Twentieth-Century Texas: A Social and Cultural History

Lone Star Cinema: A Century of Texas in the Movies

245 FILM IS A LITTLE over a century old, and films about Texas are almost exactly a century old. As early as 1898 traces of future Texas content appeared in some Thomas Edison-produced segments of film depicting typical ranching activities. The titles told all: Branding Cattle, Cattle Leaving the Corral, Lassoing Steer, and Cattle Fording Stream. These pioneering cinematic moments were documentaries rather than fictional stories, but they were also the raw material around which plots could be developed. Since populations largely ignorant of western landscapes primarily viewed these early scenes in urban centers, the footage must have served, whether intentionally or not, as travelogues to faraway places, namely, the West. After all, in 1898 the frontier had been “closed” for only eight years, and travel to those distant sites was still expensive and time-consuming.1 Film footage came early to Texas, which in the late nineteenth century was still a lot closer to the frontier than New York and New Jersey. In February 1897 Thomas Edison’s Vitascope showed various scenes to Dallas audiences, including a Mexican duel, a fire rescue , Niagara Falls, and a lynching. In 1900 in Austin citizens were able to see projected film footage in a tent show. The first actual Lone Star Cinema A Century of Texas in the Movies Don Graham ★ 20centtxtext.indd 245 20centtxtext.indd 245 1/18/08 1:46:55 PM 1/18/08 1:46:55 PM 246 TWENTIETH-CENTURY TEXAS filming to take place in Texas occurred at Galveston that same year. A series of Edison newsreels depicted scenes from the Galveston Flood, which killed thousands. The segments were shot on September 24, 1900, against the will of the city authorities, who tried to forbid moving pictures of the stricken community. They bore titles like Panorama of East Galveston; Panorama of Orphans Home, Galveston; and Panoramic View, Wreckage along Shore, Galveston. The purpose of each piece of footage was to show the devastation and damage to buildings caused by the hurricane and subsequent tidal wave. Oddly, the image of Texas in the movies began with a documentary of a disaster, not with the soundless puffs of smoke from blazing six-guns.2 In the first decade of the new century, the movie as a coherent narrative art form began to take shape in such early classics as The Great Train Robbery (1903) and A Corner in Wheat (1909). At the same time, because moving pictures were still a novelty, mere footage was enough to attract the curious. Exhibitors in Austin, for example, as late as 1910 advertised “2,000 feet of moving pictures” with no definition of content. The emergence of genres, popular subjects for plots, and movie stars was a slow but steady process, and the development of specific Texas materials in the movies to a degree paralleled these currents in the newest entertainment industry . The genre most closely aligned with Texas was, of course, the western––and that meant the cowboy. The working cowboy held no more interest for mass audiences than he did for the most important mythologizers of the cowboy era. Frederic Remington, Owen Wister, and Theodore Roosevelt—painter, novelist, and cowboy president—were the three who did more than anybody else to transform the hired man on horseback into a national hero. They saw—and made the nation see—the cowboy as a picturesque figure, a man of action as well as repose, and perhaps above all, a paragon of American qualities that included physical prowess, courage, and 20centtxtext.indd 246 20centtxtext.indd 246 1/18/08 1:46:56 PM 1/18/08 1:46:56 PM LONE STAR CINEMA 247 a sense of moral rectitude. The cowboy became the American par excellence, and the Texas cowboy became preeminent among cowboys , at least in the number of westerns made with Texas in the title or with Texas associations. It has been estimated, for example, that 6 percent of all the dime novels of the nineteenth century dealt with Texas, a remarkable statistic in that no other state attained even 1 percent of such dubious popularity. Additionally, over 600 films concerned Texas, well over half of them westerns.3 Where did screenwriters, or scenarists as they were called then, turn for their stories of cowboys? The sources were varied, but authentic historical records were seldom among them. One influence was Buffalo Bill’s Wild West shows. Immensely popular throughout...