Posts by Richard--W

September Storm 3-D was really the last major two-strip 3-D
release, and the only one to employ anamorphic optics for a 2.35:1 screen
ratio. This historically important and entertaining 3-D film from 1960 will
soon be coming to Blu-Ray thanks to the non-profits 3-D Film Archive and
the 3-D Space Museum. The kickstarter campaign reached its $25,000 goal
within two weeks, a testament to the confidence vintage 3-D fans have in
the restoration and exhibition work of Bob Furmanek, Greg Kintz and Jack
Theakston of the 3-D Film Archive. Their track record has been impeccable,
and the quality of their work has been consistently outstanding.

Unfortunately, the campaign stalled within five days of reaching its "stretch
goal" to restore the special-venue 3-D short SEA DREAM 3-D (1978) which
they'd like to include as a bonus on the blu-ray. Only five days left to raise
$1,000 to restore SEA DREAM 3-D. Please help by telling everybody you
know and by contributing what you can:

Steptember Storm 3-D kickstarter

Watch the videos, read the updates and make you pledge.

May I also remind everyone that the World 3-D Expos that took place in
Hollywood in 2003, 2006 and 2013 were made up of the films that Bob
Furmanek had diligently searched for, found and saved, and that Greg Kintz
did restoration work on. Without their efforts, there would have been no
Expos. So successful were the Expos that they had a profound impact on the
industry, demonstrating the viability of 3-D technology and helping to revive
studio interest in making new 3-D movies:

More upgrades are on the way. THEY WERE EXPENDABLE, SHE WORE A YELLOW RIBBON, CHISUM and McQ are being released on blu-ray in the next few months.

SHE WORE A YELLOW RIBBON is being released through Warner Arhcive. Warner had better get the color and density right this time. If they screw up another John Wayne classic like they did THE SEARCHERS, I'm going to war.

HONDO 3-D and THE SONS OF KATIE ELDER -- still missing in action.

Do keep the forum up and running. I can't participate much but I read what goes on. Love the place.

I haven't watched HONDO in over a year. Not since the 3-D screening in Hollywood last September. That was a whole 'nuther movie, I can tell you. Why in the world didn't Paramount put the 3-D version on disc? Gretchen was there and told us that Paramount doesn't want to release the 3-D version and she has no idea why. What's the matter with them? Are they retarded, or what?

Held on the 60th Anniversary of classic 3-D films from 1953 and 1954. State of the art double-interlock projection of 35mm prints. This is your last chance to see them on the big screen. Learn the extraordinary history of HONDO 3-D here: http://www.3dfilmarchive.com/home/hondo-3-d-release

Olive Films canceled The Oregon Trail (Republic, 1936). They acquired the rights but couldn't find the elements, according to a post on another forum.

I am disappointed, and more than a little annoyed, that Paramound did not include a 3-D option on the new Blu-ray of HONDO. It is one of the finest and most technically accomplished stereoscopic films ever made. I should know, I attended industry screenings of the 3-D restoration.

Learn about John Wayne's success as a 3-D pioneer at my friends' website here:

http://www.3dfilmarchive.com/home/hondo-3-d-release

I enjoyed browsing Paula's Ben Johnson page. Everybody should take a look-see.

You should probably place the photo inside a dehumidifier so that it will unroll itself. Call a local archive or museum and ask to speak to an archivist or to their photo archivist. They are trained and equipped, generally. Of call the George Eastman House Museum of International Photography in Rochester NY and ask to speak to their photo archivist. He will help you.

1910 suggests a silver gelatin or albumen print. Delicate. Water will destroy the photo. One does not sprinkle, dampen or otherwise soak historic photos, certainly not from 1910.

Richard

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Kodak weighs bankruptcy plan

By Richard Waters in San Francisco
January 6, 2012 3:35 pm

Eastman Kodak may have had $862m in cash on hand when it last disclosed its financial condition, but that has not stopped one of corporate America’s best-known names from thinking the unthinkable: a possible bankruptcy that would mark a low point in its 123-year history.

It emerged this week that Kodak has begun preparations for a filing under Chapter 11 of the US bankruptcy code, which protects companies from their creditors while they try to reorganise financially.

Though not a foregone conclusion, the contingency planning – including an effort to line up financing from banks to allow it to operate in bankruptcy – suggests that Kodak is close to losing the long fight to remake its film business for the digital era.

It was nearly two decades ago that George Fisher, then chief executive, declared that the company could no longer lean on the film business that had been the foundation of its success, but would need to remake itself for the “information revolution”. Despite pushing into a range of new markets from ink-jet printers to digital cameras, however, revenues have fallen steadily, reaching $7.2bn by 2010 – half the level of five years before, and far below the $20bn Kodak had predicted it would hit by that point.

The company has pegged its ability to stabilise its finances in the short term largely on the sale of its portfolio of more than 1,000 digital photography patents. However, an auction of the patents would be likely to achieve a higher price if Kodak seeks Chapter 11 protection first, said Richard Mikels, a bankruptcy lawyer at Mintz Levin in Boston. That would remove the risk for buyers that a sale could later be challenged by Kodak’s creditors if the company is eventually forced into bankruptcy, he added.

For bankrupt Canadian telecom equipment company Nortel, the sale of a valuable patent portfolio last year was the final step in a complete dismemberment of the company. For Kodak, weighing whether to seek Chapter 11, the risk of a similar fate is now looming large.

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/0efa…eabdc0.html#axzz1itrXrBsH

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R.I.P., the movie camera: 1888-2011

Major manufacturers have ceased production
of new motion picture film cameras; cinema as
we once knew it is dead

By Matt Zoller Seitz

Thursday, Oct 13, 2011 9:54 AM US Mountain Standard Time
---------------------

We might as well call it: Cinema as we knew it is dead.

An article at the moviemaking technology website Creative Cow reports that the three major manufacturers of motion picture film cameras — Aaton, ARRI and Panavision — have all ceased production of new cameras within the last year, and will only make digital movie cameras from now on. As the article’s author, Debra Kaufman, poignantly puts it, “Someone, somewhere in the world is now holding the last film camera ever to roll off the line.”

What this means is that, even though purists may continue to shoot movies on film, film itself will may become increasingly hard to come by, use, develop and preserve. It also means that the film camera — invented in 1888 by Louis Augustin Le Prince — will become to cinema what typewriters are to literature. Anybody who still uses a Smith-Corona or IBM Selectric typewriter knows what that means: if your beloved machine breaks, you can’t just take it to the local repair shop, you have to track down some old hermit in another town who advertises on Craigslist and stockpiles spare parts in his basement.

As Aaton founder Jean-Pierre Beauviala told Kaufman: “Almost nobody is buying new film cameras. Why buy a new one when there are so many used cameras around the world? We wouldn’t survive in the film industry if we were not designing a digital camera.” Bill Russell, ARRI’s vice president of cameras, added that: “The demand for film cameras on a global basis has all but disappeared.”

Theaters, movies, moviegoing and other core components of what we once called “cinema” persist, and may endure. But they’re not quite what they were in the analog cinema era. They’re something new, or something else — the next generation of technologies and rituals that had changed shockingly little between 1895 and the early aughts. We knew this day would come. Calling oneself a “film director” or “film editor” or “film buff” or a “film critic” has over the last decade started to seem a faintly nostalgic affectation; decades hence it may start to seem fanciful. It’s a vestigial word that increasingly refers to something that does not actually exist — rather like referring to the mass media as “the press.”

In May 1999 — a year that saw several major releases, including “Toy Story 2,? projected digitally for paying customers — editor and sound designer Walter Murch wrote a piece for the New York Times headlined, “A Digital Cinema of the Mind? Could Be.” In it, Murch pointed out that only two major aspects of the analog filmmaking process had survived into the late ’90s, the recording of images on sprocketed celluloid film and their projection onto big screens by casting a beam of light through the images. Murch predicted that once digital projection became widespread, it would “trigger the final capitulation of the two last holdouts of film’s 19th-century, analog-mechanical legacy. Projection, at the end of the line, is one; the other is the original photography that begins the whole process. The movie industry is currently a digital sandwich between slices of analog bread.”

Near the end of 1999, my former New York Press colleague Godfrey Cheshire published a two-part article titled “Death of Film/Decay of Cinema“, which in hindsight seems eerily prescient. He predicted just about everything that would happen within the next decade-plus, including the replacement of old-fashioned film print projection by digital systems, the replacement of film cameras by digital cameras, and the near-total takeover of traditional cinematic language by techniques that had once been the province of television.

“Camera, projector, celluloid,” Cheshire wrote, “the basic technology hasn’t changed in over a century. Sure, as a form of expression, film underwent a radical alteration with the addition of sound, but that and other developments – color, widescreen, stereo, etc.–were simply embellishments to a technical paradigm that has held true since photographic likenesses began to move, and that everyone in the world has thought of as “the movies” – until this summer. [...] For the time being, most movies will still be shot on film, primarily because audiences are used to the look, but everything else about the process will be, in effect, television – from the transmission by satellite to the projection, which for all intents and purposes is simply a glorified version of a home video projection system.”

Although I’ve become more of a surly classicist with age, I was an early defender of movies shot on video, and I really don’t see the point of doing a Grandpa Cinema routine, waving a cane and hollering that the movies somehow “equal” film. That’s silly. Cinema is not just a medium. It is a language. Its essence — storytelling with shots and cuts, with or without sound — will survive the death of the physical material, celluloid, that many believed was inseparably linked to it. The physical essence of analog cinema won’t survive the death of film (except at museums and repertory houses that insist on showing 16mm and 35mm prints).

But digital cinema will become so adept at mimicking the look of film that within a couple of decades, even cinematographers may not be able to tell the difference. The painterly colors, supple gray scale, hard sharpness and enticing flicker of motion picture film were always important (if mostly unacknowledged) parts of cinema’s mass appeal. The makers of digital moviemaking equipment got hip to that in the late ’90s, and channeled their research and development money accordingly; it’s surely no coincidence that celluloid-chauvinist moviegoers and moviemakers stopped resisting the digital transition once they realized that the new, electronically-created movies could be made to look somewhat like the analog kind, with dense images, a flickery frame rate, and starkly defined planes of depth.

But let’s not kid ourselves: Now that analog filmmaking is dead, an ineffable beauty has died with it. Let’s raise two toasts, then — one to the glorious past, and one to the future, whatever it may hold.

http://www.salon.com/2011/10/1…e_movie_camera_1888_2011/

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The digital realm will never do what photochemistry has done.

Never.

Richard

... to all you good people on the John Wayne forum.

What are your plans for the new year?

I have not entirely given up hope of finding a business partner to finance my factual westerns. I'm still plugging away. Meanwhile, the publisher is on my case not to miss the deadline again. Maximum effort, minimun reward, that's the nature of academic publishing.

I believe in the impossible.

Richard

The Cowboys' Christmas Ball
To the Ranchmen of Texas


By Larry Chittenden, 1893


'Way out in Western Texas, where the Clear Fork's waters flow,
Where the cattle are "a-browzin'," an' the Spanish ponies grow;
Where the Northers "come a-whistlin'" from beyond the Neutral Strip;
And the prairie dogs are sneezin', as if they had "The Grip";
Where the cayotes come a-howlin' 'round the ranches after dark,
And the mocking-birds are singin' to the lovely "medder lark";
Where the 'possum and the badger, and rattlesnakes abound,
And the monstrous stars are winkin' o'er a wilderness profound;
Where lonesome, tawny prairies melt into airy streams,
While the Double Mountains slumber, in heavenly kinds of dreams;
Where the antelope is grazin' and the lonely plovers call—
It was there that I attended "The Cowboys' Christmas Ball."

The town was Anson City, old Jones's county seat,
Where they raised Polled Angus cattle, and waving whiskered wheat;
Where the air is soft and "bammy," an' dry an' full of health,
And the prairies is explodin' with agricultural wealth;
Where they print the Texas Western, that Hec. McCann supplies
With news and yarns and stories, uv most amazin' size;
Where Frank Smith "pulls the badger," on knowin' tenderfeet,
And Democracy's triumphant, and might hard to beat;
Where lives that good old hunter, John Milsap, from Lamar,
Who "used to be the Sheriff, back East, in Paris sah!"
'T was there, I say, at Anson with the lovely "widder Wall,"
That I went to that reception, "The Cowboys' Christmas Ball."

The boys had left the ranches and come to town in piles;
The ladies—"kinder scatterin'"—had gathered in for miles.
And yet the place was crowded, as I remember well,
T was got for the occasion, at "The Morning Star Hotel."
The music was a fiddle an' a lively tambourine,
And a "viol came imported," by the stage from Abilene.
The room was togged out gorgeous-with mistletoe and shawls,
And candles flickered frescoes, around the airy walls.
The "wimmin folks" looked lovely-the boys looked kinder treed,
Till their leader commenced yellin': "Whoa! fellers, let's stampede,"
And the music started sighin', an' awailin' through the hall
As a kind of introduction to "The Cowboys' Christmas Ball."

The leader was a feller that came from Swenson's ranch,
They called him "Windy Billy," from "little Deadman's Branch."
His rig was "kinder keerless," big spurs and high-heeled boots;
He had the reputation that comes when "fellers shoots."
His voice was like a bugle upon the mountain's height;
His feet were animated an' a mighty, movin' sight,
When he commenced to holler, "Neow, fellers stake your pen!
"Lock horns ter all them heifers, an' russle 'em like men.
"Saloot yer lovely critters; neow swing an' let 'em go,
"Climb the grape vine 'round 'em—all hands do-ce-do!
"You Mavericks, jine the round-up- Jest skip her waterfall,"
Huh! hit wuz gettin' happy, "The Cowboys' Christmas Ball!"

The boys were tolerable skittish, the ladies powerful neat,
That old bass viol's music just got there with both feet!
That wailin', frisky fiddle, I never shall forget;
And Windy kept a-singin'—I think I hear him yet—
"Oh Xes, chase yer squirrels, an' cut 'em to one side;
"Spur Treadwell to the centre, with Cross P Charley's bride;
"Doc. Hollis down the middle, an' twine the ladies' chain;
"Varn Andrews pen the fillies in big T Diamond's train.
"All pull yer freight together, neow swallow fork an' change;
"'Big Boston,' lead the trail herd, through little Pitchfork's range.
"Purr 'round yer gentle pussies, neow rope 'em! Balance all!"
Huh! hit wuz gettin' active—"The Cowboys' Christmas Ball!"

The dust riz fast an' furious; we all jes' galloped 'round,
Till the scenery got so giddy that T Bar Dick was downed.
We buckled to our partners, an' told 'em to hold on,
Then shook our hoofs like lightning, until the early dawn.
Don't tell me 'bout cotillions, or germans. No sire 'ee!
That whirl at Anson City just takes the cake with me.
I'm sick of lazy shufflin's, of them I've had my fill,
Give me a frontier break-down, backed up by Windy Bill.
McAllister ain't nowhar: when Windy leads the show,
I've seen 'em both in harness, and so I sorter know—
Oh, Bill, I sha'n't forget yer, and I'll oftentimes recall,
That lively gaited sworray—"The Cowboys' Christmas Ball."


http://www.cowboypoetry.com/chittenden.htm#Christmas


Merry Christmas, everybody.


Richard[/font]

Where does John Wayne appear in Lone Star Ranger (Fox, 1930)? I'll have to look for him in it. There are some skips in my copy. Not because of missing footage, but a bad burn from CometVideo. It's quite a good western, however.

Richard

The reason I mention this particular book is that it covers the same time and place, geographically and chronologically, as the new series HELL ON WHEELS. Wish I could get ten people -- okay, five people -- to read the book first, and watch the program as it airs, so that we could discuss it in a devoted thread. That would be fun.

Richard

The reason I mention this particular book is that it covers the same time and place, geographically and chronologically, as the new series HELL ON WHEELS. Wish I could get ten people -- okay, five people -- to read the book first, and watch the program as it airs, so that we could discuss it in a devoted thread. That would be fun.

Richard

Try reading this acclaimed book by historian Thomas Goodrich. He lets the evidence do the talking in Scalp Dance. Not too academic, above politics and beyond blame games. It's a good place to start.

Richard

Try reading this acclaimed book by historian Thomas Goodrich. He lets the evidence do the talking in Scalp Dance. Not too academic, above politics and beyond blame games. It's a good place to start.

Richard

I saved this article several years ago, written by a courageous reporter who is no longer with us. Sadly, the situation has not improved for the better:

Quote

http://www.tucsonweekly.com/tu…ucson/Content?oid=1072198

The Battle Over Old Tucson

The county and two of its wealthiest residents keep fighting--with no end in sight.
by Chris Limberis

May 01, 2003

County Administrator Chuck Huckelberry was among the select group invited to Don Diamond's ritzy 75th birthday bash at Loews Ventana Canyon Resort in early March.

Huckelberry was in the most select group of this select group. He also had been at Diamond's 70th, and Diamond had made it clear that those who didn't make the cut for this year's party--bankers and lawyers--were no longer needed by him. Apparently Huckelberry is needed, even though he and his host are gunning for one another in an ugly, costly battle over Old Tucson, the once-famous Western movie set ravaged by fire in 1995.

At the party, guests were treated as if they were on a cruise, where admission was gained through "boarding pass" invitations. Guests ate as they could nowhere else in Tucson while being entertained by a band flown in from New York. The party was so lavish that its cost easily could have covered the $124,410 that Old Tucson--run by a company controlled by Diamond and Donald Pitt, buddies from their days at the University of Arizona--owes in back rent and late charges.

After sending a default notice to Diamond and Pitt last summer, Huckelberry--with clearance from a Pima County Board of Supervisors that has historically catered to Diamond--saddled up two county lawyers to sue Old Tucson on March 13. The company's answer to the complaint, assigned to Judge Carmine Cornelio of Pima County Superior Court, is due today (May 1), one day after Old Tucson's first-quarter 2003 rent was due.

Diamond and Pitt--whose father operated a jewelry store downtown at Stone Avenue and Congress Street--have begged the showdown with repeated delays in payment, squabbles over details of rent credits, and the hope that their lease, renewed with favorable terms in 1996, can be rewritten to chop their minimum rent payment to the county from $300,000 a year to $50,000.

The two also have a hold card: They have lined up Lowell Rothschild, a top-flight bankruptcy lawyer whose firm has also done work for the county.

Pitt, a lawyer and former member of the Arizona Board of Regents, joined with Diamond and another longtime friend, investor Richard Bloch, to buy the lease to Old Tucson in 1985 from a company headed by Robert Shelton. They paid $3.5 million to acquire the 100 buildings of the movie set and theme park that Shelton restored and built up when he, a country club consultant from Kansas City, took over the park in 1959. (Bloch, also a partner in the Diamond-Pitt landmark deal to acquire and sell off land in the Howard Hughes Trust--a package that made the three wildly rich--is no longer part of Old Tucson.

The Old Tucson debt is tiny for someone with Diamond's wealth. It is a wealth exemplified by his ability to write an eight-figure check to get out of the tricky Banning-Lewis Ranch deal in Colorado before the collapse of one of the many crashing thrifts in the dawn of the Resolution Trust Corp. (It must be said that Pitt and Diamond also give, to medical research and other charities, more than many make in a lifetime.)

But this costly battle goes on--at a time of county budget cuts and at a time that Old Tucson itself is flailing.

OLD TUCSON'S HEYDAY was as a movie studio. Yet, Diamond, Pitt and others cling to the hope that it can have a successful future as a water park.

Yes, a water park.

Laugh as you might at the recommendations for an Old Tucson water park. It is what the consultants recommend, and they play a big role with

Diamond and Pitt. Critics point out that consultants are the ones who guided them away from Old Tucson as a big movie set and to today's amusement park with sharply dwindling attendance.

Rather than rebuild the soundstage, the famous and important Kansas Street shooting area, the old mission and other critical features used in movies for decades, Diamond and Pitt chose consultants' designs, trading the movie-making history--Old Tucson was created by Columbia Pictures for the 1939 movie Arizona--for a $14.95-per-adult tourist trap.

The Western theme, one consultant assured, will be retained "with lifeguards wearing cowboy hats, etc. A Western-themed water park would be a lot of fun."

"(The) target market would change radically," said Will Koch, president of the Holiday World, a theme park in the southern Indiana village of Santa Claus. "The rides and water park would be the primary draw, with the western theme simply providing the 'flavor' of the park."
Koch's ideas were part of a fantasy presented to Old Tucson owners on Nov. 25 by Pete Mangelsdorf, chief executive officer at Old Tucson, and Tom Moulton, the county's manager for the leased property. Moulton could speak like an insider because, until October 2000, he worked for Old Tucson Studios.

The November brainstorming came four months after Huckelberry finally decided to call out Diamond, when he had county Parks Director Rafael Payan serve Old Tucson with notice of default. Though friendly with Diamond, Huckelberry has watched the savvy speculator circle around him and county government for decades on huge land deals like the Rocking K Ranch, Pima Canyon and several big land swaps. The rivalry simmers most on Huckelberry's legacy: the Sonoran Desert Conservation Plan. Despite reports that he is trying to be more tolerant of the land preservation plan, Diamond, the son of a New York coffee broker, once belittled it as "dipshit."

Still, this rivalry returns to Old Tucson's dusty streets because of escalating, unpaid bill and the court action.

BACK IN THE DAY, Robert Shelton was Tucson's movie man, a charismatic, energetic sort who befriended John Wayne (who became a partner in Old Tucson), Elizabeth Taylor and scores of other movie and television actors, producers and directors. He single-handedly lured movie after movie to Tucson.

He loves--without boasting--to tell the story about how he once had five production companies working at Old Tucson at one time. He had Wayne, Burt Lancaster, Clint Eastwood and Lee Marvin simultaneously working on films. Shelton could configure five or six sets at Old Tucson, he says. Shelton had a knack with movie folks. Eastwood built Old Tucson's courthouse. Paul Newman built the boarding house for Hombre. Shelton got the Reno, the oldest operating locomotive, from MGM.

Shelton is friendly with Diamond, and says that when they were discussing the sale of the lease from Shelton's control to Diamond/Pitt control, in 1985, he considered Diamond a close friend.

"We had been in business together with Alumni Publishing Co.," he recalls. "I was kind of a boob. He is the most focused human being I know. He's got to come out with it all."

Old Tucson became a company for the investors' kids--a toy, critics contend. But they apparently were not impressed enough with the movie business to keep it going like Shelton did.

Diamond's daughter, Helaine Levy, was installed as the CEO and president. A succession of general managers came through the turnstiles. One, Dan Aylward, infuriated directors and producers by walking onto live sets. Aylward had a much better time with the Board of Supervisors, making repeated requests for more lenient lease terms and for admission increases.

Under a 1973 lease with Shelton, the county collected $38,000 a year in minimum rent and allowed 25 percent of the rent to be applied to maintenance. In 1988, minimum rent was raised to $200,000, but generous rent credits were expanded and often not policed.

Indeed, Diamond and Pitt became so cozy with the county agency that administers the lease, Parks and Recreation, that then-Director Gene Laos and two of his friends operated in 1988 the Three Amigos restaurant--in space Old Tucson leased from the county. The conflict of interest netted Laos only a brief suspension.

In early 1995, records show, the problems of late rent payments and maintenance issues prompted county lawyers to persuade the Board of Supervisors to tell Old Tucson officials to shape up or face default. And on April 18, 1995, the Board of Supervisors hired former deputy county attorney Michael Callahan to help untangle the knots of the Old Tucson lease and to provide consultation for lease renewal.

Disaster intervened six days later. At about 6:30 p.m., fire raced through Old Tucson and devoured its mostly wood buildings, destroying half the movie set and theme park.

TERRY POLLOCK IS AN OLD friend of the Diamond and Pitt families. He became a familiar face and voice with the public through his advertising agency and his work to keep Central Arizona Project water from being pumped into Tucson homes.

He now is a voice for Old Tucson, as a $90,000-a-year vice president for strategic development. In radio appearances he frequently describes the fire catastrophe as a "perfect storm."

High winds. A Drexel Heights fire crew out in Three Points for a training exercise. The lack of water on site because firefighters could not get to the source. That, he says, resulted in the major damage.

Records show more. Old Tucson officials chose to dissemble a pump that in fact needed maintenance work rather than allow for it to operate, even at lower capacity.

Old Tucson and Pima County officials also failed to get necessary fire inspection from the state fire marshal and failed to submit construction and renovation plans for review by the fire marshal. County officials didn't require fire prevention devices like sprinklers and allowed the park to have less than a quarter--67,000 gallons--of the needed 300,000 gallons on hand. Water lines also were too small.

Pima County's lax attitude culminated in 1987, when it stopped inspecting Old Tucson buildings altogether. Of the 100 buildings at the time of the fire, just three had sprinklers.

On that fateful April 1995 evening, fire swept so fast that crews had little chance of preventing the loss. Among the treasures cited by Shelton and other experts as lost were the soundstage, built in 1966, and the vast--and in some cases, historically significant--wardrobe.
Huckelberry, whose party for his temporary retirement from county administration was held at Old Tucson in the spring of 1993, was stunned the night of the fire and somewhat apologetic if realistic about its tinder-box condition. Old Tucson, he said, "grew up like an Old West town. Hodge podge."

Shelton was home that evening when a television reporter called for an interview. He "could see the glow" from the foothills.

"There was nothing I could do but cry. The next day we went out to take a look. I was numb. It looked like burned-out Berlin."

While arson was quickly suspected, there have been no arrests. The cause remains unknown.

SHELTON AND OTHERS IN the movie and commercial film business now lament the new Old Tucson. Following the course set out by consultants, Diamond and Pitt left out Kansas Street, the soundstage and other components that are critical for movie and television productions.

"They oversized the courthouse, oversized the saloon, there are no shooting streets and they undersized everything else," Shelton said.
When Old Tucson reopened a visitors' center and gift shop, it sold ashes from the fire.

Even today, it's unclear exactly how much damage the fire did, in terms of finances. Insurance coverage, according to county records, was put at $5 million. The loss was first listed at $10 million, then $5 million. When Old Tucson reopened in 1997, then-General Manager Bob Kenniston boasted of a $13 million renovation. And in a recent editorial backing Old Tucson and condemning Huckelberry's actions, the Arizona Daily Star boosted the renovation to $18.5 million.

Yet when Old Tucson's longtime legal counsel, T. Patrick Griffin, approached the Board of Supervisors in 1996 to restyle the lease and to give its blessing to a Bank One loan, the figure cited was much less. Bank One was providing a $5.5 million construction loan, minutes from that Oct. 22, 1996 meeting show. Huckelberry, without correction from Griffin, said the "reconstruction budget, including design fees, is around $9.5 million. The insurance proceeds are $4 million and this is the balance."

Ever since the fire, Old Tucson's management and the county have been at odds over money. In 1996, supervisors approved a rent credit concession totaling $2.75 million. That infuriated Democrat Dan Eckstrom, who said at a July 16, 1996 meeting that the rent credit "is another form of corporate welfare."

At a subsequent meeting, Eckstrom said: "The point is very simple: The $2.75 million is equivalent to a loan." County audits earlier showed that Old Tucson "commingled" money that was supposed to go to building maintenance with other accounts.

Eckstrom, whose District 2 includes his native South Tucson and much of the southside, also bristled at the suggestion that Old Tucson's offer to provide 1,000 admissions for underprivileged kids was generous.

"Considering Old Tucson is open for approximately 360 days, on a most generous day Old Tucson would allow a little under three kids per day entrance to Old Tucson," Eckstrom said. "Is this something that shows social responsibility?"

But Eckstrom could pick up only a second, from then-Supervisor Raúl Grijalva, a Democrat. Republicans Ed Moore, Paul Marsh and Mike Boyd pushed through the changes Diamond and Pitt sought.

Eckstrom declined last week to say: "I told you so."

EVEN WITH HUCKELBERRY LOADING up and preparing to lock out Diamond's group, supervisors are skittish about ordering the two Dons to ride out. Their political influence is beguiling and overpowering.

Diamond's boys, Mangelsdorf (the CEO), Pollock (the vice president), and Griffin (the counsel) have been busy seeking a reprieve from the county bill. Business, they say, has taken a hit from the drop in tourism after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks and the gloomy economy.

Five weeks before Old Tucson fell into default, Mangelsdorf--who did his MBA thesis on Old Tucson--said in a memo to Diamond that part of Old Tucson's problem was that it was paying too much in base rent to the county. Further he wrote, while the accrued rent credit is $475,000, "Old Tucson Co. does not have the cash or the projects to spend $475,000."

Mangelsdorf has taken time to complain about the short notice given for the inspections that the county now performs. The county hired Gale Bundrick, a respected former high level county parks administrator, to do them. Bundrick listed more than 100 areas requiring repair and improvement, according to county records. They ranged from permanent protection for the John Wayne Museum to multiple roof repairs.

And Old Tucson has proposed novel--and rejected--invoices for reimbursement under the rent credit provision. Mangelsdorf wanted taxpayers to provide a subsidy of more than $13,000 for the administrative costs of listing rent-credit projects, county records show. The item was rejected, as was $4,150 for Old Tucson's acquisition of a 35-foot saguaro that experts say will not survive.

Rent to the county has dropped, since reopening, from $493,000 in 1997 to $335,000 last year. Gross sales have dropped from a pre-fire high of $8.46 million in 1994 to $6.1 million. Attendance--once enough to be second or third among Arizona attractions after the Grand Canyon and the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum--is down to 300,000 a year compared to the half-million it once drew.

None of that has caused Huckelberry to ease off the trigger.

"The Pima Air and Space Museum has had the highest attendance and revenue summer since their inception, and attendance and revenue at the Desert Museum was up this summer as well," Huckelberry told Griffin in a Sept. 25 letter.

Griffin pleaded for more county help. In a question that he split into 11 lines for emphasis, Griffin wrote: "Is there anything else Old Tucson can do that is: new, sensitive to the environment, Western themed, family oriented, makes you want to come back, reasonably priced, works in hot weather during the day, works in cold weather at nighttime, appeals to the locals, approved by the county?"

While Pollock makes appearances in which he alternately says Old Tucson is withholding rent because of slow business and to force the county to renegotiate or rebid the lease, Griffin in that Sept. 16 letter to the county lawyers said the Diamond-Pitt group "spent in the neighborhood of $10 million rebuilding Old Tucson and that was based on financial projection developed by theme park experts, scrutinized by the bank and reviewed by the county ..."

The letter goes on. "Just since the second half of 1998, the Old Tucson owners have advanced $1,720,817 of their own money to Old Tucson, and borrowed another $1.55 million to put in Old Tucson that they had to personally guarantee. That is in addition to the $3.5 million in existing bank debt. The bank has also been paid several million dollars."

But Pitt has acquired the Old Tucson loans originally made by Bank One. Now he is seeking ways to boost revenue.

According to a Sept. 30 memo that Pitt sent to Diamond, the attractions "still do not provide a draw during the May through September season, which in my opinion can only be satisfied with water elements and a water park utilization."

Tom Burke and Wendy Peterson, the deputy county attorneys handling the matter, said in response that they had "repeatedly and unequivocally stated to Pat Griffin and Donald Pitt that the county will not accept water rides, elements or features."

The matter is further complicated by statements from Huckelberry's inside man, Tom Moulton, the former Old Tucson executive now on the county payroll for $96,862 a year.

Moulton had advanced proposals for a "flume" and "log rolling" at Old Tucson.

He also drew a scolding from the county lawyers for perpetuating the theory that the county and Old Tucson could be business partners and that county officials could sit on the Old Tucson board.

In one settlement discussion, the county would put base rent at $50,000 a year, to be paid monthly, plus 10 percent of anything over $5 million in gross sales, with five-year adjustments according to the Consumer Price Index. Old Tucson would be confined to 120 acres, leaving the county with the 240-acre balance. Most important, the controversial rent credit for buildings would be scrapped--and the sound stage rebuilt using past rent and past rent credits.

If it fails, Huckelberry will have no choice but to draw down on Diamond and his boys.

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Old Tucson was rebuilt at the wrong scale and poorly designed. It's a town square surrounded by restaurants and souvenir shops, not an actual western street. A couple of the original buildings still survive, but they have been so disney-fied they hardly look western, and they're insufficient for shooting purposes. The brother town, Mescal situated north of the highway north by west of Benson, has not been maintained. The street is so delapidated and unsafe it costs more to stand the buildings back up than it does to shoot there. Plus there are only two good angles on the place, looking toward the mountain and off to the east. The other directions now have modern intrusions inching closer and closer. The new owners all but drove the movie business out of the state.

Richard

Thanks for posting these links.
More distractions to while away the time I should be working ... on something.

Richard

Thanks for posting these links.
More distractions to while away the time I should be working ... on something.

Richard