By Phil Roberts
In the 1950s, a celebrated veteran in the entertainment business wrote about his memories of Wyoming in his autobiography. He was Cecil B. DeMille, pioneer motion picture producer/director.
DeMille rode trains and stagecoaches throughout the West in the late 19th century with a traveling theater company. The “opera houses” in Wyoming along the Union Pacific line were often on the troupe’s circuit. The best known actors of the age stopped at those places, including stage actors Junius Booth, Harry Lauder, and Sarah Bernhardt. Comedians Buster Keaton, Groucho Marx and W. C. Fields appeared on stage in Wyoming in the age of “vaudeville.”
Motion pictures were coming on the scene. DeMille decided to invest in a production company. The firm holding the patents to movie equipment told him he could purchase what was needed for film-making only if he did not make the pictures on the East Coast. He promised he would go elsewhere, but he had trouble raising sufficient capital to purchase the Edison-made equipment.
While he was waiting for bank loans to come through, he found a likely script for a silent movie to be made on location. It was called “The Squaw Man” and told the story of a fur trapper who made his home among the Indians in what is now Wyoming. DeMille wrote that he remembered Wyoming and visualized making the film in the Laramie area.
Months passed and finally, in the early fall, the bank loans came through enabling DeMille to buy the equipment, hire a cast and crew, and arrange train transportation for the entire operation. He said he knew that winter probably was setting in around Laramie.
Where, in the country, is there landscape like there, but in a warmer climate? DeMille decided it would be Flagstaff, Arizona. He hadn’t realized that Flagstaff’s elevation was nearly as high as Laramie’s and the yearly snowfall average exceeded that of the Wyoming town.
When DeMille and the crew arrived at the station platform in Flagstaff, snow was falling. The young producer decided he’d have to film elsewhere, put the crew back on the train and went into debt on tickets to Los Angeles.
There, he had no place to set up operations so he consulted the classified ads in the newspaper. One place appealed to him–a “ranch” featuring a big red barn on the property. It was near the little village of Hollywood.
And the rest is history…
One can only imagine had the bank loan for DeMille been approved sooner. Might he have set up permanent operations in Wyoming? Might people now be singing, “Hooray for Laramie!” and referring to the Wyoming town as the “movie capital of the world”?