Film Homage Victor Fleming Douglas Fairbanks The Mollycoddle 1920 Hopi Indians Collage 2012 #5 Acrylic Print

Victor Fleming started out in films as a cameraman for Fairbanks, graduating to director four years later in 1919.

1920's "The Mollycoddle" was shot on the Hopi Indian Reservation in Northern Arizona. Despite the declaration below the Hopi's soon banned non Indians from filming their sacred rituals.

I imagine the words "their savage way" offended them.

"FOREWORD: Our thanks are gratefully expressed to government officials, tribal chiefs, and to the hundreds of picturesque Hopi Indians on their reservation near the Painted Desert of Arizona, who, in their savage way heartily welcomed us to their prehistoric villages and with primitive cheerfulness played an important part in this picture."

Fleming was fond of Arizona. He returned in 1933 to direct Jean Harlow in "Bombshell," the only film she made on location. Fleming was vacationing in Cottonwood in 1949. still nursing the savage reviews he received in 1948 for "Joan of Arc." Fleming died while b...

I first became obsessed with photography and motion pictures while growing up in post WW2 Manila in the Philippine Islands in the late 1940's/early 1950's. Film noirs were a particular influence. But my first love remains the theater. I acted in numerous amateur productions from 1958 to 1978. In 1979 I earned a MA in drama from the University of Arizona; earlier getting a BA in English from the University of Minnesota, where I co-founded the first film society on campus and ran it for four years. While at the U of A, I studied with the master black and white photo essayist W. Eugene Smith (1918-1978) the last year of his life. I am the last person cited in Jim Hughes' definitive biography of Gene, as I wrote about attending his final...