Sooner Cinema: Oklahoma Goes to the Movies

By Larry A. Van Meter

Sooner Cinema: Oklahoma Goes To The Movies, a collection of essays featuring 20 different movies with Oklahoma themes or characters. Edited by Larry A. Van Meter, the book asks, within the context of American cinema, What does Oklahoma mean? According to Gray Frederickson, Academy Award winning film producer, many people don t know that Oklahoma has played a key role in movies since the beginning of the motion picture industry. It is certainly fitting that finally someone is assembling a book of essays that highlights the many wonderful contributions this state and its people have made to the motion picture industry.
Movies featured in the essays:

Oklahoma!
The Grapes of Wrath
Cimarron
The Outsiders
Silkwood
The Oklahoma Kid
This Stuff ll Kill Ya!
Tulsa
Far and Away
Where the Red Fern Grows
True Grit
Oklahoma Crude
In Old Oklahoma
Okie Noodling
Banned in Oklahoma
Bound for Glory
Hair
Tumbleweeds
Oklahoma Newsreels
Norman New Wave

• Language: English
• Publisher: Park Hudson Press
• Release date: Jul 20, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215795064

Book preview

Sooner Cinema

Oklahoma Goes to the Movies

by Larry A. Van Meter

Park Hudson Press

Oklahoma City

2023

Copyright © 2009 by Forty-Sixth Star Press

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including

information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

Conceived, written and printed in the forty-sixth state of the union

Digital edition copyright © 2023 by Park Hudson Press with expressed written permission of Forty-Sixth Star Press

NOTES ON THE DIGITAL EDITION

This digital edition of Sooner Cinema is presented by the Metropolitan Library System in an effort to share the history and culture of Oklahoma County. While as true as possible to the original content, the original text may have been edited for content and format. The ideas and viewpoints expressed in the text are those of the author and not necessarily those of the Metropolitan Library System. Some materials in our collections represent historical viewpoints that are now recognized as lacking in diversity, equity, and inclusion.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The editor would like to express special thanks to Buddy Johnson and Pam Bracken for their support, vision, and energy. To Jeffrey Charles Leitner, who is brilliant, curious, and always willing to talk about ideas. To my mentors Darryl Tippens, Keith Booker, and Sally Robinson.To Sandra Leitner. To Judy Van Meter. And most profoundly to Kara Marie, my true love.

The publisher wishes to thank Gary D. Rhodes for generously lending his expertise to this project of showing Oklahoma’s movies and its people at their best and brightest. Gratitude to Linda Bracken, Jana Hausburg, Mojo and Cheez Whiz. This book is dedicated to my pioneering great grandmother Margaret Hoppel Wetmore and grandmother Nellie Meta Wetmore Bracken - and all of Oklahoma’s strong-willed women.

FOREWORD

There are many people who don’t know that the state of Oklahoma has played a key role in movies since the beginning of the motion picture industry. Oklahoma was one of the first locations for a motion picture. It was shot on the 101 Ranch at the beginning of the twentieth century. Throughout the years there have been hundreds of films made about Oklahoma, or in Oklahoma. And, Oklahomans have contributed to the movie industry as writers, directors, actors, technicians, and producers.

It is certainly fitting that finally someone is assembling a book of essays that highlights the many wonderful contributions this state and its people have made to the motion picture industry.

As a film producer with many years of experience working in Hollywood’s movie business and producing several films in Oklahoma, I am excited to know that there is a book dedicated to Oklahoma and movies.

Gray Frederickson, Oklahoma City

INTRODUCTION

The purpose of this book is to ask, within the context of American cinema, What does Oklahoma mean? It’s impossible to answer the question, at least answer it in any sort of satisfying, thorough way. Many other states in the movies seem to exist in an easily recognizable form: film spectators can immediately recognize the Empire State Building, the Golden Gate Bridge, the Space Needle, Monument Valley, Miami Beach, The Alamo, The Arch, Mount Rushmore, The Grand Canyon, or the Sears Tower as belonging to a particular state. But what about Oklahoma? There are plenty of movies about Oklahoma, but what about Oklahoma can be recognized as Oklahoma in those movies?

An oil derrick? Maybe, but whenever I picture an oil derrick, I think of that white trash Texan James Dean in Giant, gloriously striking it rich in the middle of Rock Hudson’s cattle ranch. Were there any Oklahomans watching Giant in 1956 saying, Now wait a minute! Those oil derricks belong to us?

Part of the problem is geography. We’re not part of The South, and we’re not exactly part of The West. I’ve heard it said that, technically, Oklahoma is in The Midwest. Really? When I think of the Midwest, I think of the Illinois cornfields Cary Grant runs into to escape Hell’s biplane in North by Northwest, or of the frozen tundra of Lambeau Field or Fargo.

Another, even bigger, problem is that there seems to be a vast international conspiracy to conceal Oklahoma from public view, even within films about Oklahoma. Seems like most of the films about Oklahoma were not filmed in Oklahoma. Far and Away? Montana. Oklahoma Crude? California. In Old Oklahoma? Utah. Silkwood? New Mexico. Twister? Well, they say Oklahoma, but all the highway signs in the movie say Texas. Even our no-doubt-about-it official state movie, Oklahoma! Arizona.

But this spatial indeterminacy may in fact work in Oklahoma’s favor. Oklahoma is not locked to any particular landmark, accent, or backdrop. Think about it—is there any Wyoming film that doesn’t show the Grand Tetons? or a Colorado film that doesn’t incorporate the Rockies? or a Hawaii film that doesn’t show a surfer? Oklahoma films aren’t compelled to show the state’s X to prove its Oklahoma-ness. Liberated from this spatio-ideological imprisonment, Oklahoma films are free to explore a wider range of subjects.

It is important, however, to think of Oklahoma as somewhere. In 1986 three of my Oklahoma Christian College classmates and I packed into an Audi 4000s and drove 28 straight hours to Poughkeepsie, NewYork for a friend’s wedding. The bride was from New York City, and one of her sisters approached me and said, So where are you from? I said Oklahoma City. Oklahoma? she said,and then paused.

Do people actually live there? True story.

But where is that there?The essays in this book might not sufficiently answer that question, but I hope you will agree with me that they will sufficiently ask it.

Shooting Silent: Early Oklahoma Westerns

W. M. Hagen

In the imagination that Hollywood has created, Oklahoma is one of the states that represent The West, through stories of cattle drives (Red River, Lonesome Dove), Territorial outlaws and renegades (True Grit, Hang 'Em High), land runs, settling, and towns that sprang up overnight (Cimarron I & II, Far and Away), Indian conflicts (Little Big Man, Geronimo), and oil booms (Cimarron, Oklahoma Crude, Tulsa).

Oklahomans regularly indulge visitors who can't recognize Native Americans without their feathers nor the lay of the land itself. Where is the desert, or the prairie with dust blowing, or the mountain backdrops, or (for a few) the green river valleys of the movies? The answer, of course, is Elsewhere, which is where most movies about Oklahoma were filmed. 

The Wichita, Washita, and Glass Mountains, Robbers Cave, Black Mesa, Red Rock Canyon, Beaver's Bend, the Cross Timbers, the forks of the Canadian, the Red, or the Cimarron Rivers, the towns and cities have all been sites of film-worthy historical events. But rarely have they been used in Westerns; locations in California, Montana, and Texas, among other Elsewheres, have stood in for these features. Generally, it's been easier to film where the weather is monotonously fair.

Oklahoma may be more genuinely represented by its Western actors: Tom Mix, Will Rogers, Ben Johnson, and Gene Autry, though many others have tried their hands at being the Oklahoma Kid or the Man From Oklahoma. A wonderful collage that shows how Hollywood has represented the state can be seen at the Oklahoma Historical Center (Oklahoma City). Using clips from over seventy movies, most from the sound era, Elizabeth Anthony created Moving Images of Oklahoma, which deftly shows how we're supposed to look and act so the rest of America will recognize where we're from.

This essay will focus on the films that were truer to the places, events, and people of Oklahoma when it was still Territory, or the Western frontier. They were truer, in part because some were semi-documentary, re-enactments made outside the studios and movie lots of New York and what became Hollywood. Often they were filmed in the locations where history actually happened, with people playing themselves. To be sure, they were somewhat amateurish productions, with limited resources, but the lack of major studio oversight, unhampered by imposed plot formulas, employing people who knew how to get on and off a horse, resulted in some surprisingly effective scenes. In their quest for authenticity, these films often showed what was seldom seen in more polished Westerns. Some scenes contain images and actions that today's viewer would associate with films made during and after the 1960s, the so-called anti-Westerns. The films under main consideration date from 1908 to 1915; a later William S. Hart film, Tumbleweeds (1927) will be considered as a bridge to the sound era: an attempt to show the 1889 Cherokee Run as epic history, though it was filmed in California and displays a number of conventions of the Hollywood Western. A common element of all the major titles being considered, however, is that they imply or directly state that The West they portray has ended.

Oklahoma benefited from the fact that it had unsettled frontier spaces and cattle drives shortly before the rise of film narrative in the early part of the Twentieth Century. Early shorts, made by the Edison Company, focused on real cowboys and Indians doing the sorts of things audiences enjoyed in the Wild West shows. Driving Cattle To Pasture, Cowboys and Indians Fording a River in a Wagon, Brush Between Cowboys and Indians, Western Stage Holdup (all 1904) ran no more than ninety seconds and were designed for Kinetoscope or Nickelodeon programs. They're not much more than the titles indicate, actualities staged in front of a fixed camera.  The most promising one, Brush Between Cowboys and Indians, has cowboys on one side of a river firing at distant horsemen who may or may not be Indians. The Holdup film has better focus of both sides, which makes it all the more disappointing that there is no gunplay: the gang demands, gets the money, and rides off, while the stage resumes its journey. More interesting is a longer short called Joe Turner and Family on the Edge of Civilization wherein a wife's rejection of two Indians leads to a raid, the wife leaves to get the rangers, while husband holds them off and their two girls hide in the field.  The Indians set fire to the field, but the rangers arrive in the nick of time to drive them off. 

In 1908, Marshall Bill Tilghman got into the film business when his colleague John Abernathy and a Chandler neighbor (and cameraman), J.B. Kent, asked him to help them complete a film.  When he said he knew nothing about filmmaking, they replied that he knew how to organize and finish a job, and that's what they needed, according to Zoe Tilghman's account. The film was to record an event Abernathy was famous for: chasing down and wrestling a wolf to the ground. Theodore Roosevelt had been mightily impressed by the stunt, which he had seen during a hunting trip to the state, but he wanted a film to support his story for his skeptical Eastern friends. Since the crew had only one camera, they had difficulties in getting the wolf to come within its range for its takedown. Tilghman came up with a system of wires—invisible on screen—so the wolf would have to run toward the waiting camera, when chased by the dogs.  It worked, and Roosevelt screened it in the White House.

But the President got more than The Wolf Hunt, as it was called, because Tilghman convinced the group that they needed more story to make the show interesting. So Abernathy’s wolf chase became the unlikely diversion of a posse in the middle of The Bank Robbery, itself shot in Cache, Oklahoma. It was probably inspired by the popular Edison film, directed by Edwin Porter, The Great Train Robbery (1903), but the claim was that this film commemorated an actual event exactly where and the way it occurred. Onboard for the film were Abernathy, Tilghman, ex-outlaw Al Jennings—all playing themselves—and Chief Quanah Parker. As was the case with Porter's film, a number of townspeople were given roles, and there was plenty of gunplay, since the authorities had been alerted that an attempt might be made on the bank. The chase was better handled than in Train Robbery, because the actors were experienced horsemen. The ending conformed to The Great Train Robbery formula, however: the surviving outlaws, stopped to divide up the loot, were cornered by the posse and killed or captured.

These neophyte filmmakers organized as the Oklahoma Mutoscope Company, with $50,000 in stock and, according to one account, a camera borrowed from the Miller 101 Ranch, where the earlier Edison shorts were probably shot. Their film was more primitive and fragmentary than the Porter Western, but the location shots, the action sequences, and the acting were entirely more authentic than the more polished Edison production. The distinction between polished Eastern/California and Oklahoma-based productions continued into the second period of Westerns, from about 1912 to World War I. A later film by Bill Tilghman maintained the claim to authenticity by employing those who had been involved in conflicts portrayed, but the film style, action sequences, and acting could not compare with high standards set by D.W. Griffith and Thomas Ince in such films as The Battle of Elderberry Gulch (1913) and The Invaders (1914). What was lacking in film technique, however, was compensated for by the attention to detail, on-location shooting, and accurate action. As Kevin Brownlow puts it in his authoritative study, here is a moving picture of the West, shot by Westerners before the Old West had entirely vanished. 

It is worth noting that one of the two major Hollywood stars of the teens was Oklahoman and ex-101 rider, Tom Mix. (The other was William S. Hart.) Seeing Mix in one of his more famous films, The Heart of Texas Ryan (1916), one is impressed by his ability to do stunts himself. He also seems authentic as the cowboy who still has a lot of boy in him: pulling jokes that ought to land him in jail and attempting feats—taking on a whole band of rustlers, in one instance—that no sane adult would try. Interestingly, the plot of Texas Ryan does not end with complete poetic justice: he is captured by the outlaws, his girlfriend pays a ransom, and the gang goes free, presumably to enjoy the fruits of their crimes below the border.

Mix's film and some of Hart's efforts—Hell's Hinges (1916) for example—compare with two important Oklahoma films of the teens in their violations of what became the more formulaic features of Hollywood Westerns. Al Jennings’ Beating Back (1914) and Bill Tilghman's The Passing of the Oklahoma Outlaws (1915) were both presented as true accounts—the first of a famous outlaw (Jennings himself), the second of a famous frontier marshal. Both played themselves. The difference was that Al Jennings wanted to parlay his undistinguished and brief criminal career into the screen success of a Mix or Hart, and Tilghman simply wanted to set the record straight.

Beating Back (1914) was based on the story of Jennings' life, co-written with Will Irwin and published in the Saturday Evening Post. Filmed in New Jersey, it featured Jennings, his brother Frank, and Eastern actors mixed with cowboys recruited from a Wild West show. Brownlow was unable to find a print for his 1979 study, nor did Jack Spears ten years later…nor did I.  Though there were certainly earlier films featuring a single outlaw (Jesse James, 1911), evidence suggests that Beating Back boldly violated moral standards in excessively glamorizing Jennings' criminal exploits, before he was captured and reformed. It was roundly applauded at Sing Sing Prison; the local censor in Kansas City would not allow it to be shown until Jennings agreed to deliver a corrective lecture after each showing (What's certain, from several sources, is that it tended to show lawmen as cowardly and inept; in one scene, a handful of the gang members held off a huge posse).  The Oklahoma Legislature, in reaction to it and other outlaw films, almost passed a bill outlawing any film that would show a bank or train robbery. Luckily that measure failed, but Marshall Tilghman was so perturbed by the depictions of outlaws and law men that he determined to make a film that would tell the truth. 

In so doing, Tilghman may have pioneered the end-of-the-West Western, at least in title—The Passing of the Oklahoma Outlaws (1915). Many of the same personnel who had worked with him in the 1908 production were included, plus Arkansas Jack, once a Doolin gang member. The newly formed Eagle Film Company shot footage where the conflicts took place in Kansas, Oklahoma, and Arkansas, and cast original participants insofar as possible. The episodes were precisely named and dated; the first, for instance, is titled Fight at Ingalls/ September 1, 1893. Each major figure who is killed is marked by an intertitle, such as Deputy Houston gives his life for the law. Consistent with the documentary approach—and a small budget—, the shots are single takes, with static framing, as if the cameraman had simply arrived and recorded an event in progress, although when the participants run or ride into the frame and only then shoot at each other, the staging seems obvious. But the stand-and-shoot battles, the gun smoke and dust that obscure the action, the simple topple-and-fall of those shot, the scurrying from place to place, the jumps from shot to shot as the participants change places, and the similar dress of lawmen and bad men—in short, the surface confusion—actually stamp the film with a kind of authenticity impossible in the careful productions of the major studios. Add to this the fact that the shabby town of Ingalls, Kansas was actually used in the re-creation, and the details of the fight were quite exact, often at the expense of the drama. When the lawmen simply ride into town—in a wagon! —and begin shooting at one and all males, including at least one bystander, one is thrust, without explanation, into the warlike world of Hart's Hell's Hinges (1916) or Clint Eastwood's High Plains Drifter (1973). Only through reference to Marshall Evett Nix's memoir, Oklahombres, does one learn that Ingalls was basically a refuge for outlaws; Nix also confirms the basic events seen in the battle, including the daring run across the battlefield by Cimarron Rose, to bring a rifle and ammunition to the outlaws. Not glossed over is the fact that all the outlaws escaped, except one, while three deputies were killed—hardly a victory for the law! 

Another feature of the gun fighting strikes one in the Ingalls and subsequent encounters: how matter-of-fact much of the killing is. Often the outlaws are simply shot unawares, when surprised or from ambush. No warning, no give yourself up, no put 'em up. Like the bounty-hunters in For a Few Dollars More, the aim of the lawmen sometimes seems to be to fill a wagon with bodies. Within the film, this is justified by some outlaws' disdain for human life. After Red Buck has shot an unarmed farmer who is protesting the theft of his horse, an intertitle explains Outlaws do what they do because they are what they are. Such determinism certainly sanctions removal rather than prison time. Not in the film is the fact that Bill Doolin was so upset by the senseless killing that he expelled the killer from the gang (Nix 184). On the other hand, the film records the fact that Bill Doolin did not let his men simply shoot Tilghman when he unknowingly came to their dugout to ask directions. In the last episode of the film, Pierce and Bitter Creek, two members of the Doolin gang are tracked to a hideout and more or less shot from behind. Their deaths—or passing—is epitaphed The life of an outlaw is one of hardship and danger, ending in death or a prison cell. 

In the capture of Cattle Annie and Little Britches, teenagers who were helping the outlaws, the film captures a couple of realities that were rarely shown in the formula Westerns. One reality is that apprehension was often a matter of luck and quite undramatic: Little Britches leans out a window with a gun, looks one way, and a waiting marshal simply grabs her by the shoulders and pulls her out. The other reality is even