The Sedona Heritage Museum’s 2024 Sedona Stories speaker series concluded on Thursday, Nov. 14, with co-authors Diane Phelps Budden, Chris Seeholzer and Janeen Trevillyan and photographer Mark Elder discussing their 2023 book “Sedona Movie Locations Then & Now.”
“I’m assuming that most people in the room are boomers, because this is such a walk down memory lane, if you are,” Budden said. “All of us either saw it on the screen or on our TV because we were growing up.”
Published by the museum, the book is part guidebook and part picture book and is intended to help film fans locate filming locations for 21 major motion pictures that were shot in Sedona. The book also juxtaposes historical film photographs with contemporary images of the same locations.
Since Zane Grey’s “The Call of the Canyon” was filmed in Oak Creek Canyon in 1923, more than 100 feature films have been shot in Sedona, earning it the nickname “Arizona’s Little Hollywood.” Between the late 1930s and early 1960s, Sedona became a hub for Western film productions, where nearly 20 movies were produced between 1945 and 1950. Cesar Romero, Tyrone Power, Joan Crawford, Henry Fonda and Glenn Ford were among the many stars who worked against the backdrop of the red rocks.
“The whole idea of being able to see places that you have no concept of what they look like and have no thoughts that you might ever be able to travel to, which, really, even when you look as far as into the middle of the 20th century, there are a lot of people who still didn’t think they would ever be able to travel,” Trevillyan said of how film viewing once took the place of tourism.
“I grew up in Munich, Germany,” Seeholzer said. “I knew every American Western. I knew every movie star, and my whole childhood and teenage years was dreaming about one day getting to this place where all that magic took place.”
Sedona’s big filmmaking era ended in 1968 with the completion of the last two films in the guidebook, “Firecreek” and “Stay Away, Joe.”
The former was shot at Schnebly Hill and Cross Creek Ranch and atop Airport Mesa and starred Henry Fonda and Jimmy Stewart.
“The movie’s opening scene at Sedona Airport required Fonda and his movie gang to ride their horses at a full gallop next to the runway while the camera crew drove parallel to them to capture the dramatic moment,” the book stated.
For the making of the Elvis Presley’s “Stay Away, Joe,” Presley arrived with his new wife, Priscilla, and his full entourage for the six-week shoot. The film featured Presley as a Navajo scrambling for a solution after a prized stud bull that was supposed to bring financial freedom to the tribe was accidentally eaten.
“One of the things I also did is try to watch all the movies,” Seeholzer said. “I finished most of them, except ‘Stay Away, Joe.’ It’s so bad I could not get through it.”
The book notes that movie lovers can find one of the locations for “Stay Away, Joe” at the intersection of State Route 89A and Forest Road. Sedona Camera Club member and location photographer Chris Elder visited a movie site that now with a barbed wire fence around its perimeter
. “I hold the strands of barbed wire open [for my wife] and she goes through, and she goes wandering off into the brush, and she turns around says to me, ‘You coming?’ which means, ‘You’re coming,’” Elder said. “I proceeded, and lo and behold, the tension on one of the strands snapped and away I flew. I landed on my back … and my cell phone is going off in my chest pocket. I’m saying to myself, who wants to talk to me? It’s my phone. It says, ‘You’ve fallen, we’re going to call 911.’”
“This book was a labor of love and it was a fun process, and it was something we put off to the point where there was a bunch of pent-up demand,” Trevillyan said. “So we’re hoping that there will be plenty of people who will enjoy it.”
