Now showing! - “Lights! Camera! Arkansas!,” the new exhibit at the Old State House Museum in Little Rock. See! - how Arkansas plays a starring role in dozens of Hollywood motion pictures.
See! - five galleries and hundreds of movie-related artifacts: props, photos, costumes, scripts, comic books, toys and magazine ads.
See! - the museum’s largest ever exhibit, years in the making, with a cast including Broncho Billy Anderson, Billy Bob Thornton, Mary Steenburgen, Julie Adams and the Creature From the Black Lagoon.
And one more exclamation point: Wow!
“Our goal,” museum curator Jo Ellen Maack says, “is for people to walk in and say, ‘Wow! Wow! - I never knew that!”’
Exhibit curator Bob Cochran, director of the Center for Arkansas and Regional Studies at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, wrote the commentary that appears through the exhibit on a series of panels that look like movie clapboards.
One gallery is made to look like a movie theater with a red neon marquee. The movie house appears to be showing Andy Griffith in the partly made-in-Arkansas drama, A Face in the Crowd (1957), a rarity for Griffith’s turn from comedy to the story of a county boy with a monstrous ego. The poster reads: “Power! He loved it!”
Inside, the 36-seat theater runs interviews with stars including Adams of Blytheville and Little Rock, the star of Creature From the Black Lagoon (1954). A life-size replica of her scaly co-star stands ready to menace visitors in the depths of the exhibit.
Similar to the museum’s 2005 exhibit, “Our Own Sweet Sounds: A Celebration of Popular Music in Arkansas,” the new show traces nearly 100 years of film history to find obscure as well as famous connections to the Natural State.
Famous: Joey Lauren Adams of North Little Rock, the Golden Globe-winning star of Chasing Amy (1997). Television and movie producer Harry Thomason, whose recent feature, The Last Ride (2012), was filmed in Little Rock.
Not so well known: That bluesman and band leader Louis Jordan of Brinkley also took a swing at movie acting. The poster for Look-Out Sister (1947) remembers one of his least-likely roles, as a bandleader at a dude ranch.
Who knew: That character actor Arthur Hunnicut hailed from Gravelly - down the way from Bluffton, not too far from Waltreak in Yell County - just the sort of place he seemed to have come from in movies including The Big Sky (1952) with Kirk Douglas.
Hunnicut’s Oscar-nominated role as Zeb Calloway gave him practically all of the movie’s best lines. Talking about a raiding party, he might as well been commenting on lost movie memories.
“They gone went,” Uncle Zeb observed. “But the question is, will they stay gone went?”
The exhibit answers: Here they come again.
LIGHTS! CAMERA! ACTION!
“Lights! Camera! Arkansas!” starts in the 1920s with “Broncho Billy” Anderson from Little Rock and Pine Bluff. Anderson’s more than 600 one-reelers and silent features not only placed him in the saddle as the first cowboy movie star, but also helped open the West to every other buckaroo on the screen.
It tells the state’s part in movies from the silent era to the current release, Mud, from director Jeff Nichols of Little Rock. Nichols contributes the duct-taped, red-tank dirt bike the boys ride in Mud, and a storyboard that shows how he plans a movie.
“What you are looking at,” he notes about the drawings that tell a story in sequence, “is a major part of my writing process.”
In between are displays that remember song-and-dance man turned hard-boiled detective Dick Powell from Mountain View, a gunfighter Alan Ladd from Hot Springs and cowgirl sharp-shooter Gail Davis from Little Rock and Mc-Gehee.
Powell gave up crooning to walk the mean streets as Raymond Chandler’s private investigator Philip Marlowe in Murder, My Sweet (1944).
He co-founded Four Star Productions, the company behind dozens of television series. Dick Powell Theatre (1961-1963) was among the first anthology series, and Wanted: Dead or Alive (1958-1961) made a star of Steve McQueen.
Ladd might be best remembered as the reluctant gunfighter in Shane (1953), but another role is closer to Arkansas: He played Jim Bowie in The Iron Mistress (1952), brandishing his made-in-Arkansas knife.
The exhibit includes the white dress-up suit he wore as Bowie in New Orleans, evidence that the handsome leading man stood, at best, about 5 foot 6. His career was a series of deceptions that made him look taller. The trick worked not only on screen, but also in sales of Ladd comic books, cap guns and Ladd-endorsed Camel cigarettes and Jervis hair tonic - a showcase full of mementos.
Davis was the first woman to star in a TV Western. Her cowgirl skills impressed her movie co-star, singing cowboy Gene Autry, and he cast her in the title role of his production company’s 1954-1956 series, Annie Oakley.
The ever-smiling, pig-tailed star did so many of her own stunts, and looked so pretty on horseback, Autry called her “the perfect Western actress.” CAST OF, WELL … A BUNCH
Hollywood studios provided some of the exhibit’s artifacts, Maack says; some, she and the museum’s exhibits director Gail Stephens found on eBay, and some, the actors provided.
From Paramount Pictures, the movie True Grit is represented by Texas Ranger Matt Damon’s brown jacket and outlaw-chaser Hailee Steinfeld’s petticoat.
Arkansas author Charles Portis wrote the novel, True Grit, from which Hollywood found the grit to produce two movie versions. The first (1969) paired John Wayne with Glen Campbell from Delight, Ark. The second (2010) starred Damon and Jeff Bridges.
Oscar winner Billy Bob Thornton (Sling Blade, 1996) sent the blue sequined jacket that he wore - and who else would dare? - in Waking Up in Reno (2002).
The late Lisa Blount’s family provided the Oscar she won in 2002 as executive producer of the live action short, The Accountant, written and directed by husband Ray McKinnon. Born in Fayetteville, Blount was an actress as well, remembered for her role in An Officer and a Gentleman (1982).
“It’s not every day you can say you’ve seen an Oscar,” Maack says.
But some of the museum curator’s favorite parts of the exhibit relate to lesser-known aspects of Arkansas movie history.
NATURAL STATE WONDERS
Johnny Cash starred in movies including A Gunfight (1971), one of the few Westerns in which the crowd cheers for the man in black.
The actor-singer’s childhood home is in Dyess, near Jonesboro, but - Dale Evans’ connection to Arkansas? Hal Needham’s? J.C. Flippen’s?
“Queen of the West” Evans’ childhood was a rough ride through Osceola and several other places in Arkansas, but “not many people know it,” Maack says.
Evans and “King of the Cowboys” Roy Rogers married in neighboring Oklahoma, and were so famous as movie and TV stars that even their horses were famous - Buttermilk and Trigger.
Stuntman Needham directed Smokey and the Bandit (1977). He received a honorary Oscar earlier this year for his career of hundreds of movies, doing stunts that cost him multiple broken bones. Born in Memphis, he was a sharecropper’s son in Arkansas.
The exhibit includes one of the oddities of Needham’s renown as the world’s highest-paid movie stuntman: a play set that invited children to stage a Western saloon brawl. The family-friendly instructions referred to the saloon as a “cafe.”
Born in Little Rock, character actor Flippen’s bulldog face and gruff behavior played in contrast to the likable nature of his frequent co-star, James Stewart, in such outings as Winchester ’73 (1950).
ROLL THE CREDITS
See! - Academy Award winner Mary Steenburgen’s maroon dress from her breakthrough role opposite Jack Nicholson in Goin’ South (1978). Three years later, she won an Oscar for her part in Melvin and Howard.
See! - Phillips County native Levon Helm’s mandolin from The Last Waltz (1978), director Martin Scorsese’s documentary about The Band.
See! - hundreds of movie photos on screens throughout the exhibit, solving the problem of how to show more pictures than would fit on the walls.
“Lights! Camera!Arkansas!” continues through March 2015 at the Old State House Museum, downtown Little Rock. Admission is free. The museum is open 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Monday through Saturday and 1-5 p.m. Sunday. Visit oldstatehouse.com, or call (501) 324-9685.
Style, Pages 29 on 06/11/2013