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

Tragic Marker

If you’re under age 70, you may think “Tom Mix” is a frozen daiquiri flavoring product, but the name actually refers to Holly­wood’s onetime top movie cowboy, who appeared in close to 300 mostly silent pictures between 1909 and 1935. By the end, Mix’s career was on the skids––he was, after all, 60 years old and a little trailworn–– and he met his maker before he ever had a chance to stage the comeback that might have finally landed him in front of a camera in Sedona.

Mix entered Stiff City in Arizona, but it wasn’t a desperado or even a fiery studio mogul that did him in. He died instantly on October 12, 1940, after plunging his open 1937 Cord Phaeton convertible into a dry wash on a lonely highway near Tucson and getting brained by his flying luggage. Remarkably, it was said that despite his violent end, Mix’s body was unmarked and his white cowboy suit unwrinkled. He would have liked that.





The spot of Mix’s demise is marked with a stone monument, topped by a two-foot-tall metal cutout of a forlorn, riderless Tony, Mix’s movie horse, dedicated by singing cowboy Gene Autry in 1947. While lacking in the majesty of, say, the Washington or Lincoln Memorials, it at least take precedence as a curiosity. Today, the Tom Mix death site is part of a highway rest area; the horse cutout was unceremoniously shot full of holes at the time of my visit. The Tom Mix Memorial is located on AZ-89, 17 miles south of Florence between mile markers 115 and 116; keep an eye open for the sign; if you blink, you’ll miss it.––Joe McNeill

The Rex Files

Rex, a.k.a. “King of the Wild Horses,” was a lot like human movie royalty: Captivating onscreen, out of ­control off it. His name may not be on the tips of people’s tongues these days, but Rex was a Roaring Twenties superstar, the first horse to get billing over human actors and a major box office draw in the late-silent period; his biggest hit, Black Cyclone (1925), was a blockbuster that reportedly grossed the then-astonishing sum of four million dollars. But Rex was also Hollywood’s original wild child, by all accounts one cantankerous critter, and stardom never reigned in his antisocial––okay, make that psycho––personality.

Beastly Rex had a tendency to violently assault any human that got too close and sensible actors refused to go anywhere near him, even though he always had a restraining rope tied around his foreleg out of camera view while filming. Years after their encounter, one old wrangler who’d worked with the Wonder Horse sputtered with awe, “I seen him throw an actor twen’y feet, once, an’ then tear his clothes right off him with his teeth!” Legendary stuntman Yakima Canutt, who had a chunk of his face removed by Rex while filming The Devil Horse in 1926, remembered his co-star as “a big, beautiful well-trained black, but every so often he would get mad and try to kill anyone near him.”

Rex was the blue-ribbon celeb in the movie livestock company owned by Flagstaff rancher/studio contact man Lee Doyle that included most of his regular four-hoofed co-stars: Lady, the heroine; Marquis, the villain; Paris, suspiciously described in a contemporary press report as “the juvenile and female impersonator,” and Moe and Eva, low comedy relief burros. Rex sired four look-alike offspring and he and his family appeared in almost half the movies made in Sedona during the 1930s, low budget kid pictures like Stormy and King of the Sierras that helped keep the area on Holly­wood’s radar until more expensive “A” Westerns made a comeback at the tail end of the decade.





Doyle bought Rex from Fox Film in 1931, but the “King of Wild Horses” was no stranger to Arizona. He’d filmed Universal Pictures’ Wild Beauty in Stafford, southeast of Phoenix, in 1927, and in August 1930, Fox began shooting a remake of Tom Mix’s Just Tony that it first titled Alcatraz, then changed to Wyoming Wonder and finally to King of Wild Horses that was to team Rex with newcomer John Wayne, fresh off his first starring role in The Big Trail. Unfortunately, the Rex/Duke team-up–– the “Star Steed” had more prominent billing in trade ads than Wayne––was permanently shut down after two days of second unit filming in Flagstaff.

Three years later, Rex had the lead in another picture titled King of the Wild Horses that has long been listed by some Sedona movie buffs as part of the area filmography––a few amateur historians even name local beauty spot Red Rock Crossing as a specific location site––but solid evidence that the Wild Horses production spent any time in Sedona has yet to surface. On the contrary, contemporary newspaper reports, Columbia Pictures’ publicity materials, and the American Film Institute Catalog all say that King of the Wild Horses was filmed on locations north of Flagstaff, primarily on the Navajo and Hopi reservations, as well as at Blue Canyon near Tuba City, and Fredonia in Coconino County. No existing print of King of the Wild Horses is available for viewing and not a single photograph or contemporary reference has been uncovered indicating any scenes from the film were shot in Sedona.




14 year-old Frankie Darro rides a chillin’ stand-in for the chilling Rex in the 1931 Mascot Pictures serial The Vanishing Legion.

Unstable Rex has been stabled in the Great Beyond since the 1940’s, but his superstardom was permanently memorialized in a kitschy painting created by child actor-turned-artist Charles de Ravenne that hung for years in the lobby of the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel in Los Angeles. Titled “Hollywood Comes to Napoleon’s Aid, ” it depicts Napoleon riding across a wheat field followed by his staff, impersonated by some of the most recognizable Hollywood VIPs of the day. Rex is portrayed as a horse of a different color, docilely carrying natty character actor Adolphe Menjou (depicted as French military commander Marshal Ney) astride him. Also in the painting is another picture show stallion with a Sedona connection, silent cowboy star Fred Thomson’s Silver King, carrying United Artists head Joseph M. Schenck as a colonel of the Cuirassiers (artist De Ravenne appeared in Thomson’s 1924 FBO Western Thundering Hoofs when he was seven years-old). Other Tinseltown notables in the painting include Douglas Fairbanks Sr., who is pictured as a member of the Hussards de la Garde; le Maréchal Sid Grauman, Hollywood’s Chinese Theatre showman; William Powell as a Napoleon aide de camp; Ronald Colman, Clive Brook, John Gilbert and Erich Von Stroheim as Grenadiers; Groucho Marx as a dead trumpeter; and Charlie Chaplin as a drunken priest, clutching a bottle of champagne and refusing a drink of brandy from vivandière Marion Davies. It’s a sure bet that in real life bad boy Rex would have been vexed by the lot of them.––Joe McNeill