LAS VEGAS, N.M. (AP) - Romaine Fielding, the original auteur, came here to test the boundaries of an emerging medium.
Tom Mix, the original cowboy, established an American archetype that would endure for more than a century.
In 1913, Fielding arrived in the Meadow City and made 10 films over a few short months. Mix made at least 20 more in the San Miguel County railroad town in the fall of 1915.
The frontier was bustling, motion pictures were picking up steam, and, for a minute, Las Vegas, New Mexico, was the center of it all.
“This was the pioneering of the film industry,” says John Snyder, a Colorado-based Western historian and film aficionado.
In the vast scope of New Mexico history, Las Vegas’ brief turn as the moviemaking capital appears only as a footnote. But the Fielding and Mix movies - short, silent, black-and-white, many lost over time - imprinted this part of northeastern New Mexico in the collective consciousness as a definitive backdrop of the American West. Their Vegas stints are remembered well by film historians and film-inclined Las Vegas residents, and their legacy survives in film and television projects that continue to shoot in and around Las Vegas for some of the same reasons, not to mention state financial incentives for the industry.
In 1912, the same year that New Mexico became a state, Fielding was making movies in Silver City, in New Mexico’s southwestern corner. He visited Las Vegas at the invitation of a local business group and was warmly received in what was then a cosmopolitan Southwestern city. He liked the look, reported the Santa Fe New Mexican (https://bit.ly/2iLkprb).
“It was (Fielding’s) habit to go to a place, get the feel for it, make a couple movies and move on and look for a different kind of scenery,” said Elmo Baca, a Las Vegas history buff and owner of the Indigo Theatre near the plaza in old town Las Vegas.
Fielding did more than get the feel. He rented the entirety of the prominent downtown Plaza Hotel, renaming it Hotel Romaine. He recruited some 5,000 local extras for his mammoth production “The Golden God,” which depicted a futuristic class struggle set in 1950 and included an enormous battle scene that took 17 days to shoot, according to the New Mexico Film Office. (“The Golden God” reels were ultimately lost in a fire.)
A screenwriter colleague once wrote of Fielding, “He was unique. Repellent, yet fascinating; uncanny - often tender, appealing. His plays, if you saw him at his best, transpired in the open. They were ’Westerns,’ but unconventional ones.”
Fielding was indeed an innovative director even in the context of a relatively new medium, Baca said. He presented more nuance than white-hat-versus-black-hat, wrote Native characters as protagonists and was willing to take risks, Baca said, as in the morality play against big business and the military complex of “The Golden God.”
Mix, meanwhile, was on his way to becoming America’s first matinee idol. His biggest films, including a run of some 160 pictures in the 1920s, would come later in his career, but his time spent in Las Vegas was instrumental to his development as a writer and performer, Snyder said.
Mix, like Fielding, craved an element of authenticity in his pictures, Snyder said. Both found the real Western people and places they sought in Las Vegas, then an essential stop on the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway line. The area’s wide-open skies, framed by gently sloping mesas giving way to broad plains, seemed a proper setting for what would become archetypal Western stories about hard men amid the boundless American wilderness.
“(Mix) became a huge advocate of filming on location and filming Native Americans, filming people with Spanish heritage, as real people who deserved to be treated with dignity and be treated as part of the crews and the cast,” Snyder said. “(And) he had tremendous respect for real cowboys who could really ride and really shoot and really rope.”
Mix, in his trademark 10-gallon hat, is generally regarded as the first cowboy movie star. He was immortalized in the final lines of the 1993 Western Tombstone as an attendee who wept at Wyatt Earp’s funeral. His pictures became for many a vision of the frontier, said Jon Hendry, business agent of the New Mexico film workers union.
“Tom Mix pictures traveled all over the world,” Hendry said. “People in Europe saw that, saw the West, and said, ’I want to be there.’ Well, they wanted to be in Las Vegas, New Mexico; they just didn’t know that. . It’s an incredibly important place in the history of film.”
A century of vast change has come and gone, but the filmmaking appeal of Las Vegas is largely the same as in those silent black-and-white days. No two houses, and thus no two streets, look alike, said Kathy Hendrickson, who leads Las Vegas tours with Southwest Detours. The diversity of looks - old and new at once - is what has kept filmmakers coming back over time.
“We have such interesting architecture, we have mountains, we have plains, Victorian homes, adobes, all of it together,” Hendrickson said. “It’s got its own little quirky character.”
“With 900 buildings on the National Register (of Historic Places) and a focus on preservation, we to some degree still look a lot like we used to,” said Annette Velarde, community development director. “Not that we haven’t modernized, but preservation has kept that look and that appeal.”
The appeal touches more than just the filmmakers. Hendrickson recalled how she led a tour this summer for a man who had driven from Connecticut with his girlfriend to see the downtown Las Vegas filming locations of Red Dawn, the 1984 action flick starring Patrick Swayze. The man even brought khaki fatigues worn by characters in the film, changed into them, and posed for pictures on the veranda of the Castaneda Hotel, the backdrop of a climactic scene.
Whether Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper in “Easy Rider” (1969), the Sam Peckinpah-directed “Convoy” (1978), Matt Damon in “All the Pretty Horses” (2000), Simon Pegg and Nick Frost driving with “Paul” (2011) or the cult-hit neo-Western series “Longmire,” each entry in the Las Vegas canon has presented its own picture of the West, building on those early black-and-white foundations.
“You could really make a case that Las Vegas has made an interesting contribution to that (Western) genre,” Baca said. “And that all began with Fielding.”
“No Country for Old Men,” the Coen brothers’ 2006 adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s novel, won four Academy Awards, including best picture and best director. Hendry and others remember its scenery as identifiably Las Vegas.
“How many towns in the U.S. of that size have won an Oscar? Two? C’mon,” Hendry said. “With ’No Country For Old Men,’ the scenes you think of, the scenes in your mind, were all done in Las Vegas.”
Hendry thinks creating a historic overlay district, using money collected from location fees and permits, would be one way to preserve the city’s film history while drawing visitors to the town of 14,000.
“Put some signs up: This is where we shot Tom Mix movies, this is where we shot Convoy, Red Dawn, Speechless, Longmire - I could go on for hours,” Hendry said. “How cool would that be?”
Velarde says there’s a chance for a private entrepreneur to step in and make a tour a reality.
“The end goal is to have a working studio tour, because we really are one big film backdrop,” she said.
Kerry Loewen, meanwhile, is eager to show off the grandly refurbished Trolley Building, home to the media arts and technology department of New Mexico Highlands University. The gleaming facility, renovated at a cost of $8.2 million, opened in August. Could this space, with its professional-class computer labs, studios, green-screen room and more - and the students who populate it - someday mesh with the area’s film industry?
“Oh, it already has,” said Loewen, the department chairman.
The autumn production of “Making a Killing,” a detective drama starring Christopher Lloyd and Aida Turturro, brought a handful of film students to shadow professionals on set and hired some to serve as production and art assistants.
Patricia Chavez, a senior film student from Villanueva, a small community south of Las Vegas, said having the chance to assist professional set dressers was validation that she had chosen the right program; others she knew had gone to study film at the state’s flagship university in Albuquerque. “I learned how to stay out of the way, how to take direction,” she said, laughing. “How to think fast and how to ask questions. It was a great experience.”
There are currently 15 students in the undergraduate film track at Highlands, Loewen said. Of the new building, he said, “My view is: If you build it, they will come.”
Ever since the 1910s, they have been.
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Information from: The Santa Fe New Mexican, https://www.sfnewmexican.com
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