Sedona's Citizen Welles, Part 3

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

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

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

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

Did your mom consider coming back to Sedona? 

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

She painted, right? 

She was very artistic.

Did she paint Sedona? 

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

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

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

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

No, only Carefree and Los Angeles.

Did he ever mention the possibility of shooting in Sedona?

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

You all three left Sedona at the same time?

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

Did he ever express any regrets about leaving?

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

Did he ever return to visit?

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

Did you have any involvement in his film projects? 

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

You didn’t appear in any other films? 

No.

But you modeled.

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

What did your father think of the modeling? 

He was fine with it.

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

Sedona's Citizen Welles, Part 2

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

'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

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.’ ”

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.

Total Pre-Call, Part 10

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

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

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

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

Total Pre-Call, Part 9

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

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

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

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

Total Pre-Call, Part 8

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

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

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

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

Total Pre-Call, Part 7

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

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

Total Pre-Call, Part 6

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

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

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

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

Total Pre-Call, Part 5

Lois Wilson and Richard Dix on location at Tonto Basin.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Total Pre-Call, Part 4

Lois Wilson in costume for To the Last Man.

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

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

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

“‘Not at all,’ I told him bravely.

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

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

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

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

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

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