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 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.

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.