Colonel Tim McCoy Unknown Film Card no date
by David Lee Guss
Title
Colonel Tim McCoy Unknown Film Card no date
Artist
David Lee Guss
Medium
Photograph - Photography
Description
Tim McCoy's (1891-1978) entry into the world of motion pictures is unique. He had become an expert in Native American sign language and their customs from his days working as a cowboy/rancher in Wyoming.
In 1922 he was hired by Jesse Lasky (1880-1958) of Famous Players-Lasky to be technical advisor and provide Native American extras for the first Western epic "The Covered Wagon" (1923); directed by James Cruz who had sold "snake oil" in a patent medicine show before entering films in 1911 as an actor.
A much smaller contingent, of the hundreds of extras and McCoy, traveled to Hollywood to present a stage show before the film's screening. It ran eight months in Hollywood and then many months in London and Paris.
In 1926 he was signed by Irving Thalberg of MGM to be the studio's first cowboy star.
McCoy, with his striking looks and darting eyes, worked intermittently in motion pictures until the eve of World War 2. He served as an officer in both wars achieving the rank of colonel in WW2.
I, and my writer/photographer friend Carol Clarke, interviewed the colonel at his Mexican style home (with the open air inner court yard) in Nogales, Arizona in 1974.
Among his many accomplishments he was especially proud of his 1952 Los Angeles based TV children's program "The Tim McCoy Show," where he showed his movies and gave history lessons on the Old West.
His co-host was Native American expert Iron Eyes Cody, who looked, dressed and claimed to be Indian but was of Italian heritage.
{NOTE: Carol Clarke and her husband provided the cattle to director Howard Hawks when he made the 1948 classic Western "Red River," with John Wayne in Elgin, Arizona.
Decades later she photographed Hawks and Wayne at Old Tucson in their final collaboration, "Rio Lobo" (1970).}
A lovely print of "Two-Fisted Law Law" (1932) with McCoy can be seen on the Internet Archive. John Wayne is sixth billed with only a few scattered lines.
Walter Brennan is next billed as a corrupt deputy sheriff with a far greater role.
http://www.archive.org/details/TwoFistedLawWithTimMccoyAndJohnWayne1932
Virtually the entire cast, with the same director D. Ross Lederman and co-writer William Colt MacDonald, had appeared in Columbia's "Texas Cyclone" the same year.
Bad guy Wheeler Oatman has the distinction of appearing in the first all talking film, "The Lights of New York" (1928).
His command to his henchman to take a man "for a ride" is usually excerpted in documentaries tracing the birth of sound in pictures.
@2011 David Lee Guss Film homage, Colonel Tim McCoy, Unknown film, photo-2011
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April 23rd, 2013
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