Lights! Camera! Arkansas!: From Broncho Billy to Billy Bob Thornton
Lights! Camera! Arkansas!: From to Bob Thornton. By Robert Cochran and Suzanne McCray. (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2015. Pp. ix, 109. Illustrations, bibliography, index. $24.95, paper.) Tell you what-that Boh Thornton is real deal, ain't he? -Walton Goggins, The AccountantAs they confess in opening paragraph, authors Robert Cochran and Suzanne McCray harbor no greater ambition for this slim volume than a first pass at surveying incursion of Arkansans upon Hollywood and Natural State's psychic imprint upon filmic plain. A catalog for Lights! Camera! Arkansas! exhibit mounted at Old State House Museum in Little Rock from 2013 to 2015, which Cochran curated, this companion treatise reads like a run-through for a future reference work, much as Our Own Sweet Sounds musical exhibitions of 1996 and 2003 spawned a similar field guide (authored by Cochran) which was, in turn, succeeded by Encyclopedia of Arkansas Music (2013). If along way, it manages to claw back some of regional identity usurped by state's showier neighbors-Texas, Tennessee, and Louisiana-then so much better. Embellished with a curated travelogue of period onesheets, lobby cards and (often signed) promotional stills presumably from exhibit, with a Brubaker's dozen of impressionistic portraits by Gary Patterson and Marion Barnes-like boardwalk caricatures run through a Howard Finster app-the end result could credibly share same universe as Oxford American or Garden & Gun magazine.For their part, Cochran and co-writer McCray (a vice provost at University of Arkansas), deep-dive film obsessives with time on their hands, seem to have erred on side of completism: Anyone who was born in Arkansas, who ever lived there, who passed through there briefly or escaped never to return; any film shot there, set there, or inspired by its fractious history-authentic or specious-there's a good chance you'll find a Made in Arkansas tag sewn into lining. Roger Corman shoots Bloody Mama in Yellville and Marion County, and produces Boxcar Bertha (directed by Martin Scorsese) and Fighting Mad (directed by Jonathan Demme) on location, and he's one of state's defining directors of '70s. Timothy Busfield (Elliott on thirtysomething) attends two years of high school in Conway, Jerry Van Dyke (Coach) buys a ranch in Hot Spring County, or George Takei (Mr. Sulu; elder statesman of Internet) clocks eight months in Rohwer Relocation Center in 1942, and suddenly they're native sons.And then .. . everybody's a critic. When authors aren't rolling our eyes at losers like The Monster and Stripper (starring Sleepy LaBeef), Chopper Chicks in Zombietown (with a young Bob Thornton), or the mostly wretched So Sad About Gloria (courtesy of '80s sitcom magnate Harry Thomason), they're tagging Little Rock-born David Gordon Green's Pineapple Express as vapid and demanding of Thornton, [H]ow does Bad Santa follow Sling BladeT' (pp. vii, 44, 68). By time they get to snarking about Fighting Mad, Demme's farm-based Jack, or using Levon Helm's Turkey Scratch provenance to weigh in on The Last Waltz, just to call out Scorsese's sycophancy and Robbie Robertson's narcissistic preening, you may be getting your own fighting mad on (p. 82).But these are quibbles. Any population of three million will statistically produce its own passel of movie stars and outlier geniuses, and erstwhile Land of Opportunity is no exception. The book is divided chronologically into four chapters (Silents to '30s, '40s/'50s, '60s/'70s and '80s to Present), plus a bonus chapter on documentaries. Therein, we learn of Gilbert Broncho Billy Anderson (bom Max Aronson in Little Rock), who parlayed a dual role in 1903's The Great Train Robbery into a careelas first movie cowboy, clocking over 150 serial appearances. (Clint Eastwood's Bronco updated both character and spelling. …