OLD TUCSON STUDIOS

OLD TUCSON STUDIOS A RETURN TO THE OLD WEST ONCE AGAIN

I'm standing on the plank sidewalk outside the saloon at Old Tucson Studios next to a genuine floozy who ruffles her feathers anytime someone hollers the name Diamond Lil. My intention is to have a word with her, but she is otherwise occupied by a vaca-tioning Ohioan called Roy. He has a grain sack for a belly and a land-office grin as he angles to within sniffing distance of the curves in Lil's neck and tosses his arm over her bare shoulder.

He winks and whispers of his intentions, to the howls of onlooking friends, and that's just fine. It gives me time to ponder a question I've been working on for some years now. What is it about the Old West that won't quit? Why is it still so popular in books and films, and at Old Tucson, the movie set and theme park that has sat amid the cactuses and coyotes in the desert west of Tucson for nearly six decades?

Columbia Pictures built the set in 1939 for the filming of Arizona, with William Holden, Jean Arthur, Rita Hayworth, and Glenn Ford. Since then it has been home to many familiar titles, from Winchester 73 (1950), with Jimmy Stewart, to Tombstone (1993), the action drama about Wyatt Earp, with Kurt Russell and Val Kilmer.

The Old Tucson part of the question has special resonance now. On April 24, 1995, a fire destroyed 40 percent of the site, taking with it some buildings and backdrops that had become venerable to fans of Western movies around the world and an extensive collection of movie props and other memorabilia. The park reopened last January after eight months of reconstruction work and considerable rethinking about how to present the West to a modern audience.

In more than 20 years in southern Arizona, I'd spent a lot of time at the old Old Tucson, including taking a bit part in September Gun, a 1983 TV film that wasn't especially memorable. It starred Robert Preston famous for his role in The Music Man Sally Kellerman, and Patti Duke. The newspaper I worked for assigned me to write a feature on what it was like to be in a motion picture. I was a saloon geek, a part that required shockingly little preparation. When Preston heaved a glass of whiskey on me at the bar of the old soundstage, it was hardly like acting at all. I brushed the fake coffin varnish off my duds just like it'd happened a hundred times before.

So I was familiar with how Old Tucson was, both as a writer and everyday guest, and I was more than curious to see what it had become.

The day of my visit was a winter masterpiece. Blue sky, windless, bright as a diamond. Standing in the middle of Town Square, I saw much that was new, including the town hall building and the saloon and dance hall, a grand 7,000-square-foot room that holds 500 people.

The square has a big feel, even though the town is smaller. The 25 buildings leveled in the fire were replaced by 15 new ones, and park managers expect more will be built in coming years by film companies in need of new looks and sets.

The midday crowd is especially thick around actress Jenny Meeker, who alternates playing Diamond Lil with Teresa Michael. Meeker is a vivacious sort who worked in the administrative office of a medical company when Old Tucson came calling. Now she spends her days wearing a shiny blue dress, lace-up boots, and a plume of feathers above a stack of curls so tight you could bounce a safe off them.

When someone asks Diamond Lil why she's the town favorite, Meeker, a veteran of 15 years in community theater, parks her painted hands on her hips and coos, “Because I'm drop-dead gorgeous, that's why.” The crowd laughs at a good line nicely delivered, and that's the most obvious change at Old Tucson. The actors are real stage performers who know their trade, and they stay in character, and visible in town, throughout the day.

A guest who extends a howdy to rancher Casey Calhoun, played by actress Leesajean Meader, might hear in return: “Mighty fine. 'Cept my calf run off and got caught up in the tumbleweeds, and I had to go git 'er.” “We want the guests to know this is life itself, a real town in 1897,” says Meader, who totes a length of lassoing rope and knows how to use it. “The actors refer to each other by their character's names all day long. When we come through the gates, we become that character.”

“After-noon,” says six-foot-seven-inch

Jeff Goldberg, tipping his black judge's hat to an elderly Asian woman who isn't sure whether to smile or flee. Goldberg probably learned something about fantasy in his first profession. He was a tax accountant.

The spontaneity on the streets shows in the performances, too. Instead of lip-synch-ing their lines to a background recording, the actors speak the dialogue, and that makes the shows play somewhat different-ly each time. I spoke with several guests who'd returned again and again to see the same performances.

"I've seen the saloon show three times, and I'm about to see it a fourth," says Frank Kilcrease, a 61-year-old former postman. "The actors get right right down in the crowd.

You have to know your business to do that, and you have to have control of the audience. Real performers make it a completely different experience than before."

Tucson retirees Fran and Larry Smith visited the park 21 times the first two months of this year. "We used to walk at the mall, but now we come here," says Larry. "We like the feeling of going back in time to the old days, you know, when things were better."

If Kilcrease and the Smiths are typical, Old Tucson will have no trouble getting back Due to its prefire attendance of close to half a million a year. That would place it among the top 10 attractions in Arizona.

Another change: Violence takes a back-seat to camp and comedy. Actors in the Santa Maria Mission Stunt Show say they don't want kids to see their performance end in a wagon load of bodies. Gone are blood bags stashed under clothing, actors who spit out bits of sponge soaked in fake blood, and sound effects of someone's jaw getting cracked.

Whether the new approach plays remains to be seen. A number of guests who remember the old park say they miss two shows in particular: the bank robbery and the street shoot-out, both of which used violence to move the drama.

"We still shoot guns and get blown up, but we walk away from it," says Kevin Teed, who worked at Old Tucson for four years before the fire. "People on their vacation just want to get away from violence. They want to go back to a day when right was right and wrong was wrong."

What he meant was they want to go back to John Wayne. It is impossible to walk the streets of Old Tucson — or any street in the West — without thinking of him. Exaggeration? Consider this true story: When Richard Nixon was in the midst of one of his, and the country's, great convulsions of the early 1970s, he had a sitdown with Wayne to ask for help explaining his values to the country. Seems the president could talk policy with the best of them, but he couldn't reach into the emotional store of everyday people and move them.

Wayne could. He advised the leader of the free world to take a gander at his 1970 film Chishum, saying he'd learn everything he needed to know about values in that old reel.

Chishum wasn't filmed at Old Tucson, but four other Wayne pictures were: Rio Bravo, McLintock!, El Dorado and Rio Lobo, and his presence is still much in evidence here. If you were to ask me the two things about Old Tucson that definitely have not changed, I'd say they're Canadians fanning themselves in the scorching 70-degree heat, and the Duke.

He's the star of a new video, a montage of clips from classic Westerns, showing at Old Tucson's Arizona Theater. In the shoot-out scene in El Dorado, when Wayne shoves a round into his Winchester, takes aim, and barks to his men, in that voice that could clean an oven, "Let's make some music!" well, you feel the magic all over again.

But you also get a sense of what was lost in the fire. All but one of the buildings in which Wayne worked are gone, and some veteran guests say it isn't the same when you can no longer walk into the Rio Lobo Cantina, the McLintock Hotel, or the mission in Mexican Plaza and think, “John Wayne worked in this very spot.”

Instead they head over to the print shop to buy movie stills of the actor and partake of a little Duke-talk with saleswoman Linda Nelson, a certified Wayne expert. “Oh my, we can't keep his photos in stock,” she says. “Especially the one of his mud-pit fight in McLintock!. Everybody knows that scene and can quote the dialogue.” A farmer fixing to hang an Indian he believes kidnapped his daughter finds himself in a confrontation with Wayne, who says: “Somebody ought to belt you in the mouth. But I won't . . . I won't. The hell I won't!” Then Wayne starts the farmer on the road to false teeth, and one of movie history's most famous fight scenes, filmed right at Old Tucson, is under way.

Dialogue like that makes every non-yogurt-eating male of the species want to be John Wayne. Come to think of it, that's another thing about Old Tucson that hasn't changed. It's impossible to spend a day here and not see a middle-aged Izod cowboy, kicking through the dust in penny loafers, imitating Wayne's strange hip-shimmy of a walk, while Mrs. Izod looks away in embarrassment, praying no one is looking.

Back on the saloon porch, Diamond Lil is still shaking her feathers at Roy from Ohio. “Now understand something,” he moons. “I'm not interested in marriage, just a one-night thing.”

OLD TUCSON STUDIOS

Lil makes with the eyes and says, “Well, how big is your bank account?” Roy is just about too tickled to spit. “That's just what the last one said,” he barks, and dissolves in laughter.

As to my question about the lure of the West, I've never really found the answer. Dozens of trips to Old Tucson in two decades, a movie part, all those books and stories, and still I can't put my finger on it.

When friends tell me I ought to quit thinking about it, I have a standard response. I toss out my chest, gravel up my voice till it hurts and say, “The hell I will!” Additional Reading: For more about Tucson and its attractions, we recommend Tucson to Tombstone, a 96-page softcover guidebook by Tom Dollar filled with travel tips and tales of the Old West. The book costs $12.95 plus shipping and handling and is available from Arizona Highways by calling toll-free (800) 543-5432; in the Phoenix area or outside the U.S., call (602) 258-1000.

WHEN YOU GO

Old Tucson Studios is open every day except Thanksgiving and Christmas. From late December to mid-April, the park opens at 9 A.M. and closes at 7 P.M., while the rest of the year regular hours are 10 A.M. to 6 P.M. Admission is $14.95 for adults, $9.45 for children four to 11, free, three and under. There is a slight discount for Pima County residents. The park also honors senior discounts and has special rates for groups or tours with more than 25 people. All entertainment, rides, attractions, museums, exhibits, and guided tours are included in the price of admission.

The rebuilt Old Tucson Studios is big on family entertainment. Visitors can enjoy live Old West gunfights, a dance hall revue, Indian storytelling, an old-fashioned Big Top Show, tours of the old movie sets, and much, much, more. Attractions include stagecoach, wagon, and narrow gauge train rides and an underground Iron Door Mine ride. Great for children are the Iron Pony handcars, Young Riders Pony Express pony rides, and the Rio Bravo log ride. Kids also will like playing the old-fashioned carnival games, panning for gold, and petting and feeding the animals at the Wild & Woolly Petting Zoo.

Old Tucson Studios offers a choice of restaurants boasting traditional Southwestern cuisine, barbecue, and Mexican food, as well as a cantina, an ice-cream parlor, and a sweet shop. There also are snack and drink stands throughout the park.

For more information, contact Old Tucson Studios, 201 S. Kinney Road, Tucson, AZ 85735; (520) 883-0100.