Filmed in Arizona

The editor of the Amarillo (Texas) News took to his typewriter with a vengeance back in 1946 on hearing that producer Selznick was shooting Duel in the Sun a giant epic Western with a Texas setting on a ranch just south of Tucson.

Tucson!

Nothing short of blasphemy. "How dare they," he bellowed.

Other Texas papers quickly took up the cry, charging that Texas honor was being violated. That the film should be banned. And that hanging was too good for Selznick and all Arizonans.

Life magazine picked up on it: "Arizona replied to the barrage loftily by introducing into the state legislature a bill prohibiting Texans from crossing the Arizona border."

The bill (which some quarters deemed a progressive piece of legislation) never made it out of committee.

But ultimately, feelings ran so high that only the existence of a neutral New Mexico between the two opposing powers was thought to have staved off a shooting match.

Clearly, it was the kind of hype for which press agents have been known to sell their grandmothers. Duel in the Sun cleaned up at the box office. In a Variety word: Boffo! And made even bigger stars out of a young Gregory Peck and a smoldering Jennifer Jones. It went on to become a lusty classic on the late late show.

Oklahoma, on the other hand, never got upset at all.

Indeed, considering the production involved, it almost bordered on flagrant apathy. In 1955, when Hollywood optedto shoot Rodgers and Hammerstein's tune-filled Oklahoma in the San Rafael Valley of Southern Arizona (amid the glorious expanse of the Greene Cattle Company Ranch) nary a discouraging word was heard from the Sooner popu-lace.

Interestingly enough, producer Arthur Hornblow decided on an ersatz Oklahoma soon after catching a color photograph of the San Rafael in Ari-zona Highways.

And before you could say let's-make-a-CinemaScope-picture-with-Gordon MacRae-and-Shirley Jones, the studio prop department flew in an entire peach orchard (replete with fuzzy wax peaches) and a field of ripe wheat. The field of corn "as high as an elephant's eye," however, was grown for real locally.

A few years later, Arizona became Oklahoma again when the giant land rush scene for Edna Ferber's Cimarron was reenacted in Tucson.

Oklahoma, itself, had been nixed earlier. The reason? It didn't look enough like Oklahoma.

It's that kind of dubious logic that has kept filmmakers zooming in on Arizona since the beginning of cinematic time.

Occasionally, Hollywood does make a movie in Arizona, about Arizona. (The Gauntlet, starring Clint Eastwood, is one of the most recent examples.) It does happen. But not often enough. And even then, there's an affinity for confusing the geographic issue. Only Hollywood could have placed Tomb-stone, which is deep in Southern Ari-zona, smack-dab in the middle of Monument Valley, actually on Ari-zona's northern border, as they did in My Darling Clementine, back in 1946. Or how about that memorable moment in 1973's Electra Glide in Blue, when motorcycle cop Robert Blake took a turn off of Scottsdale Road, which is immediately east of Phoenix, and wound up in Monument Valley, just over 300 actual miles north and east! Only in Hollywood.

Sure as popcorn tastes better with butter, Arizona on the big screen is in-variably disguised as: A remote Texas outpost just after the Civil War; an Arabian desert for the sandy pleasures of Valentino, Marlene Dietrich, and/or Jerry Lewis; the Oregon Trail or the Missouri Trail (whichever comes first). Wyoming in the early 1800s; and even The Holy Land.

Etc. Etc. Etc.

The sheer versatility of it all was best summed up by actor Rod Taylor. A few years ago, when asked why the historic 1850s Oregon Trail was being shot in Flagstaff, he said, "It's simple. Every-thing is here. You can simulate Kansas, Nebraska, and different parts of the trail right here. You guys have everything we need. Grasslands, plains, mesas, buttes, and mountains."

Universal Pictures shot the Oregon Trail at the buffalo ranch east of Flag-staff, with Taylor as a widower who

Flickering One-reel Oaters to Lusty Film Classics, All Bore the Stamp... Filmed in Arizona

by Julian Reveles joined the wagon train in a little Illinois town for the trek to Oregon's rich farming land. Scenes were also shot in Cameron and Sedona. (An earlier version of the same trail was partially shot in Old Tucson in 1967.) Real examples of the state's Technicolored versatility down through the year are legion: Back in 1930, for instance, Hollywood invaded our environs with a colorful menagerie of Conestoga wagons, horses, oxen, assorted paraphernalia, and Eureka! almost overnight, Yuma became Independence, Missouri, for John Wayne in The Big Trail.

The Duke returned in 1948, turning the little town of Elgin, in Santa Cruz County, into the Texas-to-Kansas Chisholm Trail cattle drive for Red River. And the results were pure box office.

Luke Air Force Base became a South Korean military base in 20th CenturyFox' The Hunters, in 1957, with Robert Mitchum.

Columbia Pictures blew an area of Horse Mesa Dam to smithereens back in 1959, but on the screen it was really a Chinese village in World War II for Jimmy Stewart in The Mountain Road. Producer Bill Goetz explained “the geographical resemblances between China's provinces and Horse Mesa are remarkable.”

Phoenix became a futuristic city in the year 2067 for ABC-TV's The People Trap... Globe became Reno, Nevada, in the early 1900s to lens the life story of Negro boxing champ Jack Johnson in The Great White Hope . . . and the towns of Ajo, Gila Bend, and Nogales doubled as post-Civil War West for Burt Reynolds in The Man Who Loved Cat Dancing, in 1973. Etc. Etc. Etc.

Silent, empty except for its lonely guardian - the deserted movie set at Mescal, near Benson, Arizona, awaits the tramp of booted feet, the cry of teamsters and wild cowboys, the sound of ricocheting bullets: the exotic make-believe life of the big CinemaScope production. Gill Kenny

But the magic folk in Hollywood pulled off one of their biggest miracles in 1965 when Page and Glen Canyon environs were providentially transformed into The Holy Land for George Stevens' The Greatest Story Ever Told. With Charlton Heston as John The Baptist.

In his diary/book The Actor's Life Heston vividly recalled standing waistdeep in the Colorado River for hours, shooting the pivotal scene in which he baptized Jesus (played by Max von Sydow): "The water in the Colorado River was no place to linger... it got down in the 40s every morning."

At one point, after several takes, director Stevens noticed his discomfort and asked him how he felt. "I'm OK," shivered Heston, "But I'll tell you this, if the River Jordan had been as cold as the Colorado, Christianity would never have gotten off the ground."

Heston also remembered that when he delivered himself of the apocalyptic sermon, his exhortations dramatically "echoed off Glen Canyon Dam."

(A few years later, in 1967, he was to return to the scene of his baptismal feat for something decidedly different, The Planet of the Apes. But that's another story.) Heston's film, apropos, was not the first Bible story to lens in the state. Earlier, in 1951, Gregory Peck, as David, lusted after Susan Hayward's Bathsheba amid the biblical splendor of Nogales. (And here's one for the you-go-figure-it-out-department. David and Bathsheba, a story set in Israel, was shot in Arizona. A few years later, Peck starred in Billy Two Hats, a story set in Arizona. And where was it filmed? Why, in Israel, of course!) And then there are those shifting, whispering sands . . .

For eons . . . dating back to those heartthrobbing days Valentino stalked the dunes in search of harems and other goodies . . . producers have been aware of the uncanny resemblance between the sand dunes near Yuma and the Sahara desert. The dunes (especially around the beautiful and mysterious Buttercup Valley) were a natural. They looked enough like the Sahara to be the Sahara.

Or Algiers. Or Morocco. Or Mesopotamia. Or whatever sands.

It was in those very sands that Valentino hammed it up outrageously as The Son of the Shiek, back before movies learned to talk. It was there that two of the best versions of the classic Beau Gest were immortalized. And it all became a romantic Morocco for Dietrich and a young Gary Cooper. And a thrilling Sahara for Bogie in 1943.

Also in 1943, Oscar-winning director Billy Wilder joined the throngs enroute to Yuma for a telling of Rommel's conquest, and subsequent defeat, in North Africa, in Five Graves to Cairo.

The opening scene was a powerful one-without words-showing a lonely British tank, full of dead bodies, crawling over desert dunes. Wilder had found just the right spot for it. He rehearsed the scene with his actors and ordered shooting bright and early the next day.

But the next day, as he told his biographer Maurice Zolotow, he arose to a shocking sight. The beautiful dune, and everything around it, had been totally tracked up by jeeps from a nearby Army base. Wilder was angry, but he took command of the crisis. He ordered his crew into Yuma, and they came back with every broom they could buy or borrow.

They had maybe a hundred brooms all over the place and everybody was sweeping the sand. Wilder: "Me, Anne Baxter, Franchot Tone, Akim Tamiroff, people from Yuma . . . cleaned up every . . . tire track, and I shot the scene, and it was perfect."

Yet another sandy saga shot in Yuma unspooled the celluloid agony of two lonely, rootless travelers who met in the sultry Algerian desert and fell in love against the backdrop of exotic Old Algiers. The lovers were no less than Dietrich and Charles Boyer. The film: The Garden Of Allah, 1936.

Director Joshua Logan was dialogue coach on the film at the time, and in his recent tome Josh, recalled his first impression of the locale: "It was an astonishing site. Not a blade of vegetation to be seen . . . only ripples of ridges of pink sand . . ." violated only by "a vast network of newly-constructed streets and wood and canvas bungalows."

And Boyer had a devil of a time trying to keep his small hairpiece from coming unglued in the intense heat. Character actor Joseph Schildkraut also had problems with the heat. When he met him, Logan recalls two young lady assistants were applying ice bags to his wrists to keep him from fainting.

Such were the trials of filming in the desert.

Dietrich, we're told, worried so about Wilder's exposure to the rays that one day she graciously gave of her time, covering his back and chest with oil and warning: "You must stay out of the sun. You'll get tewwibly buwned." Madeline Kahn couldn't have said it better.

All versions of The Desert Song drama-operetta were shot in Yuma. As well as such familiar film fare as Gunga Din with Cary Grant. The Desert Fox with James Mason. The Flight of the Phoenix with Jimmy Stewart. Rope of Sand with Burt Lancaster. And even Sad Sack with Jerry Lewis. Plus many more of the sandy genre. (The pilot for TV's The Six-Million-Dollar Man in 1973, was shot at the dunes.) But, back to the beginning for a bit of perspective . . .

Possibly the only thoroughly documented study of pioneer moviemaking in the state (for sure the best) was prepared in 1966 by Kenneth Hufford, former editor of the Journal of Arizona History, published by the Arizona Historical Society of Tucson.

Although Hufford, himself a film buff, concerned himself solely with the neophyte efforts of The Lubin Company of Philadelphia, he offered fascinating insights into one of the first and most substantial motion picture companies to film locally. (Previous lensing was of a documentary nature: moving pictures of local cliff dwellings, the Grand Canyon, Hopi snake dancers and the like.) The gold strike theme is pretty much of a staple plot in Westerns nowadays, but back in 1912, when Lubin first approached it, it was novel stuff. The film was The Sleeper, an unlikely name, perhaps, for one of the first one-reel Westerns to be shot on location in the hills of Tucson. The script called for an elaborate gold rush scene, and residents of the Old Pueblo were urged to "be in the movies" by arriving on the set with

such things as “wagons, mules, horses, and mining equipment.” Romaine Fielding, actor-turned-manager of the Western Lubin Stock Company, took his appeal directly to the Arizona Daily Star. He told an interviewer: “I would like to have everyone in Tucson come out and help me on the picture. It will be the biggest thing for the town that Tucson has had happen for some time. It will go all over the country, and all those wishing to boost for the city have an excellent chance here.” And turn out they did. Stagestruck and otherwise. The big scene was shot on Sunday, June 30, 1912, with more than 400 of the town faithful making their movie debuts. Later, some 100 pack mules proceeded down Stone Avenue... headed for the hills... with cameras grinding away at what Fielding later called “the greatest picture ever put out.” But that same year, Lubin abruptly, but graciously, parted company with the Old Pueblo in favor of Prescott, where he set up a temporary studio at 712 Western Avenue.

The first production on the docket for the mile-high city was an ambitious psychological oater titled The Cringer. It had all the de rigueur elements: a bank robbery, a mob scene, and a barn burning. The bank robbery was staged at the Yavapai County Savings Bank, and it went off without a hitch. So did the mob scene downtown, between Cortez and Montezuma. But the burning ran into a city hall snag. It seems Hizzoner Morris Goldwater turned thumbs down on a fire within the city, so a barn was rigged up (Hollywood-style) at a re-spectable distance, and a glorious blaze ensued.

Hundreds of Prescott extras took part in the movie fever, and when the film finally hit town, at the New State Theater, “everybody was busy picking himself out in the different scenes and boasting of it to his neighbors.” Fourteen other Prescott films followed before Lubin, again abruptly, skipped and moved on to conquer new vistas within the state. But the company had made its mark... albeit brief . . . in the state's pioneer filmmaking. Since then, of course, Prescott has figured prominently in the scheme of Hollywood things. Tim McCoy was filmed in Arizona Bound in Prescott's alpine-like wilderness in 1941, and Tex Ritter did Arizona Frontier there in 1940. In 1970, Stanley Kramer directed Glendon Swarthout's satirical novel Bless the Beasts and the Children, at the Hidden Valley Ranch for Boys. Steve McQueen was aging rodeo cow-boy, Junior Bonner, filmed entirely in Prescott. And Warner Bros. demolished a Prescott landmark, Mrs. Beulah Gard-ner's bookstore, in 1976, for an explo-sive few seconds of The Gumball Rally.

Apropos early day filming...

Many of filmdom's biggest names worked on location in Arizona during their salad days. Douglas Fairbanks and Tom Mix come immediately to mind. Fairbanks was filmed in portions of The Mollycoddle on the Hopi Reserva-tion in 1920. In fact, an interesting in-cident that came out of that was widely reported in newspapers. It seems a few months after the picture was completed, Fairbanks visited the reservation while honeymooning with Mary Pickford. He took along a copy of the film to show. Unfortunately, one of the Indians who had played a bit role in the film had subsequently died, and when his friends saw him appear on the screen, they ran off in terror.

The legendary Tom Mix made it a point to make many of his money-making Westerns against the authentic backgrounds of our national parks. As a result, Sky High, in 1922, was shot entirely in and around the Grand Canyon. The film's action ranged from a rugged fight on the banks of the churning Colorado to precarious chases along the narrow trails... and even some aerial stunting in a plane skimming the rim.

Another matinee favorite, George O'Brien, (who starred in several Zane Grey Westerns filmed in Sedona and around Kohl's Ranch near Payson... 1932's, The Golden West was one of them) shot The Rainbow Trail, in 1931, at the Grand Canyon. This prompted one New York Times critic to note that, while the opus was entirely forgettable, it had “some wonderful views of the Grand Canyon.” And Hollywood has continued its love affair with those wonderful views. Edge of Eternity, in 1959, was shot at the Canyon, as well as around King-man. Brighty of the Grand Canyon, with Joseph Cotton. Art Carney in the award-winning Harry And Tonto. Brooke Shields in Wanda Nevada (also shot in Prescott). And a two-parter of the venerable Lassie TV series.

And certainly no story of Arizona filmmaking would be complete without at least a mention of Salvatore Pace Budanza Cudia, the flamboyant Italian immigrant who, in 1938, built a movie studio on the northeast corner of 40th Street and Camelback Road in Phoenix. Originally known as Valley of the Sun, the studio was later called simply Cudia City. Cudia told The Arizona Republic in a 1953 interview, “I started production in 1941 with plans to do 12 pic-tures. I made four of them... then text continued on page 21

Arizona's distinctive mountains, saguaros, great ponderosas, and miles of lonely desert dunes, all have played a vital role in the creation of such motion pictures as The Mountain Road in 1960, with James Stewart; Bus Stop, with Marilyn Monroe in 1956; and Gunga Din, in 1939, with Cary Grant, Victor McLaglen, and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.

came the war . . . scarcity of materials . . . manpower . . . and I was forced to abandon my plans.” Its last brief fling as a studio came when the TV series 26 Men was filmed there. The site later became a dinner-theater and, even later, as Cudia City's Sound Stage One, a popular haven for the Valley's teens in the 50s, before being torn down in the 60s to make way for an apartment complex.

Actor Ronald Reagan hosted the Death Valley Days TV series at the Apacheland Movie Ranch, just east of Apache Junction, in the 60s. But the studio has seen better days. In January of this year it was up for sale. But, as of yet, no takers. Elvis Presley did Charro there, and Jason Robards appeared in The Ballad of Cable Hogue.

The Graham Movie Studio in Carefree (now known as Carefree Studio) has likewise seen better days. The Dick Van Dyke Show gave it a shot of show biz. And Bob Hope and Bill Cosby livened up the sound stage with Cancel My Reservations and A Man and Boy. As of this writing, a Scottsdale-based company is planning to film a comedy there with Tim Conway and Harvey Korman.

Activity has never been slow in Arizona, however. It seems that down through the years dating back to Lubin some sort of filming activity has been going on in some area or other of the state.

Arizona's film history is star-filled and dynamic: The late Marilyn Monroe at a Phoenix Bus Stop hustling up all kinds of free publicity for the 1956 Jaycees Rodeo . . . Paul Newman looking for Pocket Money at the Westward Ho . . . Barbra Streisand singing her heart out at Sun Devil Stadium . . . Glenn Ford and Ida Lupino looking for the Lost Dutchman in Lust For Gold. . . David Carradine and Jennifer O'Neill in the air above Flagstaff with Cloud Dancer . . . Kurt Russell hawking Used Cars in Mesa . . . Richard Crenna saving all of Phoenix from being wiped out by a runaway comet in A Fire in the Sky. And as the man says: Etc. Etc. Etc.