LITTLE ROCK — For 40 years, Arkansans have been irked by the mountains of True Grit.
In the 1969 film, 13,000-foot-tall Rocky Mountains stood in for the Ozark and Ouachita mountains of Arkansas and Oklahoma. That’s nearly five times the elevation of the tallest peak in Arkansas.
To Arkies and Okies, it just didn’t look right. It was like the difference between a Derringer and a .44-caliber Colt Dragoon.
And it’s about to happen again, although the mountains won’t look so out of place this time.
Joel and Ethan Coen plan to film a remake of True Grit next year. It will be shot primarily in Texas and New Mexico, according to reports, instead of Arkansas and Oklahoma,where the story was set.
“It’s too bad,” said Tom Dillard, head of special collections at the University of Arkansas library. “I do think we really have beautiful scenery to film and have it be appropriate to the story.”
“Ah, the snow-capped peaks around Fort Smith,” said Joe Glass, who was head of the Arkansas Film Commission for 15 years before retiring in 2008. “You probably haven’t seen them nestled in the aspen trees.”
In reality, Fort Smith isn’t cradled by large mountains - not even the Arkansas variety.
The original True Grit, starring John Wayne, was filmed primarily in the San Juan Mountains in Ouray County, Colo., a range that is part of the Rockies. The county has 12 peaks that are 13,000 feet or higher.
The reason the 1969 film was shot there was because producer Hal Wallis wanted to take advantage of the fall colors of the aspen trees, according to Duke: The Life and Image of John Wayne by Ronald L. Davis.
The reason the new movie will be filmed in Texas and New Mexico is because of snow and financial incentives, said Laura Grey, a location specialist with the Colorado Office of Film, Television & Media, which lost out as a location for the remake.Grey said the Coens plan to film in spring, and they want snow on the ground because they’re trying to stay true to the novel.
Bob Hudgins, director of the Texas Film Commission, said at least 60 percent of the movie will be filmed in Texas.
That percentage is required to receive the state’s maximum 17.5 percent rebate on production costs. Texas also has an existing crew base of about 50,000 state residents trained to work in film or commercials, he said.
Arkansas’ Legislature passed Act 816 this year providing a 15 percent overall rebate for film production costs in Arkansas - slightly behind Texas’ 17.5 percent - and an additional 10 percent rebate for the salaries of full-time Arkansas residents employed at jobs below the level of actors, directors, producers and writers.
The problem, Hudgins said, is Arkansas has few trained people to work on films, so crew members would have to be brought in from other states and wouldn’t qualify for the additional 10 percent rebate.
Oklahoma might get a reprieve.
Grey said part of the new True Grit may be filmed in Oklahoma and Utah. That information came from a location scout for the Coen brothers.
The production spent two days scouting locations in Arkansas, Grey said, but a dearth of springtime snow sent them farther west for filming sites.
“This is the movie business, so it’s never set,” she said. “They could turn around tomorrow and film it in Morocco. You never know.”
THE NOVEL
True Grit, published in 1968, is likely the most widely read novel by an Arkansan, Dillard said.
Charles Portis, the author, grew up in four towns in south Arkansas and has lived in Little Rock since the 1960s.
Asked if it would be a nice idea to film at least part of the movie in Arkansas, Portis said, “Yes, it would be. I don’t know why they’re not filming it in Arkansas. They haven’t discussed it with me. I think it would be better, but I don’t think it’s a big deal. They bought it.”
The book begins with an elderly Mattie Ross telling the story of an adventure she had in 1880, at age 14.
She left her home near Dardanelle for Fort Smith. There, she hired a one-eyed deputy U.S. marshal named Rooster Cogburn to help her track down her father’s killer in the Ouachita Mountains of Indian Territory. Wayne was 61 when the film was made.
Most of the film takes place in eastern Oklahoma. But to many Arkansans, it’s an Arkansas tale, emphasizing Christian pioneer ethics, a stern sense of frontier justice and a true grit for revenge that only an Arkansan could balance so well.
The Boston Globe called True Grit “a perfect novel.” But for Arkansans, it goes much deeper.
In True Grit, Portis has told a story of universal appeal to anyone who has pioneer kinfolk. This story is rooted in the Arkansas psyche, like a million other tales that have been erased by time and Dust Bowl winds. It’s a work of fiction, but we know it’s true. We know, at least, that something similar happened to one of our headstrong ancestors, but they are no longer here to tell the story. So we’ll let Charles Portis do that, and we’ll know Mattie Ross as one of our own.
Portis, who is somewhat of a recluse, has a cult following outside Arkansas and a devoted fan base within his home state. In an article for Esquire magazine, Ron Rosenbaum called Portis “our least-known great novelist,” both hilarious and profound.
Portis worked as a reporter for the Arkansas Gazette in 1959 and for the New York Herald-Tribune from 1960 through 1964. The last year, he also served as London bureau chief for the Herald-Tribune.
THE OLD MOVIE
True Grit is a classic Western novel. As for the1969 movie, “We managed to forget it,” Ethan Coen told the Toronto Sun.
“It’s not a very good movie, really,” Joel Coen told the Sun. “The novel is really fantastic. ... I think it’s a mediocre movie from a great book.”
Ne i t h e r C h r i s to p h e r Crane, the current director of the Arkansas Film Commission, nor the Coen brothers could be reached for comment for this article.
T h e 1 9 6 9 m o v i e c o - starred an impeccably coiffured Kim Darby and Glen Campbell. Darby, who appeared to be older than 14, played Mattie. Campbell, a native of Delight, played the Texas Ranger character LaBeouf.
The screenplay was written by Marguerite Roberts.
“There was a kind of beauty that was different from most Westerns,” John Wayne was quoted as saying in Davis’ biography. “My part was as beautifully written a thing as I’ve ever read. And the girl’s part was the best part I ever read in my whole life. That left poor Glen out there on a limb all by himself, which is too bad because a lot of the critics picked on him.”
Wayne won his only Oscar as best actor for his role in True Grit.
Glass said it wasn’t unusual to get phone calls from people wanting to shoot a movie in the same part of Arkansas where True Grit was filmed.
“I would tell them that was in west Arkansas, way out west,” said Glass.
“They do everything in the wrong place all the time for a variety of reasons,” said Glass. “Now it’s incentives.”
THE NEW MOVIE
The Coen brothers’ version of True Grit reportedly will feature Jeff Bridges as Rooster Cogburn, Matt Damon as LaBeouf and Josh Brolin as the murderer Tom Chaney. They’re still searching for a Mattie. Casting calls have been held throughout the South, including in Little Rock.
The Coen brothers said they plan to stick closer to Portis’ original book than the previous film.
They have been making films for more than 20 years. Their movies range from comedies such as O Brother, Where Art Thou? to thrillers like No Country for Old Men to harder-to-define movies like Fargo, Barton Fink and The Big Lebowski.
Filming movies in locations other than where the books were based is common.
Th e 19 9 7 n ove l Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier, for instance, is set in North Carolina, but the movie was filmed largely in the Carpathian Mountains of Romania.
Having heard that True Grit would film in Texas and New Mexico, residents of Oklahoma also were chapped.
“Any movie with the word ‘true’ in its title should have some locational verity, right? So when a remake of True Grit is done by Joeland Ethan Coen, shouldn’t it be filmed in Oklahoma?” a Nov. 25 editorial in the Oklahoman newspaper asked. “They seem to be drawing competitive state incentive programs like a weapon, the way Mattie Ross did in True Grit with every mention of her lawyer, J. Noble Daggett.”
INCENTIVES
Before Texas passed its new film law this year, the Lone Star state provided a 5 percent overall incentive, far less than most states, Hudgins said.
Arkansas was the first state to enact filming incentives in 1983, said Glass. Arkansas Code Annotated 26-4-206 provided a rebate of 5 percent of film production costs in Arkansas as long as $500,000 was spent in the state within a six month period or $1 million within a year.
That same year, A Soldier’s Story was the first movie to take advantage of what was then touted as “the Arkansas nickel” rebate.
Arkansas Code Annotated 15-4-2005 changed the rate in 1997 to cover all sales taxes - the 6 percent state sales tax, as well as city and county taxes. That law expired in 2007.
“I said, ‘At least we’ll get a lot of ink and everybody will be talking about us,’” Glass remembers of the 1983 law.
He was right. Other states began implementing incentives to lure film production companies.
Forty-three states now offer incentives for filming, upto 40 percent in Michigan, according to the Screen Actors Guild.
A major change in the Arkansas law is that tax breaks now are granted to production companies that spend at least $50,000 within six months, instead of the pervious $500,000.
“It’s a wonderful thing they’ve done, not just reinstating the incentive but getting it bumped to 15 percent,” Glass said. “Ours is really set up to help local film producers who will use local actors and crews. Our new incentive act is set up to encourage Arkansans. It’s not enough to lure True Grit.”
ARKANSAS’ MOUNTAINS
William Vesterman, an associate professor of English at Rutgers University in New Jersey, said the size of the mountains won’t matter to most people outside Arkansas and Oklahoma.
“I think Arkansas should have a proper pride in its setting, but one hill looks like another to me,” he said.
Vesterman teaches a seminar on Portis and Tom Wolfe, who worked with Portis at the Herald-Tribune.
Vesterman said Arkansas’ most impressive mountains are literary rather than literal.
“The physical location doesn’t matter so much,” he said. “The metaphysical location is more important. Portis ranks in the mountains of the literary world, as Tom Wolfe would say. Who cares about real estate when you have genius ?”
Front Section, Pages 1 on 12/27/2009