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

Total Pre-Call, Part 2

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

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

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

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

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

Total Pre-Call, Part 1

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

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


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

Shirley, You’re Mistaken...

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

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

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

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

Girl Fearless of Tomorrow

Cecilia Parker in cheesecake still promoting Universal Pictures' serial The Jungle Mystery.

“If anything should happen to make me drop out of pictures right now, I feel as though I would be much ahead of the game for the experience I’ve had. Of course, I hope to be able to carry on for some years yet. But there is no telling when one’s picture life will come to an end. And when mine comes, I won’t cry––I will be glad to have had a taste of it.

“The first thing I would do if I were forced out of pictures would be to look for a job in an office. I believe the poise and experience I have acquired in pictures would be of help to me in getting a such a job, too. Poise is just as important in an office as anywhere else, although most girls don’t seem to consider it so."––Actress Cecilia Parker quoted in a newspaper interview published on May 10, 1932, a few days after she completed Sedona location work for Fox Film’s Mystery Ranch. Ms. Parker made her credited movie debut seven months earlier in Zane Grey's  The Rainbow Trail, the Grand Canyon-filmed sequel to the photographed-in-Sedona Riders of the Purple Sage. All three Westerns starred George O’Brien. In a joint TV interview fifty years later, both Parker and O’Brien recalled that the 17 year-old neophyte actress had an on-set tutor while filming Rainbow Trail. They were probably referring to Fox’s staff acting coach Minna Gombell, who was also a member of Rainbow Trail’s cast and went on location in the Grand Canyon with them.