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tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32625767858281259862019-01-01T06:18:33.480-08:00Arizona's Little HollywoodHaving played host to more than 60 Hollywood productions—from the early years of cinema through the 1970s—Sedona, Arizona's impact on the film industry is the main topic of discussion on this blog. Detailing its role as a silent but stunning backdrop to all types of movies, entries cover the silent films, B westerns, World War II propaganda, and film noirs filmed on location in Arizona.Arizona's Little Hollywoodhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-3262576785828125986.post-27706912770153800912012-04-23T08:47:00.000-07:002012-04-23T08:56:33.102-07:00"Lightning" Deal

Smoke Lightning had a two day run at Fredonia, New York's Winter Garden Theatre in May 1933, but the headline attraction wasn't all-American George O'Brien. Topping the bill that week was Mussolini Speaks!, A six-reel documentary produced by Columbia Pictures and promoted with ad art showing a crowd of Blackshirts giving "today's man of the hour" the fascist salute. Cult director Edgar G. Ulmer (Detour) reportedly worked on it as a director.

When Hollywood cowboy George O'Brien left Flagstaff for Los Angeles in October 1932, having completed three weeks of filming in and around Sedona for Robbers' Roost, he had good reason to expect he'd be back. Before Roost's cast and crew departed, Fox Film representatives told The Coconino Sun that David Howard (who'd directed O'Brien's Mystery Ranch in Sedona six months earlier) was coming back soon to film the Zane Grey story Canyon Walls. Beyond that, Fox intended to shoot one or two unspecified Zane Grey stories in the area immediately afterward. Local rancher Lee Doyle was already engaged to help select locales and, as usual, handle transportation and supplies. O'Brien, whom Fox was now declaring the "most popular Western actor in pictures" had every reason to expect he'd be back on the train soon to star in one or all of these pictures.

But it didn't turn out that way. While O'Brien did star in Canyon Walls, it wasn't in Sedona. When the project was released on February 17, 1933, it was retitled Smoke Lightning, bore little resemblance to Grey's story and was filmed entirely in California. Fox cameras would return to Red Rock Country, but not until almost a year later, in August 1933. And then it was not for an O'Brien/Grey western, but for Smoky, based on a best seller by cowboy author/illustrator Will James and starring Victor Jory. Given that Fox would chalk up a devastating $19.96 million loss in 1932, and surely had an inkling of that by the time the Roost company left town, it's not such a leap to imagine that filming a low-return Western in Arizona had become a luxury Fox decided it could no longer afford; the three post-Roost Grey adaptations starring O'Brien (Smoke Lightning, Life in the Raw, and The Last Trail), were filmed entirely in California, a sign of the changes to come that would contribute to O'Brien and Fox parting ways.Arizona's Little Hollywoodhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-3262576785828125986.post-80817975036707713092012-02-06T07:04:00.000-08:002012-02-06T07:04:10.790-08:00Twin Beauts

Bet this photo grabbed your attention! The babe is Irish McCalla, 5' 9 1/2" pin-up glamazon and future star of TV's Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, seen here lounging in front of the slightly more statuesque but not nearly as sexy Merrick Butte in Monument Valley. This shot was probably snapped by prolific girlie magazine photographer David Sutton in September 1950 during the filming of River Goddesses, an indie travelogue that documented the adventures of five curvalicious pin-up models taking a sightseeing trip down the Colorado River in wooden rowboats. Footage from this obscure feature film hasn't been seen in decades, but based on the evidence of this picture, the goddesses also made a detour into bone dry Navajoland to pay a visit to John Ford's neighborhood in Arizona's Little Hollywood.

River Goddesses has one heck of an oddball pedigree. Its believed to have been produced by a Hollywood company called Capital Enterprises, which may or may not be the same outfit that later distributed Crusader Rabbit, the first made-for-TV cartoon series. It was directed by former German Communist Party member Carl Junghans, one of the leading documentary filmmakers of the Weimar period, who jumped sides in the '30s to work as a writer/director/editor for Nazi Germany's Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda. His documentary short Jugend der Welt (Youth of the World) received the Coppa dell'Istituto Nazionale Luce award at the 1936 Venice International Film Festival, the same year that the partly photographed-in-Sedona Nazi Western Der Kaiser von Kalifornien won the Mussolini Cup as best foreign film. After falling into disfavor with Hitler, Junghans hot-footed it to the United States, where he worked as a gardener and landscape photographer. In 1946, he made a comeback as a filmmaker to write, produce and direct a pair of short documentaries about Monument Valley: Memories of Monument Valley and Monuments of the Past, the latter movie narrated with typically stiff upper lip aplomb by British actor Herbert Marshall. Junghans (disparagingly monikered "the Colonel" by Goddesses' crew) was reported to have been a somewhat less-than-charming Teutonic misogynist; forty-three years after working with him, McCalla recalled to author Richard E. Westwood that he "openly said women should be kept in concentration camps for breeding purposes only: that's all we were good for."

Four boats carrying the Goddesses gang shoved off from Hite, UT, at the northeast end of Lake Powell, and went ashore for numerous photo ops along the Colorado before landing at Lee's Ferry, Ariz., 7.5 miles southwest of the town of Page, Ariz., and the Glen Canyon Dam. Joining McCalla in the on-screen escapades were shipshape mates Becky Barnes, Lee Moi Chu, Irene Hettinga and Martha Moody; with the exception of Chu, who later did walk-ons in a pair of clinkers released by major studios (Universal-International's Forbidden and United Artists' Dragon's Gold), the other models booked return passage into obscurity at the end of the nearly monthlong cruise.

The see-worthy sirens were chaperoned during the excursion by pioneering female river-running guide Georgie White Clark, who told Northern Arizona University researcher Karen Underhill in 1991 that the travelogue wasn't really about the scenery, but "was more to show the girls... they just showed the beauty of the girls more than anything. I mean, the thing was [they] really wanted to show more of that as they hiked around, which they did, up to Rainbow Bridge and all––[it was] more to show their beauty while they were doing it."

In her 1977 autobiography, Georgie Clark: Thirty Years of River Running, she recalled a Goddesses "action sequence" that featured Irish McCalla: "Next, they had Iris [sic] walk along the top of the cliff. Actually, it was just a little spot outside of camp. Next she fell and grabbed the top of the cliff. Next scene, the camera zoomed in to show her hanging hundreds of feet above the river. I almost died laughing over that one. They actually made that girl hang from the top of that little rock with her feet barely a foot above the ground. All she had to do was let go and drop easily to safety." The march of time hadn't dimmed Clark's memory of Herr Junghans, either. "The first thing the director did after they unloaded [his boat], was to pop down in his chair on the beach and order martinis. I remember watching him drink that martini and thinking, 'Boy, this is going to be some trip.'"

The idea for the cinematic nautical tour was apparently dreamed up by cameraman Sutton, who photographed the movie and at the same time snapped cheesecake stills of the frolicking short-shorts and bikini-clad bombshells to peddle to various "gags and gals" rags, like Brief, Peril, and Laff. The slightly classier Night and Day (modestly taglined "America's Picture Magazine of Entertainment") published shots from the trip for years; photos even showed up in the big circulation and appropriately named Look magazine, which ran a five page pictorial titled "Six Girls Against the Colorado" in its May 8, 1951 issue. Unfortunately, these titillating images are all that remain of River Goddesses. Every frame of it has vanished and there are no posters, newspaper ads or other types of publicity materials to be found anywhere. This lack of a paper trail could be telltale proof that the film never made it into theaters, although Georgie Clark claimed that she saw it once, so its a good bet that the movie was actually completed before it sank into oblivion.

Prior to making her invisible big screen debut in River Godeseses, Irish McCalla was one of the triumvirate of post-war American pinup superstars, along with sister va-va-voom icons Betty Brosmer and Bettie Page. Her filmography consists of just six post-Sheena features, mostly low-budget drive-in schlock like The Beat Generation, Hands of a Stranger, and She Demons, the cheesy 1958 grindhouse classic in which she portrayed a haughty society girl who washes up on an uncharted tropical island inhabited by a love-frenzied mad scientist, renegade Nazi storm troopers, sloppily made up zombie women and a bevy of over-rehearsed hoochie coochie dancers.

McCalla moved to Prescott, Ariz., in 1982 to devote her time to painting, her first love. She was the subject of numerous gallery exhibitions in Scottsdale, Ariz., and a longtime member of Women Artists of the American West; her paintings are even in the permanent collection of the National Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame. But it is her brief reign as pulp pinup queen that has made Irish McCalla immortal; the river goddess was named one of "The Top 100 Sex Stars of the Century" by Playboy magazine in January 1999.––Joe McNeillArizona's Little Hollywoodhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-3262576785828125986.post-39177884947994140982012-01-30T09:23:00.000-08:002012-02-01T06:26:39.200-08:00Stock Answers

Richard Dix and Lois Wilson in 1925's The Vanishing American...

Between 1923 and 1928, Paramount Pictures released almost a dozen films based on Zane Grey stories that were photographed on Arizona locations, including To the Last Man, The Call of the Canyon (1923), The Heritage of the Desert (1924), The Light of Western Stars, Code of the West, Wild Horse Mesa, The Vanishing American, (1925), The Last Frontier (1926), Drums of the Desert (1927), Under the Tonto Rim, Avalanche, The Water Hole and Sunset Pass (1928). But when talkies took the movie business by storm the studio decided to cut costs by shooting its Zane Grey westerns close to home in California.

However, Paramount continued to churn out low budget movies in the 1930s based (sometimes barely) on novels written by Grey, and by cleverly stitching in footage lifted from the silents, these also appear to have sequences photographed in Arizona. Some of the film shot on location in Payson for the lost silent version of To the Last Man has survived because cash-stricken Paramount saved a few dollars during the Great Depression by recycling scenes from it for the 1933 sound remake with Randolph Scott. A few glimpses of the silent Heritage of the Desert (filmed north of Flagstaff at Cameron) can still be seen because Paramount plundered it as economy footage for its 1939 remake.

... and Buster Crabbe wearing Dix's duds in 1936.

Even The Vanishing American, the only northern Arizona-lensed silent Grey adaption that still exists in good condition, was mined for stock. The 1936 remake of Desert Gold had star Buster Crabbe dressed identically to Vanishing's Richard Dix, which made a reasonable enough illusion in longshot to fool unsuspecting matinee crowds into thinking that the California production had crossed the state line into Arizona.––Joe McNeillArizona's Little Hollywoodhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-3262576785828125986.post-30481249495791341262012-01-23T09:33:00.000-08:002012-01-23T09:33:37.679-08:00Sedona's Citizen Welles, Part 3

Orson Welles and cinematographer Greg Toland at work on Citizen Kane.

Orson Welles lived in Sedona for nearly two years in the '70s. His daughter, Beatrice Welles, offers a rare glimpse into his private life in the third and final part of our exclusive interview.

SEDONA MONTHLY: Your mom, Paola Mori, was an Italian countess who thought Sedona was beautiful, but what did she think of living in such a rural area?

BEATRICE WELLES: It was difficult for her – more difficult for her than me. I left London for her because she was going to be alone in Sedona. We knew nobody. She got to know people through me. I worked for [Sedona watchmaker] Geoffrey Roth for a while just to have something to do. But it was tough for her. There was nothing.

Did your mom consider coming back to Sedona?

She wanted to, she loved it here, but she didn't think about coming back. She needed to stay in Vegas.

She painted, right?

She was very artistic.

Did she paint Sedona?

Yes [gestures to room behind her] – they are in there. But there was always a dog in it or me – Sedona was the background. They are very sweet and charming paintings. I come from a very artistic family. And here I am…making handbags [laughs]. I am artistic. I realize that now, but it never dawned on me that I was artistic. It took forever to realize it was there.

Your father seemed to like working with family members. His second wife, Rita Hayworth, was in The Lady From Shaghai. Your half-sister, Christopher, was in Macbeth. Your mother was in Mr. Arkadin and you were in Chimes at Midnight. Did it make him feel more comfortable to be around familiar faces or was it a matter of economics?

I think it was both. He did a lot of adaptations, and he thought of specific people while he was doing the adaptations. Economics was always a huge part because he put all of his money into his movies. Everyone thinks I must be rolling, but they don't understand. He made all of these movies, put all of his money in, and then it ended up being owned by someone else.

Parts of The Other Side of the Wind, his last, unfinished, film were shot in Carefree [Arizona] just prior to the time he lived in Sedona. Was any filming done in Sedona or other parts of northern Arizona?

No, only Carefree and Los Angeles.

Did he ever mention the possibility of shooting in Sedona?

No. He was home. The moment there was my mother and me, it all changed. Not when we were traveling, but when we settled in London. We didn't think about making movies. [Editor's note: Welles filmed a conversation with lifelong friends Roger and Hortense Hill in Sedona in June, 1978, that he may have intended to use as a segment in a never-completed self-portrait to be titled Orson Welles Solo. Portions of this footage, renamed Orson Welles Talks With Roger Hill, have been restored and were screened at Switzerland's Locarno International Film Festival in 2005]

You all three left Sedona at the same time?

Yes, and we left because of him. He needed us to be closer, but he really loved it here.

Did he ever express any regrets about leaving?

Yes, because he hated Las Vegas. We all did. He said he wished there was a way we could have stayed. Leaving was purely logistical.

Did he ever return to visit?

Never. My father didn't vacation – it didn't exist in his life. Vacation was coming home. At one point we talked about flying here, but the airport was much smaller. You couldn't get a jet in. He didn't want to be crammed into a tiny plane – he had a bad back. He said it was the same as driving. There was nothing to do. And I got tired of driving him back and forth. But he loved the drive [from Phoenix]. He loved Bloody Basin Road. He thought it was the most wonderful name. It's so Southwest. Every time we passed it, he had to say something about [deep male voice] Bloody Basin Road [laughs].

Did you have any involvement in his film projects?

No. I never worked on anything. I was always just with him.

You didn't appear in any other films?

No.

But you modeled.

I modeled. I did it out of necessity. I had been show jumping – I was short listed for the Olympic games – and then I busted my knee. My whole life stopped. I had four horses. Nobody bought me the horses. I went out and dealt and got the horse and worked on them and made them into jumpers. That was the fun part, more than the competing. They were all ex-racehorses. You could do that in England. Then my whole life stopped. I had been modeling now and again, so I decided to do it. I was so depressed – my life was the horses. So I did a lot of runway work, which was what I enjoyed the most. Unfortunately, I also wanted to make money. In those days, supermodels didn't exist. I only worked for Vogue, and they paid a flat rate of 25 pounds a day. It didn't matter how many hours you worked. I didn't really like it. I wanted to do catalogue work because you would get paid, but you had to be shorter. The clothes were made for shorter people in the early- and mid-'70s. I was almost six feet – nothing fit me. But I did the Milan and Paris shows. It was fun. Angelica Houston was modeling at the time – she was a friend. There wasn't the snobbism there is now. I think it's unbearable now.

What did your father think of the modeling?

He was fine with it.

Did he encourage you to be creative?
No. He was the worst father in that sense. He was the most wonderful father in teaching me about the world. I knew things that no one else knew about because he had read about it. He was always interested in learning, and he would talk about what he learned. But he was never the father that guided you. I got no schooling and no guidance. I didn't know what to do, so modeling seemed right.––Interview by Erika Ayn Finch and Joe McNeill
Arizona's Little Hollywoodhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-3262576785828125986.post-14457990702276265132012-01-16T08:18:00.000-08:002012-01-16T08:18:23.088-08:00Sedona's Citizen Welles, Part 2

1941 Orson Welles publicity portrait for Citizen Kane.

Filmmaker Orson Welles lived in Sedona from 1977 through 1978 with his wife and daughter, Beatrice, who still lives there. Beatrice gives us a glimpse of what life was like with her father.

SEDONA MONTHLY: What was a typical day in Sedona for Orson Welles?

BEATRICE WELLES: Quiet but not quiet. He never slept. He slept when he was tired. He'd be up all night, and then he'd sleep a couple of hours in the afternoon. The typewriter never stopped. He tried to teach me about baseball, which didn't work. My mom was the cook – everyone was an exceptional cook in my family except me. But I got all of my father's [traits]. I knew nothing about Thanksgiving until I moved to America. So he had to tell me the story about Thanksgiving – I was 21 years old. So we had Thanksgiving in Sedona. I think my grandmother was here from Italy – she stayed for a few months. I remember my mother made a turkey stuffed with mini tamales. She got the recipe from Sunset Magazine.

Your father said he learned to make movies by watching Stagecoach dozens of times. Did you ever hear him talk about the film?

Yes! He always said Monument Valley was one of the most beautiful places in the world. When he sent us off on the trip that led us to Sedona, he said we had to see Monument Valley. He was in awe of Jack Ford; he saw Stagecoach 33 times. It is an amazing movie. I saw it four or five years ago on the big screen – I'd never seen it on the big screen. It's extraordinary – it has everything. It's ageless.

Did he ever express interest in making a Western?

Never that I knew of. He had so many projects – maybe there was a Western in the middle of one. I don't know.

You mentioned Burt Reynolds. Did any other filmmakers or actors visit him in Sedona?

No, because he didn't want them to [laughs]. That was the whole point. He had to deal with them in Hollywood, and he didn't want them coming here. Of course, he was very close to Burt at that time.

Did he ever watch any of his older films on TV?

No. Once something was done, you moved on because you can't change it. Especially movies. He was in love with movies, but he loved to do theater because he could change it every night. If there was something that wasn't quite right, he could tweak it. He was a perfectionist, and I get that from him. It's annoying because you're never quite happy with what you do, and he never was. The only movie he ever said he loved and the one movie he wanted people to remember him by was Chimes of Midnight, which was the five Shakespeare plays he put together and made into a 90-minute movie. It was first on stage in Dublin and then it was made into a movie backed by Spaniards.

I was in the film. It was my one acting experience. I got rheumatic fever the moment it started, so it was all over. I had to get a double. It was his favorite movie. I remember watching it with him. But he never watched his other movies. God forbid one of his commercials came on. He would instantly change the TV. He never wanted to see himself. Everything that was past was past. It's what saved him. He had a lot of hardships in his life. He had so much taken away from him – most of his movies. And he moved on.

That's the side of me that's hard. If I think about everything I've done [to preserve his legacy], I know I'm doing it for my father, but he probably doesn't care. I've spent the last 20 years going through heartbreak – it's all emotion and I'm the only one who cares about it. That's logical; I'm the only one who would care. But there's another side that makes me think he wouldn't care, and maybe I should stop. But I can't. I want to leave his films the way they should be left. It's not about him but what he left and how he made it. They should be left that way.

I'm talking about Othello and all of his films I've tried to get my hands on. We stopped Touch of Evil from being screened at the Cannes film festival [in 1998]. They wouldn't listen to us. We wanted to see what was being done to the movie. It was being restored – footage had been added. As the estate, we wanted to see it. They ignored us like we didn't exist. We brought in a lawyer who told them the movie wasn't approved by the estate, and the Cannes festival didn't show it. I was very unpopular. Chuck Heston called me an idiot on TV. I didn't want to stop a premier at the Cannes film festival, but we wanted to see what was going on. We wanted to see the script and the movie. Is that so much to ask?

So how much filming did you actually do for Chimes at Midnight?

I was 9. My British accent was dubbed by a boy. I played the part of Falstaff's page. It was very traumatic. I was 9 years old, I had long hair, I was starting to think about being a girl, and suddenly I had to have my hair all chopped off, looking like a boy. Nobody understands how traumatic that was for me. I was quite feminine, and suddenly I had to have this horrible haircut, which was also bad because he told me during that time nobody had good haircuts, which is a very good point.

I worked on the film quite a lot. They would drag me out of bed. I was in bed for a year. Thank God for that – we had the right doctor. The only way to save your heart is by not moving. I had cortisone injections every day. So I would be put on a pillow for filming. There were parts where they couldn't use a double. But my part became much smaller because I was sick. The worst of it was that my father hated birthdays, like me. He hated them because on his ninth birthday, his mother died. So my ninth birthday came along. Usually, it wasn't a big thing for him. Christmas was. But on my ninth birthday, he bought me a horse. But I never got to ride the horse, because I was sick two days later. And we ended up selling the horse. It wasn't practical.

What were his favorite movies from the late 1970s?

He was a great admirer of Clint Eastwood and Sylvester Stallone – he thought the first Rocky was amazing.

Was there a movie theater in Sedona, and did you go see movies?
There was the Flicker Shack, but we didn't see any movies. Again, coming home was sacred. In those days, there was no VHS, so it was just TV.––Interview by Erika Ayn Finch and Joe McNeill

Arizona's Little Hollywoodhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-3262576785828125986.post-40514316473800000772012-01-09T09:34:00.000-08:002012-01-09T09:34:23.945-08:00Sedona's Citizen Welles, Part 1

Beatrice Welles on Sedona's Schnebly Hill, flanked by her father's 1970 Academy Honorary Award "for superlative artistry and versatility in the creation of motion pictures."

Most Sedona histories name German-born Dadaist Max Ernst and American Surrealist Dorothea Tanning as the most famous artists to have ever lived in Red Rock Country. But for our money, that honor is owned by Orson Welles, the multi-tasking genius considered the single most influential filmmaker of the sound era, who lived with his third wife and his daughter, Beatrice, in Sedona for nearly two years in the 1970s.

We are proud to claim Orson Welles as one of Sedona's own. In 1941, at age 25, he directed, produced, starred in and co-wrote Citizen Kane, widely hailed as the greatest film ever made. He went on to direct, write and act in a dozen additional masterful features before his death in 1985 (some of which, unfortunately, he was never able to complete) including The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), The Lady from Shanghai (1947), Othello (1952), Touch of Evil (1958), The Trial (1962), Chimes at Midnight (aka Falstaff, 1965) and F for Fake (1973).

Orson Welles' association with Arizona dates back to at least 1941, when he scouted locations in Tuscon for Mexican Melodrama, aka The Way to Santiago, his unrealized follow up to Citizen Kane. Today, his daughter, Beatrice Welles, still lives and works in Sedona. Beatrice, who as a child played a small role in Chimes at Midnight, her father's favorite of his own films, is a passionate animal rights advocate and talented artist well known for her innovative handbag and fichu designs. She is also a controversial figure due to her ongoing fight to preserve her father's artistic legacy. For our annual film issue, Beatrice sat down with Sedona Monthly to reflect on life in the red rocks with her father.

SEDONA MONTHLY: How did your family discover Sedona?

BEATRICE WELLES: We were visiting America from London, and my dad told us we should visit the Grand Canyon. Off [my mom and I] went. Of course, I believed everything my father said. This was in the '70s, and the speed limit was 55. He told me if I went over 55 in Arizona, I would be put in jail. So here we are in this big car with no one on the roads, and I'm doing 55. It took us a month to do something that would probably take a week [laughs]. Somebody told us we had to see Jerome, but that there was nowhere to stay in Jerome, so we had to stay in a place called Sedona. We looked it up on a map and made a hotel reservation. It took me probably two hours to get down the canyon because I couldn't see – it was a nightmare. We woke up to this amazing view. Nobody had told us. I was 20 – this was 1976. We toured the Southwest, but we kept on finding ourselves back in Sedona. We felt compelled to be here.

We went back to [Los Angeles] and showed my father 7,000 photographs. Sedona, Sedona, Sedona! We stayed in L.A. for about a month, and as we were packing to go back to London, my father said, Why don't you pack for Sedona, find a house and we'll live there. So that's how it happened. It's not surprising – that sort of thing happened a million times. He'd never seen Sedona, but he'd seen the photographs, and he saw that we were so happy. He wanted us to move to America anyway because he was working so much in the states. He thought Sedona would be a wonderful place, but it wound up not being a wonderful place because of the distance [between Sedona and L.A.]. He would get two days off, and it was two days to travel here. He was exhausted, but we all loved Sedona.

Where did you live while he was here?

We lived by the creek off Doodlebug Road until it flooded, and we were evacuated. It was such drama. After that, we moved to Sky Mountain Ranch to be as far away from the creek as possible. As much as we liked the creek, Sky Mountain was safer. We lived on Sycamore Road.

So what year did your family move to Sedona?

Early 1977, and then we moved away at the end of 1978. He really loved it – moving away had nothing to do with not liking Sedona. He didn't get two or three weeks off. It would be two days, and it just didn't work. We ended up going to Las Vegas, which we all hated. But it was 40 minutes by plane – he could do turnarounds if he had to. I only stayed there less than a year, and then I came rushing back here. When we first moved to Sedona, I was bored out of my mind. I came from London, and I was having a very heavy social life with lots to do. Every night there was an opening or a concert or something you wanted to go to. I was in Sedona writing letters to everybody and thinking I had never written so much in my life.

What did Orson do while he was in Sedona?

Nothing. When he came home, the doors closed, the bathrobe was put on, and it was nothing. He watched TV incessantly. It was the first time we had a remote. In England, he would sit in front of the TV and change channels over and over. And he worked. Even when he was home, he was writing – there would be a table full of papers and a typewriter. He was always working on something. He wasn't on the phone; it was all creative. He couldn't stop. He spent time with us, but he wasn't into the outdoors.

During the period he lived here, there was a thin, locally produced magazine called Sedona Life, and he was listed on its masthead as a member of its board of advisors. How did he come to be involved in the publication?

It was my fault. I knew the woman who ran it, and I asked him to be involved as a favor to her. He didn't do anything for it. He didn't write for it. I was always asking him horrible favors for my friends, and he always said yes.

We know you're an animal lover. Did your family have pets while you lived here?

My parents were huge animal lovers. My dad had Kiki. She was this tiny black teacup poodle. He invented a story that it belonged to a cutter, and he didn't want it so my dad wound up with the poodle. Of course that isn't true. He bought the poodle. He refused to admit it. So he and Kiki were inseparable. They went everywhere together. When he arrived home, Kiki was with him. It was bizarre, this large man with this tiny dog. He was mostly a dog person, but he liked cats, too. At the time, we had Kiki and my little Jack Russell terrier, who was 15 by then – she lived to be 22. And there was a Pekinese my mother had. Then there was the dog we got from the humane society here. At the time, it was outdoors where the dog park is now located. This dog was huge. I don't know what he was – we got him as a puppy. He became so big we had to have a collar made for him. That was our ménage when we were here.

I have this great photo of my dad with a cigar in his mouth, and he's holding Kiki. He hated to have his photo taken. He didn't like how he looked, ever. Hence all the false noses while he was making movies. He was always hiding behind makeup. You could never take a picture at home. I have so few pictures because he hated it. But this one time, it was about Kiki.

Do you think of your father as an international globetrotter?

I'd say he was international, but that's not even right because he was so American. He traveled frequently because he had to. I think you get very used to that way of life, and you like it. I know I do. I miss it terribly. It's lovely to have a place to come home to, which we didn't have really. We were living in hotels and rentals – we lived in rentals in Sedona. We had a house in Italy and Spain, but it was mostly hotels. He was a true American, though. He was born in the Midwest. People don't think of him that way. They think he was English. He traveled to China when he was young. His father was an inventor – quite crazy – and his mother was a suffragist. She died when he was 9, which devastated him. She was the one who brought out his artistic side.

Do you have any great memories of your father in Sedona?

I have a very funny one. When we were in Sky Mountain, we had a pool. That was rare in Sedona, and it was lovely. We were surrounded by national forest, so you felt like you were swimming off a cliff. So I directed a melodrama here in town – it was a huge success. He came to opening night – to my horror – and he brought Burt Reynolds. I got so nervous that I lost my voice. Burt Reynolds was a megastar, and I didn't know him. Anyway, after this thing, [dad] decided to take a swim. It was pitch dark. Suddenly we hear him roaring, screaming. My mother thought he was drowning. At the time, there was a security service in town. It was the days before alarm systems. A security guard would come check every two hours with a flashlight. So here comes this guy with a flashlight, flashing on my dad who was stark naked because he always went swimming naked. This poor security guard…I thought he was going to die.–– Interview by Erika Ayn Finch and Joe McNeillArizona's Little Hollywoodhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-3262576785828125986.post-45975616287547480062011-12-26T07:44:00.000-08:002011-12-26T07:44:59.598-08:00Selective Short Subject

MGM sent a film film crew to Sedona—its last to make the trip to Red Rock Country for twenty years—in May 1943 to photograph scenes for Roaming Through Arizona, a one-reel "Traveltalks" short released in 1944 that included Technicolor views of Oak Creek Canyon. An entry in the long-running series produced by James A. FitzPatrick, Roaming Through Arizona is a simple travelogue that extolls the virtues of various state attractions, although the Grand Canyon, filmed during FitzPatrick's visit to Arizona, isn't included here; that footage was saved for use in a separate Traveltalk, Grand Canyon, Pride of Creation (1943).

The nine-minute Roaming Through Arizona, silent with a voice-over narration and music, does offer pleasing postcard views of the Mission of San Xavier, south of Tucson, as well as the statues of World War I aviator Frank Luke (on the grounds of the state capitol building in Phoenix) and Captain William "Bucky O'Neill" (organizer of the Arizona unit of Teddy Roosevelt's Rough Riders) in Prescott, along with Prescott's Granite Dells. It tells the histories of the cliffside mining town of Jerome, the Petrified Forest National Monument, and Wickenburg's Hassayampa Well, Rodeo, and wedding chapels.

However, Sedona is the only location visited in Roaming Through Arizona that's not identified by name, despite the beautiful views of Bell Rock, Capitol Butte, and Gibraltar Rock (near Lee Mountain). The intimidating switchbacks of Oak Creek Canyon are mentioned by name in passing, but FitzPatrick mistakenly gives credit to Mayhew's Oak Creek Lodge as the place "where Zane Grey wrote his famous book The Call of the Canyon." The film fades to black as the camera offers a sweeping panoramic shot of Sedona's anonymous terrain while an offscreen chorus warbles "Home on the Range."––Joe McNeillArizona's Little Hollywoodhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-3262576785828125986.post-5458469183950271322011-12-19T08:18:00.000-08:002011-12-19T08:18:23.423-08:00Chief Spokesman?

To promote Indian Uprising (released in 1951, long before the dawn of political correctness), Columbia Pictures flacks suggested theater owners should "see if you can get a local Indian to act as your special press agent. If so, dress him in ceremonial Indian costume, and have him make personal appearances on local television and radio shows."Arizona's Little Hollywoodhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-3262576785828125986.post-54234939978503776182011-12-12T07:33:00.000-08:002011-12-12T07:33:05.362-08:00Karolyn 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

Arizona's Little Hollywoodhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-3262576785828125986.post-21855052819097624522011-12-05T09:01:00.000-08:002011-12-12T07:33:33.062-08:00Karolyn 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
Arizona's Little Hollywoodhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-3262576785828125986.post-89433896957405148382011-11-28T08:46:00.000-08:002011-11-28T08:46:55.526-08:00German Spectacle

Since its publication last year, the chapter in my book Arizona's Little Hollywood that's raised the most eyebrows is the one that revealed that Der Kaiser von Kalifornien, a German-language Nazi Western, was shot on location in Sedona in September 1935. Readers find it incredible that such an off-the-wall film could have been shot in patriotic Red Rock Country; as pop culture pundit Fern Siegel commented in MediaPost, "Like Woody Allen, my Nazi radar is highly attuned, so Der Kaiser von Kalifornien, a 1936 piece of anti-capitalist propaganda, was a surprise."

I didn't believe it either until I tracked down a German DVD copy and saw for myself. Sure enough, local landmarks Schnebly Hill, Oak Creek, Munds Mountain Trail, even the dirt trail that is today's paved State Route 89A are all easily recognizable locations in the movie. There's even a slow sweeping panorama of the entire area shot from high atop the Mogollon Rim that is probably the best photographic record we have of the Sedona landscape before development.

The question I'm most frequently asked is "How can I see this movie?" It's not easy. Der Kaiser has never been released on home video in the United States, but pristinely restored DVD special editions (in German and without English subtitles) are available from Amazon.de in Germany, as well as through international dealers on eBay. Thankfully, because the intent of Der Kaiser was strictly to vilify capitalism and twist the story of Sutter's Mill and America's 19th-century belief in Manifest Destiny into an analogy for Hitler's plan for German expansion into foreign territories, there is no anti-Semetic or racist content in the film. But one word of warning before purchasing a DVD: Because the discs are produced in the European PAL video format, you'll need a multi-region DVD player to watch it.––Joe McNeill
Arizona's Little Hollywoodhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-3262576785828125986.post-49617464781784435522011-11-21T11:20:00.000-08:002011-11-21T11:20:59.896-08:00Dan 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
Arizona's Little Hollywoodhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-3262576785828125986.post-83792584858363831172011-11-14T07:23:00.000-08:002011-11-14T07:23:24.472-08:00Dan 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 MonthlyArizona's Little Hollywoodhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-3262576785828125986.post-69409715515601511172011-10-24T08:06:00.000-07:002011-10-24T08:06:04.506-07:00Quiet on the Set!

James Stewart confers with Italian-American "Indian" Iron Eyes Cody in Sedona.

Suspicious PR item from the pressbook for Broken Arrow, filmed in Sedona in 1949:

Broken Arrow star Jimmy Stewart was known as a nice guy throughout his life, but he was never much of a talker. While on location in the Coconino National Forest near Sedona, the tall, gangling actor stopped for a moment to admire the magnificent view. An uncredited Apache player, Phillip Sky Bird, sidled up to gaze in the same direction.

Minutes passed and not a word was exchanged between the two. Finally, Stewart, feeling the awkward silence, let himself go and came up with an observation.

"Nice country," he ventured.

"Yes," replied Sky Bird, "but don't spoil it by your idle chatter."Arizona's Little Hollywoodhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-3262576785828125986.post-56675669420286227122011-10-17T08:04:00.000-07:002011-10-17T08:04:08.759-07:00Crystal Ball

Silent movie star Richard Dix listens to the radio––still a technological marvel at the time––while filming Redskin on northern Arizona's remote Navajo reservation in November 1928. Ironically, Redskin sputtered at the box office due to the rising clamor for talkies and was one of Paramount Famous Lasky Corporation's last completely silent productions.––Joe McNeillArizona's Little Hollywoodhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-3262576785828125986.post-54822247892675233152011-10-10T09:16:00.000-07:002011-10-10T09:16:32.616-07:00Paid Sedona Vacation

Ernest Borgnine, Ben Cooper, Frank Marlowe, Royal Dano, Joan Crawford, and Scott Brady in Johnny Guitar (1954).

An unpublished pearl of wisdom from Johnny Guitar co-star Ben Cooper, from a 2004 interview for my book Arizona's Little Hollywood:

Joe McNeill: "Johnny Guitar may be the greatest film ever made in Sedona, but it was a rather unhappy set – did you think it would turn out so well?"

Ben Cooper: "I was just 20 years old. I had my own horse when I was 12 and didn't know they had stuntmen in movies. So I used to practice so I could do some of the crazy things they did on horses. Now here I was, 20 years old, working on a Western movie, riding the same horse that Alan Ladd rode in the movie Shane – and they were paying me! Can you picture this kid being unhappy? Not a bit!"––Joe McNeillArizona's Little Hollywoodhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-3262576785828125986.post-18744146466750626102011-10-03T09:03:00.000-07:002011-10-03T09:03:10.355-07:00'Kingdom of the Spiders' Reunion

In 1977, spiders – and William Shatner – invaded Camp Verde, Arizona, for the filming of the B horror movie Kingdom of the Spiders. It's a claim to fame the town embraces, so on Oct. 29, the Second Annual Kingdom of the Spiders Reunion takes place at the ball field behind Camp Verde Town Hall. The fun starts at 3 p.m. with music and a barbecue. At 6:30 p.m., the movie will be shown on a 30-foot screen. Admission is free.

"It's a really good bad movie," says Steve Goetting, who organized the reunion along with his wife, Barbara. "It's very dated, but downtown Camp Verde is recognizable. The scenery is recognizable and the buildings are recognizable. There are even scenes filmed in Sedona, though Sedona is referred to as Camp Verde. This really is a part of the Verde Valley's history."

Last year, more than 700 people showed up for the reunion including dozens who were extras in the film. Since Kingdom never played in Camp Verde, many people were seeing themselves on the big screen for the first time. "There was lots of cheering – the crowd was thrilled," says Steve, who also organizes the Camp Verde Pecan, Wine and Antique Festival and who owns The Horn Fine Wines and Craft Brews. "There were kids from the high school in the movie and now they are adults, but they recognized themselves."

Though Steve extended invitations to the movie's stars, including Shatner and Tiffany Bolling, don't expect any big names at the event. You can, however, expect a mini museum featuring Kingdom memorabilia such as photos, newspaper clippings, stencils used to paint larger-than-life spiders on building walls and plastic spiders. An arachnid-lover will also be on hand with a collection of live spiders. Bring your lawn chair, snacks (no alcohol) and a sweater for the movie screening (popcorn and soda will also be sold). Look for a Kingdom of the Spiders float in this year's Fort Verde Days Parade on Oct. 8. – Erika Ayn Finch. Originally published in the October 2011 issue of Sedona Monthly

Second Annual Kingdom of the Spiders Reunion, Oct. 29 at the ball field behind Camp Verde Town Hall (395 S. Main St. in Camp Verde). The fun starts at 3 p.m. with a movie screening scheduled for 6:30 p.m. Free. For more info, call 800-827-1160 or visit www.kingdomofthespidersreunion.com.

Arizona's Little Hollywoodhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-3262576785828125986.post-3462440160864968042011-09-26T08:30:00.000-07:002011-09-26T08:30:39.541-07:00Sedona: "The Edge of the World?"

That's how clever studio flacks (not New Agers fearful of cataclysm in 2012) described the view from Sedona's Schnebly Hill in the caption of this 1930 publicity still:

ON THE EDGE OF THE WORLD
George O'Brien stops on the edge of the Painted Desert to enjoy the beautiful location selected for his next Fox Film Corporation outdoor romance, adapted from the novel The Last of the Duanes by Zane Grey.Arizona's Little Hollywoodhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-3262576785828125986.post-76380645758309794312011-09-19T07:45:00.000-07:002011-09-19T07:45:58.189-07:00Celebs Celebrate John Mitchum

John Mitchum in Noises Off.

When Cindy Mitchum Azbill's father, actor, singer and poet John Mitchum, passed away in 2001, she had the idea of commemorating his life with a memorial website. But a few of John's celebrity friends, including actor Ernest Borgnine and producer A.C. Lyles, said he deserved something bigger. An idea was born: Contact John's friends and ask each one to pick their favorite John Mitchum poem and record it. The result is Old Friends, Why I Love Them: a 10-year project of 50 recorded poems featuring some of Hollywood's brightest stars – many of who have connections to Arizona's Little Hollywood. (Though John never made a film in Sedona, his brother, Robert Mitchum, starred in Blood on the Moon; John is best known for his role as Clint Eastwood's partner in three Dirty Harry films.)

Among the talent who have filmed movies in Sedona and recorded John's poetry, you'll find Ernest Borgnine and Ben Cooper (Johnny Guitar); James Drury (The Last Wagon); L.Q. Jones (Stay Away, Joe); Jane Russell (actress and former Sedona resident); Morgan Woodward (Firecreek); Bruce Boxleitner (Kenny Rogers as The Gambler, Part III: The Legend Continues); and Ann Rutherford (Out West with the Hardys). Though he doesn't have a Sedona connection, Academy Award winner Robert Duvall recorded John's best-known poem, America, Why I Love Her (written at his home in Los Angeles in 1969). John Wayne originally recorded the poem, which became the title track for John Wayne's only album, released in 1973. John Mitchum was nominated for a Grammy for the record.

"There's been a remarkable outpouring of love and respect for my father, his poetry and each other,"says Cindy. "I think every Western [film] is represented on this record."

Though the album won't be released until the end of this year, at press time plans were in the works to screen a video of Robert Duvall reciting America at the unveiling of the 9/11 memorial in New York City this month. For more info, visit www.johnmitchum.com.––By Erika Ayn Finch. Originally published in the September 2011 issue of Sedona MonthlyArizona's Little Hollywoodhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-3262576785828125986.post-42001034000286413382011-09-12T08:10:00.000-07:002011-09-12T08:10:57.921-07:00Proud Papa

"Father of Film" D.W. Griffith (right) presents the 1946 Oscar for Best Color Cinematography to Leon Shamroy for his work on Leave Her to Heaven, the first Technicolor film shot in Sedona's Red Rock Country.Arizona's Little Hollywoodhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-3262576785828125986.post-79049894096293377232011-09-05T08:47:00.000-07:002011-09-05T08:47:53.108-07:00Trail 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.

Arizona's Little Hollywoodhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-3262576785828125986.post-25479210012828226342011-08-29T07:52:00.000-07:002011-08-29T07:52:05.858-07:00'The Call of the Canyon' is Still Lost

Bad news, Sedona movie fans. The Russian film archive Gosfilmofond's much-heralded gift to the U.S. of a digital copy of The Call of the Canyon has proven a bust. The long-lost silent film, shot in Oak Creek Canyon in 1923, had its first viewing on June 24 at the Library of Congress Packard Campus for Audio-Visual Conservation in Culpeper, Va.; unfortunately, the copy yielded just four minutes and 10 seconds of footage. Image quality is reportedly good, but scenes are so brief, and interspersed with Russian intertitles, that archivists found it difficult to even tell how they fit into the story.

Quite a disappointment. The Russian archive always promised the best chance that a copy of The Call of the Canyon still existed somewhere. But at least we can see a few short fragments of it now.––Joe McNeill
Arizona's Little Hollywoodhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-3262576785828125986.post-92118980559227519982011-08-22T07:52:00.000-07:002011-08-22T07:52:05.054-07:00Monumental Pictures, Part 2

Even though Monument Valley has less than four minutes of screen time in Stagecoach, it made an indelible impression on Moviegoers in 1939. But it wasn't the first time they'd seen it in a film. In late August 1938, six weeks before he brought John Ford to Monument Valley to scout locations for Stagecoach, Flagstaff rancher/movie coordinator Lee Doyle arranged for an MGM crew to film exteriors there (and in Sedona) for George B. Seitz's Out West With the Hardys; inexplicably, the Mickey Rooney-starring sitcom would pull into theaters (more than three months before Stagecoach) with no easy-to-ID Monument Valley real estate in sight. In 1940, Seitz returned to Monument Valley for the third time to direct indie producer Edward Small's Kit Carson with Jon Hall.

After Stagecoach delivered boffo box office, moviemakers rolled into Monument Valley. Before he was replaced by producer Howard Hughes, Howard Hawks planned to direct a scene or two there for Jane Russell's controversial "sex Western" The Outlaw at the exact same time in 1940 that MGM had a unit among the buttes shooting action sequences for its competing Billy the Kid. MGM would send a cameraman back in 1945 to film rock eye-candy backdrops for George Sidney's Judy Garland songfest, The Harvey Girls.

Following the lifting of World War II travel restrictions, a Republic Pictures second unit shot a chase sequence in Monument Valley for its 1946 William Elliott Western, Plainsman and the Lady (aka Drumbeats Over Wyoming). Oh, by the way, Wild Bill's people beat John Ford to the valley by a few days when he went back (his first visit since Stagecoach) to make My Darling Clementine for Twentieth Century-Fox. Concurrently, Yakima Canutt, Stagecoach's stunt coordinator, was there too, directing the main title action of John Wayne's Sedona-based Angel and the Badman for Republic.

Curiously, not every Monument Valley movie was actually filmed in Monument Valley. Then as now, Hollywood producers were quick to pounce on trends, so to cash in on the valley's post-Stagecoach mythic status, Poverty Row studio Monogram Pictures released King of the Stallions (aka Code of the Red Man) a 1942 obscurity that on-screen credits ballyhooed as being "filmed in Monument Valley, Arizona." In fact, the "Monument Valley" turf seen in the flick is mostly Sedona's Red Rock Country, courtesy of extensive footage lifted from Grand National Films' 1938 King of the Sierras, a slapdash B picture that quickly put fading Rex the Wonder Horse out to permanent show-biz pasture.–– Joe McNeill. Originally published in the July/August 2011 issue of Sedona MonthlyArizona's Little Hollywoodhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-3262576785828125986.post-76831540849880409882011-08-15T08:21:00.000-07:002011-08-15T08:21:19.479-07:00Monumental 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
Arizona's Little Hollywoodhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-3262576785828125986.post-70805747705057302852011-08-08T08:39:00.000-07:002011-08-08T08:39:33.354-07:00Ford's Theatre

Monument Valley and Sedona share a unique distinction – thanks to the movies, both symbolize "the West" in the American subconscious and to the world at large. But unlike Sedona, Monument Valley was never anonymous. Thanks to its link with director John Ford from 1938 on, there was always a name attached to its iconic buttes. Another difference: If Ford were here today, he'd have no problem recognizing "his" Monument Valley.

Every time the door swings open at Goulding's Trading Post – man's tiny contribution to the topography of Monument Valley near the Arizona-Utah border – a cowbell clangs loud enough to make any moo-ver shaky. But, the arrival of any person around here, historically, probably would be an event requiring fanfare – Goulding's is in what most people would consider the middle of nowhere, except for one thing: Its front step looks out on a view anyone who's ever seen a Western movie would recognize in a heartbeat.

Such was the power of Monument Valley as defined through the lens of John Ford and his team that for decades, reviewers who saw an unidentified Sedona on screen reflexively assumed our red rocks must be Monument Valley. But one look around at the actual location is all you'd need to see to never make that mistake again. Perhaps the most famous of the buttes – the East and West Mittens, and the Sisters – are set in relief against a vast backdrop of...nothing. Their power, inseparable from the way Ford showed them in the many movies he made here, starting with Stagecoach in 1938 and ending with Cheyenne Autumn in 1964, is timeless.

Monument Valley today is a Navajo Tribal Park. Guided tours are available, which allow access to areas and views closed off to drivers in their own vehicles who choose the self-guided tour along a 17-mile unpaved loop road. Horseback rides are available to fulfill any John Wayne fantasies.

Apart from the Navajo-owned View Hotel, which opened in December 2008 adjacent to the Tribal Visitors Center, there is Goulding's. Opened as a trading post by Harry Goulding and his wife, known by her nickname "Mike," in 1928, it is now a museum. Behind it stands a tiny cabin seen as John Wayne's cavalry headquarters in Ford's She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949) – "Mike" Goulding used it to store her potatoes – and next door is Goulding's Lodge, for those who plan to stay.

Ford and his crews were frequent guests, and letters of Thanks from the director, John Wayne ("Harry, you and I both owe these monuments a lot, Duke"), Henry Fonda, and others are framed in the front room of the trading post/museum. You'll pass through the Ware Room (used to store dry goods, now filled with vintage blankets, riding boots, rugs, and photos), the "Movie Days Film Gallery" (film memorabilia), and the upstairs living quarters, preserved as it was in the Goulding's day – save for the air conditioner now in the window that frames the classic cinematic view. We trust Harry and "Mike" would concede this one nod to "progress" – at least in the summer. –– Steven Korn. Originally published in the May 2006 issue of Sedona MonthlyArizona's Little Hollywoodhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com


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Due to technological evolution more and more people can't find a job for their level of educational preparation.
For as long as the late 90's the industrialization of factories has increased and has reached a new height today in autonomy and the jobs of low educated workers that were once the backbone of any factory was taken by robots. This led to an ever increasing rate of unemployment. Today more people then ever need to learn more to be able to make themselves viable on a ever more demanding job market.
The only way to prosper in this word is to embrace the idea of attending secondary education. The sooner you do this the easier it will be for you to live a good life. Unfortunately not all the persons that are still able to work today can afford or are not able anymore to learn as efficient as young people. It is a fact that the older you get the harder it will get for you to learn new thinks but human kind is famous for its fascinating way of evolving and adapting to ever changing environments and situations. Although you might be scared to have to learn to do a completely different think compared to what you used to do for a living you should keep your hopes up and put your shoulder into it. You will be able to go over any obstacle if you believe in yourself. And if you feel like you need some extra support, check out www.yesplususa.org and find articles about family issues, about how to be a better student, about how to manage your time, and numerous other subjects that can improve your lifestyle and allow you to achieve more in general.
No matter how stressed you are about this as a student you should consider secondary education as a must in today's society. Obtaining a University, a Master or Doctorate degree is something that has to be done in order to find job and be able to sustain yourself. Unfortunately the politics of various countries don't give much credit to people that don't have a good financial background. The taxes for this services is expensive and in some cases the investment can't really be recuperated in less then 15 – 20 years considering that you find a job on the domain for which you studied.
In order for you to make the best choice when thinking about going to take secondary education we recommend you to seek professional help from both a councilor that will help you determine what is the most adequate profession for your personality and from an economist that will let you know exactly which department lacks the most employers.
Related articles

subset: commoncrawl


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Another card has been made, and this time it's for someone who is leaving their internship and wanted to give a little special card to the boss lady.
She described her and what she wanted to be on the card and that I had free hand to make what ever I wanted. She wanted an image with someone riding a bike since the boss lady is doing this and is very cheerful. She also wanted a dachshund too, but I couldn't find one that would fit in with the Magnolia image. I actually enjoyed doing this card and I even tried to make a background from scratch, which I try to avoid since it isn't in my comfort zone.
Although, I have a Background Class over an Kit and Clowder that I have to try to make to actually get comfortable in doing backgrounds as well, and not only color the images in and put it on a card. I guess that is my next mission.
Anyways, until next time ……….craft on.


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Sorry, but copying text is forbidden on this website!
Davao City, a modern metropolis bursting with life, verve and color, located in a land area of 244,000 hectares touted as the world's largest in land area. This city, teeming with a vibrant populace, is bustling hub of commerce, education, tourism, arts, culture and wellness in Southern Philippines. (Department of Tourism 2013). It is one of the fastest developing cities in the Philippines. Because of the vastness of its area, the city has within it a series of different ancestries and cultural communities.
This fast-paced urbanization has caused many of our cultures to become victim of neglect. The indigenous communities continue to grow smaller and smaller every year bringing with them some of the old practices that we have long forgotten. Culture is no longer of importance in our society unlike modernization. The more we develop, the more we push these Indigenous people farther from our society and farther from their origins resulting in poor living environments and the loss of our own culture.
Agriculture is a significant factor in the growth of our country. It produces 17% of our GDP and involves 33% of Philippine Labor. 66% of countries poorest population is composed of the agriculture sector and 33% percent of this contributes to the greenhouse emission. Organic agriculture is a contributor to the city's economy and the attainment of food security, ecological sustainability and the wellbeing of the people of Davao City. Organic agriculture cannot co-exist with genetically-modified crops, chemically produced crops and related organisms.
The demand for organic products produced by these indigenous communities increase every year. Global demand for organic products is estimated at 15. 6 Billion Dollars, while RP organic exports have only reached 18 Million dollars. (Avila 2013) The preservation of our cultures is important as well as helping the indigenous community. Other than helping preserve our culture, we can also benefit from the old practices and harness from it, other resources found within the Indigenous Community.
This study was conducted so as to find ways on how not to saturate but to improve this community's way of living without the use of highly extractive resources but the use of sustainable resources instead. It hopes to find way in improving the agricultural sector as well as promote it to the public. The design shall adapt to the indigenous peoples way of living without necessarily using modern Architecture but of using Indigenous Architecture. It shall be a model for any future developments on indigenous villages.


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This is a tried and true favorite around here!
BBQ Chicken
1 lb. chicken (with or without bones)
BBQ sauce (your favorite one)
I put the chicken in the crockpot in the morning and let cook all day. Take the chicken out and debone (if needed) and shred. Mix chicken with BBQ sauce and place in a casserole dish. Cook at 350 for 20 minutes.
I serve this with french fries (baked), corn and fruit.
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Supplying staff, training and consultancy the the hospitality industry, Off to Work has bases in London, Birmingham, Edinburgh, Glasgow and Cardiff and covers events all over the UK. Its e-learning and classroom-based training programmes are open to staff and clients, as well as anyone wanting to further their career in hospitality, with first aid, food safety, event management and barista classes among the many courses on offer. The company also places talent into permanent roles with a candidate engagement programme that matches exceptional candidates with their preferred job role.
Event organiser profile: Philip Atkins
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About GENE BARRETTA
GENE BARRETTA is a published author, editor, and an illustrator of children's books. Some of the published credits of GENE BARRETTA include Now & Ben: The Modern Inventions of Benjamin Franklin, Jack the Tripper, On Christmas Morning, and Dear Deer: A Book of Homophones.To edit or update the above biography on GENE BARRETTA, please Log In or Register.
Link to this page: https://www.jacketflap.com/gene-barretta/53996
Published Works by GENE BARRETTAClick a book's title or cover for more details and to read reviews


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For a movie like director Rupert Sanders' upcoming live action adaptation of the Japanese manga / anime GHOST IN THE SHELL, featurettes like the ones below can be very helpful to a potential viewer. For those like me, who have some interest in the film but no knowledge of the source material, and who might still be feeling out of the loop even after watching the trailers, it's good to learn more about the characters and this world they inhabit. For those who are familiar with the source material, you can watch something like this and see what the filmmakers and actors are getting right - or, hopefully not, what they're getting wrong.
These featurettes introduce the members of an anti-terrorism group called Section 9. The first one tells us more about the film's heroine Major, played by Scarlett Johnansson. The second one is focused on her fellow Section 9 operatives, particularly Takeshi Kitano as Daisuke Aramaki and Pilou Asbæk as Batou. Batou is described as a hardcore killer, but don't expect his kills to be too hardcore in the film. This is rated PG-13, after all.
Scripted by Jamie Moss, William Wheeler, and Ehren Kruger, GHOST IN THE SHELL follows
the Major, a special ops, one-of-a-kind human-cyborg hybrid, who leads the elite task force Section 9. Devoted to stopping the most dangerous criminals and extremists, Section 9 is faced with an enemy whose singular goal is to wipe out Hanka Robotic's advancements in cyber technology.
Johnansson, Asbæk, and Kitano are joined in the cast by Lasarus Ratuere, Tawanda Manyimo, Yutaka Izumihara, Danusia Samal, Chin Han, Rila Fukushima, Michael Pitt, Michael Wincott, Juliette Binoche, and Kaori Momoi.
GHOST IN THE SHELL is set to reach theatres on March 31st. Just a couple weeks to go.


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Water is essential for the survival of all known forms of life. The human body is anywhere from 55% to 78% water depending on body size. To function properly, the body requires between one and seven liters of water per day to avoid dehydration
All known forms of life depend on water. Because of overpopulation, mass consumption, misuse, and water pollution, the availability of drinking water per capita is inadequate and shrinking as of the year 2006.
40% of America's rivers are too polluted for fishing, swimming, or aquatic life.
Even worse are America's lakes—46% are too polluted for fishing, swimming, or aquatic life.
1.2 trillion gallons of untreated sewage, stormwater, and industrial waste are discharged into US waters annually. The US EPA has warned that sewage levels in rivers could be back to the super-polluted levels of the 1970s by the year 2016.
Asian rivers are the most polluted in the world. They have three times as many bacteria from human waste as the global average and 20 times more lead than rivers in industrialized countries
Serious water pollution incidents increased by 50% in England and Wales last year with farmers responsible for more than a quarter of them, the Environment Agency says.
I made this Thread to increase knowledge about water pollution such as industrial water pollution and to share thoughts about how to prevent it.
2013 sponsor
I work in heavy industry and design specialty cleaning chemicals. If we all obey the rules, clean water won't be a problem. I have to design my cleaning chemicals to be acceptable to my customers' sewer department. They in turn have to make sure they clean up the water according to federal guidelines. We work together to design a safe solution. In many cases, the water discharged by the plants is much cleaner than the water in the streams. That's how it should work. That is... if everybody does it according to the rules.
My chemicals are all designed to be readily biodegradable or reclaimed for BTU recovery. But, they still need to be disposed of in a water treatment plant. That's the right way.
Meanwhile, individuals dump anything and everything on the ground. And it adds up. Working up in Minnesota years ago I was on the 6th floor of a hotel situated on the banks of the Mississippi. I was looking across the river to a neighborhood where a guy was washing his car. The soap suds were running down his driveway to the gutter and on to a storm drain which drained directly into the river. Add that a gazillion times as the Mississippi heads toward New Orleans (where I started school) and you can see the problem.
It's good that we can buy biodegradable cleaners. But, I once heard an EPA official say "A dead horse is biodegradable but I don't want one in my backyard!" Chicken litter is biodegradable, but too much of a good thing can do damage as well. It's all about finding balance.
The good news is I work with some guys (much smarter than me) who have a real knack at turning waste into something positive. That chicken litter can be converted into energy and a mild fertilizer. With the right bugs, hazardous waste can be converted to plant food.
I got into heavy industry in '81. When the OSHA and EPA rules got more and more strict in the mid-'80s I remember making a personal commitment to learn how to work within the rules rather than hide from them. I've had a personal goal of redesigning my old chemicals and engineering my new ones to be readily biodegradable and made from renewable/sustainable ingredients.
It's easy to talk about the environment. It's better to have a hand in doing something about it. And all of us can. We're already doing it by being involved in renewable fuels (biodiesel/WVO). We can do more by learning about the chemicals we use. I wouldn't even think of using most of the ingredients found in the chemicals in the paint department or automotive department at Wal-mart. Meanwhile, I find the ingredients to my chemicals in the pharmaceutical/cosmetic aisle as well as in the grocery department.
By the way, I'm working on a "renewable methanol". All methanol on the market today is made from natural gas. We're working on methanol and other products from sustainable feedstock. In many ways, we're eliminating pollution AND reducing the use of fossil fuels at the same time. How cool is that?
2002 F-250, 7.3l on WVO since '04
'82 VW Rabbit diesel 1.6l na
'83 GMC 6.2l Class C RV
'85 F-350, 6.9l flat bed
'85 E-350, 6.9l cube van
2 Mercedes 300SD's
3 Chinese Changfa-style diesel generators- 12kw, 8kw & 7.5kw
Mitsubishi 3 cyl diesel generator/light tower
Kubota 2 cyl. diesel, water cooled air compressor
Onan 12.5kw air-cooled diesel genset
I run my company entirely on renewable energy including electricity from generators running on biofuels.
Do you have a link to the original study.
Or to the raw data and data analysis methods?
I don't know of a single river in Oregon that I would be afraid to swim in. Although, I must say that the Metolius River is mighty cold!!!!!!
I think the same would be true for the lakes too.
And, I could go for some good river trout too
We do have a risk of Giardia in the Northwest, a bug that does affect humans, but is also transmitted via game animals. So, I would probably filter the water before drinking it.
It is often hard to distinguish the effects of natural sediments from man-made pollutants... at least when looking at the river from a distance. All the stories I've read indicate that the Platte river was pretty brown colored a century and a half ago when this country was settled. It probably does have some additional crop runoff.. and likely fertilizer fed algae.
In fact, one of New Orleans biggest problems is that the city has been walled off from the vital nutrient sediments carried by the Mississippi.
That said, we do need to worry about what we send downstream. And, storm sewer runoff should be processed to some extent. Phosphates (many soaps), of course, get gobbled up by algae... not pretty, but not the end of the world either.
Good to know that there are peoples who cares about the environment. I think if every Industry follow these steps then there will be no problem of water pollution. I think water treatment consultant must be contacted by these industries
Here are some more interesting facts
Guide to water pollution
Industrial Water Treatment Consulting & Engineering Services - NJ, PA, NY, DE, CT & MD - JNBLabs.com
Pollution, Water Pollution, Air Pollution - Green Student U
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