angel and the Badman (1947, Republic Pictures). Filmed in Sedona in 1946.