This wasn’t the first time staff from OK+MO heard big names in Hollywood or those in the film industry express delight in their experience filming in the Sooner State. “We shock them,” OK+MO director Tava Sofsky told Oklahoma Gazette. “They have no idea. … I don’t know if I would say nine out of 10 times. I would say more like 100 percent of the time if we can get them on a plane to come here and scout [locations] any length of time — one day or four days — they fall in love.” With Oklahoma’s strong Western heritage, known for cowboys and Native Americans, along with its longstanding history of severe weather and destruction, the state has gained a national reputation that doesn’t paint the entire picture. While films like 1940’s The Grapes of Wrath, 1991’s My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys and 1996’s Twister play into that reputation, more recent Oklahoma-shot films have augmented the state’s image by showcasing charming towns like Guthrie, Pawhuska and Pawnee as well as Oklahoma’s tallgrass prairies, hardwood forests and plains. Sofsky said that Oklahoma’s terrain and ecosystems, along with its vast diversity in culture, serve as the state’s greatest asset in attracting out-of-state moviemakers. The challenge lies in changing people’s perceptions and understandings about Oklahoma. “They have no idea that we have 12 ecological regions, that we have some of America’s most diverse terrain,” she said. “We push that hard.” Once they learn, moviemakers are hooked, Sofsky said. It’s not uncommon for OF+MO to hear of a director or writer adding a scene or filming on a location illuminating the state’s natural beauty or the distinctive architecture that dots Route 66. “One example is Great Plains,” she said. “The location scout took the director out to Pops in Arcadia. He thought it was the coolest thing ever and wrote it in.” OF+MO, which dates back to 1979 and is part of Oklahoma Tourism and Recreation Department, has a strong tagline for its mission: “Support, connect, promote.” Its commitment lies with both in-state and out-of-state film and music industry folks. Oklahoma City was among the best cities for moviemakers in 2018. MovieMaker magazine gave the city the No. 12 spot in their rankings
Jan de Bont’s 1996 film Twister was shot on location in Oklahoma. | Image Warner Bros. / provided
of the Best Places to Live and Work as a Moviemaker. The state’s rebate program, which offers 35-37 percent on qualifying in-state transactions, is largely responsible for enticing and continuing to build the film industry, Sofsky said. Sofsky argues Oklahoma-made films are a renewable resource as movie fans watch and re-watch them, especially Christmas films during the holidays. A number of holiday films, including Christmas in the Heartland and So This is Christmas, have been filmed in Oklahoma. Last week, I Can Only Imagine hit theaters across the United States. The Christian drama is based on the story behind the MercyMe song of the same name. “That’s going to put Oklahoma in front of millions of people,” Sofsky said. “Opportunities like that enhance our state’s image.”
True grit
Major film production remained absent from Oklahoma between 1954’s Human Desire and the rise of popularity of Tulsa author S.E. Hinton among Hollywood circles. Hinton’s The Outsiders is her most famous novel, but it was her book Tex, made into a film starring Matt Dillon, that ended Oklahoma’s film drought in 1982. Director Francis Ford Coppola and Oklahoma producer Gray Frederickson arrived the next year to shoot the film adaptation of The Outsiders. The book is still required reading in school curricula across the country, and the film launched the careers of Tom Cruise, Patrick Swayze, Rob Lowe and Emilio Estevez. Coppola and Hinton combined to write and produce Rumble Fish, which was also filmed in Tulsa, shortly after The Outsiders. Coppola said the avant-garde film was going to be “what Apocalypse Now was to The Godfather” in comparison to The Outsiders, but the experimental film with homages to French New Wave hasn’t enjoyed the same staying power as The Outsiders. Frederickson, who won an Academy Award with Coppola as a producer on The Godfather Part II, still lives in Oklahoma Rilla Askew author of The Mercy Seat, Fire in Beulah and 2013’s Kind of Kin, said new Oklahoma voices are essential to establishing a true Oklahoma image in popular culture. | Photo provided
City. He participated in a Q&A at Tower Theatre during a screening of the film in late 2017 and then went next door, where the bar Ponyboy has drink specials named after each character in the film, complete with actors’ headshots on the menu. Cruise returned to Oklahoma alongside Dustin Hoffman for 1988’s Rain Man, which won four Academy Awards, including best picture. The film showcases Oklahoma at the start of Cruise’s character’s cross-country road trip with his estranged autistic brother played by Hoffman. Both rural and urban Oklahoma is shown in the film, as it was shot at an Oklahoma City hospital and a farm in Hinton. A new generation of Oklahoma films began with 1996’s blockbuster Twister, which earned nearly $500 million, the second highest-grossing movie of the year. Director Jan de Bont elected to shoot in the small town of Wakita after driving through and seeing the remnants of damage from a 1993 hailstorm, according to a 2016 story in Tulsa World. Scenes were also shot in Pauls Valley, Ponca City, Maysville, Norman and Guthrie, but Wakita (population 344 in the 2010 census) has the strongest connection to the film. A Twister museum on Main Street includes a five-block walking tour of film sites and is filled with plenty of memorabilia, including a football brought to the set by star Bill Paxton. There is plenty of behind-the-scenes footage of Paxton throwing the football with town residents, many of whom served as extras in the movie. The town honored Paxton in 2017 following his death due to complications from surgery.
We’re sort of a middle America tabula rasa. Rilla Askew Interestingly, it was Oklahoma-born country star Garth Brooks who was originally offered Paxton’s role in the movie, but he turned it down because the tornado was the real star of the movie, according to a lawsuit filed by Brooks’ former business partner Lisa Sanderson. As Oklahoma’s tax rebate on film production expenses expanded in the 2000s, more major studios have shot in the state. The rebate was useful in luring production of the 2010 adaptation of Anadarko-born author Jim Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me, starring Casey Affleck and Jessica Alba and shot in Guthrie. Bartlesville and Pawhuska served as backdrops for the 2012 drama To the Wonder and 2013 dark comedy August: Osage County, based on the play by Tracy Letts. Both films showcased modern Oklahoma as a setting for familial drama with a personal connection for To the Wonder director Terrence Malick, who grew up in Bartlesville before moving to Paris. The film spotlighting his roots is one his most critically derided projects. While not actually filmed in Oklahoma,
2016’s Hell or High Water showcased the importance of Oklahoma gaming in popular culture. Texas robbers played by Chris Pine and Ben Foster use an Oklahoma casino to launder stolen money. The next big production set to shoot in Oklahoma is the Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio adaptation of the New York Times nonfiction bestseller Killers of the Flower Moon, which details the decades-long conspiracy to kill and cover up the murders of members of the Osage tribe after they became rich from oil. As of July 2017, the film was still in pre-production.
Novel interpretation
Setting a film in Oklahoma requires considerable preamble involving site selection, interface with state and local governments, application for tax incentives, locating in-state crew and facilities and countless other logistical concerns. In contrast, novelists just have to know the place well enough to capture its true essence on the page. It’s a comparatively inexpensive proposition, but Oklahoma is not a place to take lightly in fiction. It is not just populated by the go-to archetype of simple country folk; it contains multitudes. Rilla Askew, author of several novels and an assistant professor at University of Oklahoma, has set all her works to date in her native state. Those include her most recent novel, 2013’s Kind of Kin, a story about immigration and intolerance in a small, southeast Oklahoma town. She said that Oklahoma is rich material for writers familiar with its culture, varied topography and diverse population, like Billie Letts, author of Where the Heart Is. For out-of-state scribes parachuting in for some barbecue and a quick visit to the Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve, or even not visiting at all, Oklahoma can be whatever it needs to be. “We don’t have a dominant enough presence in the national narrative,” Askew said in an Oklahoma Gazette interview. “I think that’s one reason why people from outside here may choose to set their novels here. It’s like a blank slate in their minds. We’re sort of a middle America tabula rasa.” That perception of a great, flat emptiness was exacerbated by outsider John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath and perhaps given more dimension by Thompson’s hard-boiled noir fiction. The cure for such one-dimensional depictions of Oklahoma could come from something as simple as the establishing shots of the Oklahoma City skyline during coverage of Thunder games, nationally broadcast proof of the state’s progress beyond sod houses. But Askew said the most lasting change could come from homegrown talent, artists who can shift the narrative toward Oklahoma’s modernity and away from both its real and imagined past. “The more voices that come out of this place in terms of literary voices, filmmakers, poets, that’s going to be less true as time goes on,” she said.
O kg a z e t t e . c o m | M A R C H 2 1 , 2 0 1 8
23