| HISTORY
REMADE
For seven years, Joe
McNeill has devoted his life to accurately documenting
Sedona’s film legacy. Now, Joe shares the details of
how Sedona got her history back.
Interview by Erika Ayn Finch
When
the first issue of Sedona Monthly was published in
2003, it included a story about the filming of 1950’s
Broken Arrow in Red Rock Country. Joe McNeill, the
article’s author and the magazine’s creative director,
had no idea what he started with the brief story. As the magazine’s
series of profiles on Westerns filmed in Sedona blossomed,
so did Joe’s research. Three years after the series
began, Joe decided Sedona’s film history deserved more
than monthly magazine profiles, and the idea that would become
Arizona’s Little Hollywood: Sedona and Northern
Arizona’s Forgotten Film History 1923-1973 began
to take shape.
Sedona played host to
more than 60 productions from 1923 to 1973. Arizona’s
Little Hollywood tells the story of each of these films
in detail. The 680-page, hardcover, illustrated tome also
reveals some never-before-heard facts about film history in
Sedona and beyond. Readers will get a look at silent cowboy
star Fred Thomson’s long-forgotten portrayal of frontiersman
Kit Carson in the first Western ever filmed in Red Rock Country;
learn the story behind Der Kaiser von Kalifornien,
an anti-capitalist Nazi propaganda Western filmed
on location in Sedona and the Grand
Canyon in 1935; get the details on why Goulding’s Lodge
in Monument Valley isn’t as important to the filming
of John Ford’s Stagecoach as everyone thinks
and the discovery that some scenes from the movie were filmed
in Sedona; and hear the full story behind the making of the
classic Johnny Guitar (temper tantrums and all).
Now, as a true-blooded
California girl, Western film history never really piqued
my interest before I moved to Sedona. I’ll readily admit
I never fully understood Sedona’s impact on film history
until I sat down and read Arizona’s Little Hollywood
cover to cover; now, I’ll never look at Red Rock Country
the same way.
Erika
Ayn Finch: Tell us about how the movie stories in Sedona
Monthly began. When and why did you decide to turn the
stories into a book?
Joe McNeill: The
first time we came to Sedona I immediately recognized the
rocks but couldn’t place where I’d seen them before.
When we got into town, I saw things about the films that had
been made here. I’m a lifelong movie fan, so that got
me curious, and I did a little follow-up research when we
got home. As someone who grew up in an urban area on the East
Coast, to be in a place where they made Western movies was
kind of interesting. After we moved to Sedona and started
Sedona Monthly, we needed editorial content. I had
done Internet searches and looked in [film] books, but there
really wasn’t anything about Sedona. Very few reference
books even mention it. The Internet Movie Database has listings
for it – much of them incorrect, as it turned out. So
I thought it would be interesting to run stories about the
movies in the magazine as an ongoing series. Right away, I
discovered there was no trustworthy information anywhere to
use in the articles.
EAF: Have you
seen all of the movies in the book? Which movie should everyone
see?
JM: I
have seen every theatrical film made in Sedona between 1923
and 1973 that still exists. My own favorites are Riders of
the Purple Sage, Mystery Ranch, Johnny Guitar and
Broken Arrow, which is probably the one film made in
Sedona that everybody should see. It was the first major movie
made in the sound era by a Hollywood studio in which Native
Americans were not portrayed as savages. Most people today
probably aren’t aware of how important the film was
to its time, how unique it was that the good guys happened
to be Indians. Broken Arrow is historically significant
for another reason, too. It was one of the first films written
in secret by a member of the “Hollywood Ten,”
the group that was blacklisted in the late ’40s and
sent to jail because of their refusal to admit membership
in the Communist Party. . More>>
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