Legends walked these dusty streets

Saturday, March 19, 2011

TUCSON, AZ — Try and think of any cowboy movie or western you’ve ever seen, and in all likelihood, it was filmed against the backdrop of Old Tucson, where we visited today. More than 150 movies and TV shows, including Bonanza and Little House on the Prairie, were filmed on this set, which has been here for 70 years.

Movie makers in the late 1930s were looking for a place to make the film “Arizona”, and decided to build a replica of the original town of Tucson in the desert, using plans of the town from historic records. When the film was completed, they abandoned the place and it languished for a while until someone decided it might be fun to fix it up as an amusement park.

It opened in the mid 1940s to tremendous public response. Before long, the owners realized it could be rented out for better revenues as a movie set, and the merry-go-round began. Year after year, big name actors like John Wayne, Elizabeth Taylor, Maureen O’Hara, Robert Duvall, James Garner – the list goes on and on (including Ronald Reagan) – walked the dusty streets of Old Tucson, which were adapted to look like Mexican mission towns, mining boom towns, prairie homesteads and more to feed the insatiable appetite for that genre of film.

Today, Old Tucson Studios still serves as a movie set, but in addition, it brings in the public for tours, shows and amusements and can even be rented for parties or special events. There’s a stagecoach, a mini-railroad train, panning for gold, gunfight re-enactments and can-can girls in the saloon of the Grand Hotel.

Inside some of the buildings you can see slide shows of famous actors being filmed in front of the courthouse, the train station, the saloon, or the magnificent mountains behind with tall cacti here and there and “movie magic” that can make the sun set on the east side of the property if need be!

At one time, Old Tucson Studios also housed the most complete wardrobe of western costumes assembled anywhere, but a fire in the mid 1970s destroyed all but the costumes on the backs of actors in another part of the town that day, as well as several buildings. These have never been rebuilt, because current fire regulations have made the prospect too expensive. So they use what they’ve got.

Val and I caught the can-can show, watched a rope trick performer, and rode the little train around the property, passing mini-sets with old covered wagons and skulls of horned cattle lying in the dust. It was a fun visit to yesteryear!

Our route back to the RV resort was through Gates Pass, a twisty road through the mountains with wonderful vistas (or they might have been on a less hazy day) and stands of saguaro and prickly-pear cacti on the roadsides. Hey, was that the Lone Ranger and Tonto I glimpsed behind that rock formation?