Paid Sedona Vacation

Ernest Borgnine, Ben Cooper, Frank Marlowe, Royal Dano, Joan Crawford, and Scott Brady in Johnny Guitar (1954).

An unpublished pearl of wisdom from Johnny Guitar co-star Ben Cooper, from a 2004 interview for my book Arizona’s Little Hollywood:

Joe McNeill: “Johnny Guitar may be the greatest film ever made in Sedona, but it was a rather unhappy set – did you think it would turn out so well?”

Ben Cooper: “I was just 20 years old. I had my own horse when I was 12 and didn’t know they had stuntmen in movies. So I used to practice so I could do some of the crazy things they did on horses. Now here I was, 20 years old, working on a Western movie, riding the same horse that Alan Ladd rode in the movie Shane – and they were paying me! Can you picture this kid being unhappy? Not a bit!”––Joe McNeill

G’Day…Now Go Away

In November 1995, the Australian Film Censorship Board banned screenings of Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man, which was shot a year earlier in the Coconino National Forest, Sedona and Peaks Ranger District. The restriction, Australia’s first ban of an English language film since 1986’s Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, was pinned on a four-second scene that the Australian Senate Select Com­mittee on Community Stan­dards, a self-appointed body of representatives, tastefully described as “implicitly coerced” sex. The film, which starred Johnny Depp, had no such problems elsewhere, showing uncut all over the world and receiving an R rating in the U.S. Australia’s Classification Review Board subsequently overturned the ban, finding that the scene “was necessary to the narrative” and “not exploitative.” This was not the first time a Sedona-made film ran afoul of censors abroad. Both Gun Fury, a 1953 3-D western starring Rock Hudson and Donna Reed, and Shotgun, a 1955 cowboy potboiler starring Sterling Hayden and Yvonne DeCarlo, were banned in Finland for violent content.––Joe McNeill