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

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

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

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

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

Arizona’s Little Hollywood includes numerous revelations about moviemaking in northern Arizona. The book tells the story behind Der Kaiser von Kalifornien, a German-language anti-American Nazi propaganda Western filmed in Sedona in 1935, as well as the true history of filmmaking in Monument Valley including the most detailed account ever published of John Ford’s Stagecoach.––Erika Ayn Finch. Originally published in the June 2010 issue of Sedona Monthly

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