Karolyn Grimes, Part 2

George “Gabby” Hayes with Karolyn Grimes 

(hopefully not too soon after his buttermilk and cornbread lunch)

Now all grown up, actress Karolyn Grimes, Albuquerque’s little “Myrtle Walton,” tells us how much fun she had in the film’s “runaway” stagecoach, and really only got scared by “Gabby” Hayes’ lunch.

SM: As a child actor, were there different directors who would take the time to work with you a lot? 

KAROLYN GRIMES: Oh yeah, uh-huh. But some of them were scary. I mean John Ford (Rio Grande, 1950) was. [Laughing]

He was intimidating? 

Oh, yeah! Yeah, yeah, yeah!

He didn’t have a lot of time for child actors?

No, no, no, no. And he had a big temper. He didn’t care who was there, whether there was a kid there or not; the words flew. But Leslie Fenton (Pardon My Past, 1945) was a very nice director, I remember him. Henry Koster on The Bishop’s Wife (1947) was super. He’d get on the floor and tell me what to do. Of course, Frank Capra (It’s a Wonderful Life, 1946) was just delightful.

What are your memories of “Gabby” Hayes?

He was fun to be around. When he was off camera he acted totally different [than his screen persona]. He was a very capable man, very smart. One thing I will never, ever forget is his lunch. They had all the food catered, tables and tables of all this delicious food. But every single day, he ate the same thing: ­buttermilk with cornbread in a glass, and I thought it was the sickest stuff I’d ever seen! It stunk, it was awful, it would get in his beard. [Laughs] And I remember he did not want to ride in that stagecoach. He did not ride in that stagecoach. He had a stunt double, he didn’t get up there. And he thought it was ­dangerous for me and Catherine Craig to do it. But he didn’t win; we did it.

And you had fun doing it! 

I had a blast, I didn’t think of it as dangerous at all. I thought it was great. But anything could have happened. Horses stumble, fall. It wouldn’t have passed today. They had a [prop] stagecoach, with a thing that the men pushed and pulled on either side to make it jump around. They told me the horses were running away with me and I was supposed to hang out the window. They tell you everything you’re supposed to do. So it was fun; I mean, everything I did on that whole set was fun. I loved the western town and all the horses. And to ride on a stagecoach with all those horses? Wow, for goodness sakes! And what’s really funny is there’s [supposed to be] a dead man in the back of that stagecoach. [Laughing] When you think about the whole thing, [Myrtle is] sitting in this stagecoach, just saw this man shot dead – and it didn’t bother me one bit! ––Originally published in the October 2006 issue of Sedona Monthly

Karolyn Grimes, Part 1

Karolyn Grimes on the Albuquerque set

During the mid- to late 1940s, Karolyn Grimes was one of Hollywood’s busiest child actors. She made her movie debut at age four and achieved pop culture immortality two years later as “Zuzu” in Frank Capra’s 1946 classic It’s a Wonderful Life when she delivered the picture’s unforgettable closing line, “Teacher says, every time a bell rings an angel gets his wings.” A year later, she appeared in Albuquerque, which had some second unit action filmed in Sedona. We chatted with her at the Memphis Film Festival in June 2006. For more on Karolyn's life and career, visit her Website at www.zuzu.net.

SM: Prior to the DVD, had it been a while since you had seen Albuquerque? 

KAROLYN GRIMES: I made appointments at UCLA; I saw it maybe four times. I kept trying to figure out who really had the rights and how I could pursue them to get it out again. I wrote to Paramount and all different places. Well, nothing I did did any good. And then it was a miracle. Somebody wrote to me and then I got about ten calls: ‘Did you know...?!’ And I was so thrilled, oh my gosh, it’s out!

It sounds like the movie meant a lot to you. 
Well, after seeing it I remembered so much and I loved it! The color is so gorgeous and I just love my part –– I’m hilarious! [Repeating lines from the film] “I’ll be a-knittin’ and a-sittin’”! [Laughs] “Whoa, horses! Whoa!”

What was a typical day like on Albuquerque? 

The limo would come and get me at 5 in the morning – it would still be dark – and they’d drive us up to the ranch [outside L.A.]. And there was this one building with a room for makeup and wardrobe and hair, with a big wood stove. And we’d have to spend a long time in makeup. I remember one day I got superheated, I think, and as a little girl I fainted a lot. So they’d done my hair, I had wardrobe on, I was ready to go. I was just walking to go outside and [indicating a fall] right on the floor. Randolph Scott carried me out into the cool air. I think he realized I was overheated. When I woke up, he was looking down into my eyes, saying ‘Are you alright, Karolyn?’ He was so tall. A bit aloof, but he was kind. He was good to me, very easy to work with.

What was Lon Chaney Jr. like? 

You know, Lon Chaney was probably friendlier and more personable than any of the rest. He kind of stayed to himself and was so grouchy and grumpy-looking that he fascinated me as a little kid. And the fact that he was The Wolfman and all that stuff, he just scared me. But he seemed so mean that I couldn’t help...it’s like when I did Rio Grande. They told me to stay away from the Indians. Naturally, I just peeked and spied and was there all the time; you know, the opposite of anything they tell you. So you get the impression that Lon Chaney doesn’t want you around and, naturally, I’m going to be around. So I approached him and he turned out to be really nice. But he would try to scare me, in a way. He wanted to be stern and see what he... he loved to play with people. He told me I was very ugly. When I asked why, he said ‘Because you have freckles.’ Well, I felt freckles really were ugly, so I liked that he told me the truth. He was a straight-shooter, and I liked that. We were friends from then on.

He and Randolph Scott have this fight in the film, an unbelievable battle. [Laughing] He took me aside, because everybody was going to watch, and he said, ‘I just want you to know that I’m going to bleed, and I want to show you how I’m going to do this.’ So he had this capsule and he said ‘It’s just like ketchup. I’m going to slip it in my mouth, nobody’s going to know, and I’m going to break it and then I’m going to bleed all over my face. It’s going to run down, but I’m not hurt.’ I watched that fight with eyes peeled, and it went very well!

And how about Catherine Craig? 

This was the second movie I’d done with her; we were in The Private Affairs of Bel Ami (1947). She’s very sweet. She married Robert Preston and sort of gave up her career. She told me years later there was a scene cut out [of Albuquerque]; my line was, [perkily] ‘And I’ll help too!’ For the rest of their married life, she and Robert used that phrase. She said they always remembered me because of that. That was kind of neat.––Originally published in the October 2006 issue of Sedona Monthly

Dan Gordon, Part 2

Anthony Edwards and Linda Fiorentino in Gotcha! (1985)

DAN: “The first successful movie I wrote was called Tank. It was with Jim Garner, Tommy Howell, Shirley Jones and Jamie Cromwell. After that, I did a picture called Gotcha! with Anthony Edwards and Linda Fiorentino. Today, if I meet any 45-year-old man, they tell me they were in love with Linda Fiorentino. Evidently it was a big hit for 15-year-old boys, who would ditch school to see the movie. I did one of the first HBO films called Gulag, and then I did Passenger 57.

“Passenger 57 was a really big hit movie. That made me flavor of the month for a while. As a writer, you don’t ever deal with fame like a movie star. No one knows who writers are, which is the joy of being a writer. You make a very good living, and you get the fun of working in movies, but you don’t have to worry about the paparazzi. [Passenger 57] gave me access to any studio for anything that I wanted to do. You can probably get a good two or three years off of a movie like that.

“Character-driven drama at the studios no longer exists, and the movies [today] usually end in the word ‘man.’ Batman, Superman, X-Men. I actually turned down writing Transformers because I said I didn’t have anything to bring to the table. None of the movies that I did, including The Hurricane with Denzel Washington, would be made today. The best you could hope for would be to make the movie as an indie and hope a studio would distribute it.

“Wyatt Earp took a few years to get made. I had pitched it to Kevin Costner when he was editing Dances with Wolves. He was a very bankable actor but not yet the Oscar-winning megastar that he became. It was a very, very easy pitch. The problem was, he got very hot, and Kevin had the habit of immersing himself in a character and not doing any other work while he was working on that particular character.

Wesley Snipes in Passenger 57 (1992)

“I hate Wyatt Earp. When I finished the screenplay, I think it was one of the best Western scripts that anybody had done. I was enormously proud of that screenplay. The idea was to do a Western Godfather and make it the story of two crime families and one law enforcement family. If you saw the movie, you saw it was about one law enforcement family, but there was no crime family. It was really God-awful. When Kevin and I developed it, we talked about Marty Scorsese directing the picture. We wanted it done in black-and-white. Instead of Marty Scorsese, Kevin felt indebted to Larry Kasdan. He became the director of the movie. From what I understand, Larry Kasdan wanted to write the screenplay. Kevin, from what I understand, said he liked the script. Kasdan, I felt, wrote a horrible, God-awful piece of dung. It was so boring and pretentious and wooden and lifeless. The final screenplay became an amalgam of those two screenplays. So anything you like in the movie, I wrote [laughs]. Anything that was long and boring and dull, Kasdan wrote. You watch that movie, you lose the will to live. It’s a heartbreak to me because I know what could and should have been. I was so pissed off about it I wrote the book called Wyatt Earp. That is actually based on my screenplay.

“I was the second writer on Hurricane. Armyan Bernstein, who was and still is the head of Beacon Pictures, wrote a screenplay but felt the material got away from him. He said he needed to bring someone in to do a rewrite, which is an incredibly egoless, wonderful thing for him to have done. I was working on the production draft in New York. My son Zaki had just graduated from NYU, and he was working on an HBO picture as a production assistant. Zaki and I would meet after work around midnight, split a couple of steaks and a bottle of wine, and it was the best. Here was my firstborn, the only one of my three boys who went into the same business as me. There we were in the same business, and I see how mature he is, what a wonderful man he turned out to be. If I had to say what was the happiest time of my life that was it.

“We broke for the holidays. I came back from LA, and Zaki came back from New York to celebrate the holidays. The last in-depth conversation that Zaki and I had, he outlined his vision for a film school. He felt compelled to talk about it. He thought it all out – class size, curriculum. It would be a film school unlike any other – completely for independent filmmakers. The school became the Zaki Gordon Institute for Filmmaking. That was at Hanukkah. We were home, and he was exhausted that night. The next morning, he was killed in a car accident. When that happened, there was no way I could go back and work on [The Hurricane]. At the end of the day, I think the value of that movie is Denzel Washington’s performance more than the screenplay.

“After the accident, I thought I would establish some screenwriting scholarships for Zaki at various schools; that’s how I would memorialize him. About six months after the accident, I was on a plane going to Canada for my cousin’s wedding. I was sitting next to a woman, passing the time. She was going to Calgary to see a cultural park like the one being built in Sedona. Part of the deal with the cultural park was the addition of a film school, but she didn’t know anything about film schools. I told her exactly what the school was going to be: the Zaki Gordon Institute for Independent Filmmaking. I pitched her my son’s vision. She said it sounded great and asked me to be in Sedona in two weeks. I met with the president of Yavapai College, Doreen Dailey. I liked the idea of doing [the school] in Sedona because for years I had a ranch in Colorado, and we actually used to drive through Sedona to get there. I had memories of Zaki in Sedona. The negotiations were very hard because I wanted to make sure academia didn’t screw up Zaki’s vision. I wasn’t going to have my son get rewritten.

“We finally made it happen. About six months after the school opened, Doreen asked if I wondered why she was so good about helping me make it a reality. She said that she had grown up in a challenging environment in Alaska and she owed everything she had become to a mentor who made her college education possible. His name was Zack Gordon.” ––Interview by Erika Ayn Finch. Originally published in the January/February 2011 issue of Sedona Monthly

Dan Gordon, Part 1

Screenwriter Dan Gordon has written the scripts for some of Hollywood’s most popular films, including Passenger 57, Wyatt Earp, Murder in the First and The Hurricane. He also wrote and directed numerous episodes of the television series Highway to Heaven. But Sedona residents might be more familiar with Dan as the founder of Red Rock Country’s Zaki Gordon Institute for Independent Filmmaking, which is named after Dan’s firstborn son, Zaki, who was killed in a car accident when he was 22. Dan’s life experiences are not unlike those in the character-driven dramas he writes: He had a stint in the Israeli army, lived on a kibbutz, spent a year in New York unknowingly working for the mafia and turned down the opportunity to write the script for Transformers. Dan spoke to us from Los Angeles in an extremely forthright interview. “I’m being more candid with you than most writers would ever be,” he said. Here’s an inside look at what it’s like to write films in Hollywood.––Erika Ayn Finch

DAN: “I was born in a little town called Bell Gardens, California. It was mainly people who came out from the Grapes of Wrath era and stayed. We abounded in churches and bars. We had probably more storefront churches and more honky-tonk bars than anyplace I’ve ever been. It was actually a great place for a writer to grow up because you were around a lot of characters. It was a colorful town. One of my neighbors was Eddie Cochran, who wrote Summertime Blues. I remember my brother and me in his garage listening to him and his pals jam. My friends from my childhood are all still my friends today.

“When I was 16, I more or less ran away from home with my parents’ active encouragement. I went to Israel. I went to a kibbutz and went to high school in a kibbutz. My father was born in 1895 in then czarist Russia. He was 52 when I was born. After his experiences, to expect that he would understand two American teenagers was insane. Everything we did seemed disrespectful to him, and everything he did seemed nuts to us. He and I weren’t getting along, and it was getting physical. I had been raised on Zionist lore, and I had seen Exodus. There was a very fetching young girl who played Paul Newman’s sister. She had these rather fetching kibbutz shorts on, so I decided I’d go and try to find her or her surrogate somewhere in the valley of Jezreel. I fell in love with the lifestyle and people in Israel.

“I came back to the United States to go to college. I went to East Los Angeles College and then UCLA. I worked for a couple of years in the business – I knew I wanted to be a screenwriter/director. I had sold my first screenplay to Universal when I was 20. I sold it as fluke, and I made the princely sum of $1,860. This made me about the richest Jew in LA.

“I worked for a couple of years, and I made one film that, unknown to me, was a money laundering operation for the mob. They were hiring the stupidest kid they could find, and I fit the bill perfectly. They said the budget of the film was $1 million, but they gave me $100,000 assuming I could never make the picture for that. I was closing in on finishing the film, and they told me the film could never be finished because they would be audited. They needed to write off the film as a loss. It was sort of like The Producers. This was 1972, and I was in New York. It was in the middle of the Colombo-Gallo war, and they gave me a bodyguard who was also there to keep me from running because I was getting squirrelly. I lived with these guys in that world for the better part of a year, and I knew I had to get out. I’d been around some very dangerous people and seen some dangerous things. I went back to the kibbutz.

“In 1973, I went into the Israeli army in time to serve in the Yom Kippur War. I was in the army for two years. During that time, on a 48-hour pass, I wrote a screenplay. A friend managed an R&B group and asked me to write a musical for them. Oddly enough, it got financed and that was Train Ride to Hollywood.

“Like everybody of my generation, [the Yom Kippur War] was a traumatic war. So there was a biological response – I assume not unlike what happened after World War II – of everyone who came out of that war wanting to get married and have children. I didn’t know who I was going to marry, but I knew I was going to marry – now. I was discharged in May or June in 1975, and I was married two months later. My oldest boy, Zaki, was born in June 1976. My then wife was an American girl who didn’t take to life on the kibbutz, so we left. We lived outside of Jerusalem, and I worked three jobs. There was no such thing as a screenwriter in Israel. I’d been milking cows on the kibbutz and working in the field. So I taught at a film school and at Tel Aviv University and wrote ad copy for an advertising agency to make ends meet.

“By the time I had two kids, there was no way to make a living at a film studio in Israel. I had a lot of friends tell me if I came back to LA, I could get all the work I wanted. So in 1980, I came back to the United States. That was a heartbreak. I had hoped and planned to live in Israel and put down roots there. I love this country, and I love that country. In short order, I started making a living as a screenwriter. I had a couple of hard years, but then I began selling on an ongoing basis. I had a string of movies that had varying degrees of success, and I went on to work on some very good television series.

“Highway to Heaven was one of my favorites. I’m as proud, if not prouder, of the work I did there as I am of anything else in my career. I had a great time working with Mike Landon. He was another mentor in my life – he and Don Simpson. He was like a big brother to me, and it was great fun to work on that show. I had a degree of freedom that I’ve never had since because Mike was such a big star and powerful force at NBC. I wrote 45 of the first 100 episodes, and I did the rewriting on all the others. Mike would do the final rewrite. It was a great place to learn to be a writer, and he would insist that I direct because he wanted me to learn production. I use what I learned from Mike to this day. – Originally published in the January/February 2011 issue of Sedona Monthly

Trail to Lone Pine

Roy Rogers and Trigger greet Dale Evans, Beverly Lloyd and Peggy Stewart
in a scene from Utah (1945) shot in Lone Pine’s Alabama Hills.

Lone Pine is a dot on the California map, but it’s the town where manly movie legends, like John Wayne, Clint Eastwood, Errol Flynn, and Robert Downey Jr., made scenes during visits. Still, even with the cavalcade of stars spied hoofing Lone Pine’s Main Street over the past 90 years, it’s a good bet some people would never make the connection between glamorous Hollywood and the unpretentious hamlet located 177 miles north of Los Angeles (and 65 miles west of arid Death Valley National Park) at the foot of Mount Whitney, the tallest mountain in the lower 48 states. But it’s a completely different story for movie geeks – they get goose bumps at first glimpse of the town’s most distinctive landmarks: those surreal Daliesque boulder formations of the Alabama Hills just outside of town. Pilgrim, this is an iconic pop culture landscape, and not only for big men wearing big hats and riding even bigger horses; just about everyone who’s who in Tinseltown action movies has been captured on film in front of these rocks, from roly-poly silent movie comic Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle to blockbuster comic book hero Iron Man. Not to take anything away from our own beloved Arizona’s Little Hollywood, but with a résumé of almost 400 feature film appearances (including two credits shared with Sedona, Der Kaiser von Kalifornien and Broken Arrow) plus dozens of TV episodes and commercials, Lone Pine is arguably the most popular outdoor location in the history of movies.

That’s a pretty good reason for the town to pat itself on the back, so for more than two decades residents have thrown an annual shindig to commemorate their ongoing cinematic history. And this year’s Lone Pine Film Festival, taking place Oct. 7-9, is shaping up to be a three-day cowboy movie bonanza.

Among the archival films scheduled to be shown are The Stolen Ranch (1926) and Blazing Days (1927), a pair of rarely seen silent Westerns made in Lone Pine by William Wyler, the Oscar-winning director of The Best Years of Our Lives and Ben-Hur. Sam Peckinpah’s 1962 classic Ride the High Country, with Randolph Scott and Joel McCrea, will also be screened, with several people involved in making the film slated to be present.

Jimmy Ellison and William Boyd in a scene from Hop-Along Cassidy (1935).

One of the themes of this year’s festival is a celebration of the 100th birthday of Lone Pine action figure Roy Rogers, and among the gifts to be unwrapped is a rare screening of Macintosh and T.J., the King of the Cowboys’ final film (made in 1975), with some of the cast members scheduled to appear at the party. As usual, there will also be hours of classic Westerns starring other B-movie big shots like Hopalong Cassidy and Gene Autry in picture shows that offer lavish views of Lone Pine, Death Valley and the Eastern Sierra. Best of all – and this is what sets apart the Lone Pine Film Festival from, say, the vastly overrated festivals at Sundance or Cannes – after watching the movies you can take guided tours of the locations you just saw on the big screen. How cool is that?

Festivalgoers won’t just spend the weekend losing their tans in a darkened screening room because there are plenty of other activities going on, like in-person celebrity panels, live Western street theater, musical shows, a rodeo, an arts-and-crafts fair and the Parade of Stars down the main drag. Action scenes won’t be confined to celluloid, either; look for live stunts in a show spotlighting the machismo talents of Diamond Farnsworth, stunt coordinator for TV’s NCIS, and Loren James, the veteran stuntman whose 300-plus film credits include McLintock!, Bullitt and Planet of the Apes. Other notable guests will include Republic Pictures’ leading ladies Peggy Stewart, Donna Martell and Marie Harmon, who’ll recall their days toiling in the Hollywood Thrill Factory. Wyatt McCrea (grandson of actor Joel McCrea), Peter Ford (son of actor Glenn Ford) and Cheryl Rogers-Barnett (daughter of Roy Rogers and Dale Evans) will reminisce about their illustrious family trees.

Screenings and events take place at various venues around town, including at the festival’s most important outgrowth, the Beverly and Jim Rogers Museum of Lone Pine Film History. The 10,500-square-foot nonprofit archive displays Lone Pine movie artifacts, posters, props, costumes and other memorabilia. It also boasts a 85-seat theater that regularly screens hard-to-see films. Most vital, the museum is far more than a depository of black-and-white nostalgia. Since opening in 2006, it has compelled thousands of tourists year-round to visit isolated, dot-on-the-map Lone Pine, and that’s the best legacy movie history can bequeath a location town. Paying attention, Sedona?––Joe McNeill.

The 22nd Annual Lone Pine Film Festival takes place Oct. 7-9, 2011, in Lone Pine, Calif. For info and tickets call 760-876-4301 or visit www.lonepinefilmfestival.org. the Beverly and Jim Rogers Museum of Lone Pine Film History is located at 701 S. Main St. Call 760-876-9909 for information.

Old Tucson Studios––Arizona's BIG Hollywood

“When in Southern California, visit Universal Studios.” That was the pitch Universal used back in the 1960s to cross-promote its La-La Land backlot tour in print ads, and later (to the chagrin of some of its snootier directors) in the end titles of its movies. Since 1915, the allure of making the scene at a working film studio has provided a cushy side business for Universal, but if you have a hankering to visit a movie factory, head to southern Arizona’s very own historic studio, Old Tucson.

Old Tucson Studios was originally a western town set built by Columbia Pictures in 1939 for its $2.5 million Oscar-nominated epic, Arizona, which starred Jean Arthur and William Holden (in his cowboy movie debut). The structures were left standing after the completion of shooting and were reused sporadically – at the bargain basement rate of $60 per day – for cowboy extravaganzas like the partly filmed-in-Sedona 3:10 to Yuma (1957), The Lone Ranger and the Lost City of Gold (1958) and Rio Bravo (1959). Midwestern businessman Robert Shelton leased the property (John Wayne, who would shoot four Westerns at Old Tucson, was reportedly among his silent partners) and opened it to the public in 1960 as a movie studio/mini-amusement park, offering set tours, live stunt and musical shows, gunfights and a small area with rides and attractions. Shelton eventually built “Arizona’s Hollywood in the Desert” into what was dubbed the second-most-visited tourist destination in Arizona after the Grand Canyon. In 1968, a 13,000-square-foot soundstage was opened to allow Old Tucson to provide its Hollywood clients complete on-site filmmaking facilities. Later pictures shot at the studio ran the gamut from the avant-garde (Andy Warhol’s Lonesome Cowboys, 1968) to blockbuster actioners (Tombstone, 1993). In 1970, Wild Rovers, another partly made-in-Sedona Western, did a single day of exterior filming at Old Tucson, with William Holden making his first return visit 31 years after he helped open the studio.

Only Los Angeles and New York could brag louder than Old Tucson about being the most popular filming location in America until real-life disaster struck in 1995, when approximately 40 percent of the original movie buildings were destroyed in a fire that investigators labeled “suspicious.” But, just like in the movies, good triumphed over evil; the studio soon reopened for business (albeit at three-quarters of its original size) and it remains a working film location today. Since 1939, more than 500 movie and television projects as well as dozens of TV commercials, music videos, industrial films and print photo shoots have been made at Old Tucson Studios.

Getting there is half the fun. The studio lies within Tucson Mountain Park, which borders the biologically diverse (and awesome looking) Saguaro National Park, so the drive through the lush Sonoran Desert provides an eyepopping look at the never-ending forest of ginormous cacti. Even there you’ll find a movie connection: The 2009 dramedy Away We Go, with John Krasinski and Maya Rudolph, filmed a sequence at this scenic spot.

Once inside the studio walls, you’re standing in the dusty bootprints of cowboy movie Shangri-la, so the 30-minute historic walking tour is highly recommended as the ideal way to soak it all in. On the day we visited, we were fortunate to have our tour conducted by the very knowledgeable historian Paul J. Lawton, who could write a book on the place (actually, he did: Old Tucson Studios, Arcadia Publishing, $21.99).

Among the movie-related attractions is a 20-minute film commemorating John Wayne’s connection to the studio, a continuously running video history of Old Tucson, and a mini-museum that displays posters, props and costumes from many of the movies and TV shows shot there. Also on the lot is the Reno, a 34-ton locomotive built in 1872 that has been used in dozens of films and is considered to be the most photographed train engine in the history of motion pictures. Red Rock Country film fans please take note: Just beyond the Reno stands the actual “Contention” train station that the original 3:10 to Yuma pulled into in 1957. This hitch means there is exactly one more historic Sedona movie set at Old Tucson Studios than the former “Arizona’s Little Hollywood” has within its entire city limits.––Joe McNeill;  originally published in the January/February issue of Sedona Monthly. Photographs © 2011 by Debbie Weinkauff

Family Ties

Chances are good that if you live in Sedona, you don’t believe in coincidence. Just ask Jayne and Phil Feiner, who have lived in the Village of Oak Creek for two years. Phil lost touch with his grandfather after his mom passed away, and for the past 14 years, Jayne has been on a mission to find out anything she can about James (Jimmy) Phillips. Imagine her surprise when she opened Arizona’s Little Hollywood: Sedona and Northern Arizona’s Forgotten Film History 1923-1973 and found a photo of Jimmy Phillips staring back at her.

Jimmy Phillips worked at Universal Pictures until he retired in 1959. Jimmy was a livestock wrangler and extra who eventually became head animal wrangler for Universal; according to Jayne, he taught Francis the Talking Mule how to talk and Clint Eastwood how to ride a horse for TV's Rawhide. His wife worked as a stuntwoman. “We knew little things about him, and about five or six years ago, I started researching him on IMDB [Internet Movie Database],” says Jayne. “That’s when I realized that he worked under the name Jimmy.”

This past Father’s Day weekend, Jayne and Phil sat down to watch Broken Arrow, filmed in Sedona in 1949, and followed along with Arizona’s Little Hollywood. On a whim, Jayne looked up Universal Pictures in the book’s index, and then opened to the chapter on Stormy, filmed by Universal in 1935. That’s when she found the photo of Jimmy, who had an uncredited role as a cowhand. “He must have been about 35 at the time, and he looks exactly like my husband,” she says.

That’s Jimmy Phillips clapping behind the guitar player.

While Jayne and Phil, who own PJF Productions – a post-production company in Studio City, Calif. – have letters Jimmy wrote to family members while he was on location along with a few black-and-white photos, they never realized he filmed a movie in Sedona until they were already living in Red Rock Country. Jimmy died in 1974, and Jayne is still trying to track down information about his ethnic heritage. Until then, the couple takes heart in knowing “Grandpa” once looked at the same red-rock vistas that are now out the Feiners’ back door.

“It’s a weird connection,” says Jayne, “and it’s even more bizarre that out of all the stills taken from Stormy, Joe chose the one that includes Jimmy.” – Erika Ayn Finch. Originally published in the November 2010 issue of Sedona Monthly

Champion of the West

Marge Champion is on the fence with Bob Baker in Honor of the West.

91 year-old dance legend Marge Champion will join Turner Classic Movies host Robert Osborne in Sedona to present George Sidney’s Show Boat on September 7 as part of the Sedona International Film Festival’s Living Legends series. Ms. Champion, an acclaimed choreographer, director, teacher and actress, is perhaps best known for working as a dancing team with her former husband, Gower Champion, and the duo will be seen tripping the light fantastic in the 1951 MGM adaption of Jerome Kern’s classic musical play showing in Sedona. My colleague, Erika Ayn Finch, had the chance to interview Ms. Champion before her visit and they discussed, among other things, her early film work for Walt Disney Studios as live action model for the title character in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), the Blue Fairy in Pinocchio (1940) and the ballet dancing hippopotamus in Fantasia (1942). You can read the interview in the September issue of Sedona Monthly, on sale at Barnes and Noble, Borders Books, and independent booksellers across the country.

I couldn’t resist asking Erika to include a few questions for Ms. Champion about the most obscure job of her distinguished career, playing the heroine in Honor of the West, a 1939 B-Western starring forgotten singing cowboy Bob Baker. Billed as Marjorie Bell (she was born Marjorie Celeste Belcher), the seventeen year-old Champion had her first credited movie role in the picture, which was filmed on location in Kernville, California, about three hours north of Los Angeles.

Bob Baker (left) and Forrest Taylor
defend the Honor of the West.

Her ridin’, ropin’, vocalizin’ leading man, Bob Baker, had been a singer on WLS’ Chicago-based National Barn Dance radio show in 1935 (billed as “Tumble” Weed; his real name was Stanley Leland Weed) and was a longtime resident of northern Arizona. He’d been employed in the license division of the Arizona State Highway Department and worked for “Shirley’s Cowboy Guides and Entertainers” at the Grand Canyon prior to going to Hollywood in 1937.

Baker starred in twelve B Westerns for Universal Pictures (and was demoted to Johnny Mack Brown’s second banana for a final six); after playing a few small roles for Monogram and United Artists he quit the movies in 1944 and returned to Flagstaff to work as a police officer. Baker died in 1975 and is buried in Clear Creek Cemetery in Camp Verde, Arizona, about 40 miles from Sedona.––Joe McNeill

ERIKA AYN FINCH: How were you cast in Honor of the West?

MARGE CHAMPION: I had just graduated from Hollywood High School and had a great friend, one of [character actor] Fred Stone’s daughters, and they had a friend named Henry Willson, who was an agent. He took me on because he said I was right for certain kinds of movies. He sent me out to Universal to audition for Honor of the West. And I was terrible. I was 17 and had no acting experience except through pantomime and dancing. Its a hilarious movie but not because it’s any good (laughing).

You’ve seen the movie?

Oh, yes! They’ve shown it at Film Forum [a repertory movie house in New York City] and a few other places and I’m always embarrassed. They invite me to come and talk about it.

Why didn’t you make another Western?

Because I was not exactly trained in horsemanship (laughing). I went over to Griffith Park and took six horseback riding lessons when I knew I had the part.

In the movie I had to lead the posse to rescue the hero, which was kind of a twist, but I was nearly brushed off the horse on the very first day of shooting. They gave me the fastest horse and it was sheer terror. If not for one of the extremely talented cowboys who saw what was going to happen I wouldn’t be here to tell the tale. That was the only time a second shot was taken by the director [George Waggner] because they never took more than one.

In the film Bob Baker never takes his hat off, the reason being that he didn’t have any hair. I had only seen him on the set with his hat on and when I met him in the evening (everybody had supper together) he had his hat off and I didn’t know who he was!

Do you have any other memories of Bob Baker?

No, I never saw him again. He did quite a few of those one week [Westerns] and he would have a different leading lady every week.

He made three pictures in three weeks and it took seven days to make that picture. The scripts were done just about as fast as they do a television show now. They were filmed on location with not one indoor shot. And you had to supply your own jeans or whatever costume you had to wear. In those days they didn’t make girls’ jeans so I had to buy boys’ jeans, the kind with the buttons on the wrong side––I still have them, as a matter of fact. You learn some things along the way and one thing I learned is that if you’re not right for Western movies you’d better stick to what you know how to do. Copyright © by Bar 225 Media Ltd.

The Kid Stays in the Picture

It’s true! Billy the Kid was shot in Sedona! That’s star Robert Taylor at far right.

Billy The Kid was a wanted man in 1930s-’40s Hollywood. After the release of MGM’s big budget Billy the Kid in 1930 (directed by King Vidor and starring Johnny Mack Brown), the character made a brief reappearance (played by uncredited Lynton Brent) in Tom Mix’s The Texas Bad Man, released by Universal Pictures in 1932. The desperado laid low before resurfacing in Republic’s Billy the Kid Returns (1938), this time as half of a dual role played by “king of the cowboys” Roy Rogers in his second starring film.

Two years later, ultralow-budget Producers Releasing Corp. (PRC) initiated a Saturday matinee series with Billy the Kid Outlawed (1940), which rewrote history by changing The Kid from horse-thieving gunman to benevolent Stetsoned Robin Hood. “B’’-movie cowboy Bob Steele played him in the first six films, released during the 1940-’41 season. Steele was replaced by former Flash Gordon/Buck Rogers/Tarzan star Buster Crabbe, who headlined thirteen more PRC Billy the Kid cheapies between 1941 and 1943. In these, the real-life character’s name (or alias) Billy Bonney was changed to Billy Carson, reportedly because of complaints that the films glorified a notorious criminal. Crabbe continued with the series for twenty-three more films into 1946.

MGM’s 1941 Billy the Kid remake with Robert Taylor was the first Technicolor movie shot in Sedona, but the studio with “more stars than there are in heaven” fretted over competition with millionaire Howard Hughes’ The Outlaw, finished early that same year, but not released for another 18 months, largely over censors’ objections to perceived erotic content and the camera’s leering fixation on Jane Russell’s breasts. Arizona location filming began in Tuba City, with additional photography slated for Sedona, but after two weeks Hughes abruptly ordered the production back to Hollywood without explanation. The Outlaw finally opened in San Francisco on February 5, 1943, but seven weeks later, after having grossed the then-tidy sum of $158,000, the eccentric Hughes, for reasons he never explained, pulled the picture out of circulation.

When Hughes decided to reissue The Outlaw in 1946, Hollywood’s self-censoring Breen office saw red over its naughty publicity campaign (“What are the two great reasons for Jane Russell’s rise to stardom?” and “How would you like to tussle with Russell?”), which led it to withdraw its seal of approval. Crazy-like-a-fox Hughes went ahead and re-released the picture anyway, to widespread local bans and canceled theater bookings. But proving there’s no such thing as bad publicity (especially when the buzz concerns sex), The Outlaw became a sensation despite widespread bad reviews, and eventually took in more than $3 million in the United States alone.––Joe McNeill





Jane Russell’s sultry pinup promoting The Outlaw became a pop culture icon. The dress is one of the film artifacts that will be on permanent display in Sedona’s proposed Arizona’s Little Hollywood Museum.