Sedona: “The Edge of the World?”

That’s how clever studio flacks (not New Agers fearful of cataclysm in 2012) described the view from Sedona’s Schnebly Hill in the caption of this 1930 publicity still:

ON THE EDGE OF THE WORLD
George O’Brien stops on the edge of the Painted Desert to enjoy the beautiful location selected for his next Fox Film Corporation outdoor romance, adapted from the novel The Last of the Duanes by Zane Grey.

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.

Kayenta, Ariz., P.O. [was] Beside Itself With Arrival of Players

Movies weren’t the only fantasies churned out by Hollywood dream factories. Here’s a PR story issued by Fox Film (with factual annotations added) for 1930’s The Lone Star Ranger, the first sound film photographed on location in northern Arizona. A sequel released later that same year, The Last of the Duanes, would be the first talkie made in Sedona.––Joe McNeill

The most remote post office in the United States was discovered by George O’Brien and other members of the company making The Lone Star Ranger, Fox Movietone's all-talking romance of the southwest.

The post office is located in Kayenta, 175 miles from the nearest railroad station [and 26 miles from Monument Valley, where some scenes were filmed]. The postmaster is an old miner and the post office comprises four compartments in an old soap box. [The Kayenta postmaster was actually southwest explorer John Wetherill, who led the first party of white men to Rainbow Bridge in 1909 and served as first custodian of the Navajo National Monument from 1909 to 1938. He was also partner in the Wetherill and Colville Trading Post and Lodge, where the Lone Star Ranger company bunked during location filming.] While the Fox Movietone company was in that vicinity, the postmaster did a flourishing business in outgoing mail and he was one proud individual.

[Co-starring actress] Sue Carol was the only member of the company who received mail. She had two letters –– from Nick Stuart [the actor/ orchestra leader she was married to at the time; Carol would marry third husband Alan Ladd in 1942].

Another interesting discovery was made at Rainbow Arch [now known as Rainbow Bridge, it is located near Page, Ariz., in the Glen Canyon National Recreation Area]. This was a large register, encased in a metal box, set in a huge rock. The book was placed there by the Federal Government and nearby is a printed request for every visitor to register. As the Fox company numbered some 200 people, [reports published in Flagstaff’s Coconino Sun newspaper put the number at 75] they came close to filling the book.

It is interesting to record that the last visitor to register before George O’Brien and Sue Carol inscribed their names was Zane Grey [author of The Lone Star Ranger] and the one just ahead of his was Harold Bell Wright [a novelist best known for The Shepherd of the Hills; O’Brien would star in a film adaption of another of his books, When a Man’s a Man, in 1935].

They had visited the same spot some weeks before, both accompanied by several fellow travelers. Grey’s number on the register was 1175.

Will You Save Zane Grey’s The Last of the Duanes?

The Last of the Duanes star George O’Brien takes in the view from Sedona’s Schnebly Hill.

Imagine having the opportunity to step back in time and see Sedona long before its development, with nothing intruding on its stunning natural scenery for as far as the eye can see. That’s what you get in 1930’s The Last of the Duanes, the first talkie shot in Sedona and the oldest surviving Hollywood feature filmed on location in Red Rock Country. Eighty-years years later, it offers an incredible historical record of the town – if we could see a clean copy. Collectors swap weak-looking bootleg DVDs, but with a little detective work, a 35mm print of Duanes was tracked down at the George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film in Rochester, N.Y., from which a nearly pristine exhibition print of the film could be struck – if someone steps up to underwrite the costs of the final restoration work.

For years, the film was feared lost in a 1937 fire that engulfed a Twentieth Century–Fox film vault in Little Ferry, N.J., destroying the negatives of most Fox silent films and early talkies. But when the company hired British-born Alex Gordon, a producer of B-movies such as 1956’s Shake, Rattle & Rock and 1957’s Dragstrip Girl, he instituted a restoration program that located more than 30 missing Fox films, including Duanes.

In the 1960s, Gordon parceled the studio’s remaining vault materials out to various archives for preservation. The films are believed to have been divvied up among the UCLA Film and Television Archives in Los Angeles, the Museum of Modern Art in New York and Eastman House.

Caroline Yeager, an assistant curator at Eastman House, says the museum holds a restored, tinted black-and-white nitrate print, as well as an acetate and safety negative. Its holdings would yield a clean print that could be screened in a theatre with a little more cleanup work that “I would estimate would cost between $8,000 and $10,000,” Yeager said.

We ask anyone with a serious interest in underwriting the restoration of Duanes, preserving this landmark of Sedona history for the next century, to please contact us for more information at info@sedonamonthly.com.––Erika Ayn Finch