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PrintFade in: Guthrie, exterior
A couple of forthcoming motion pictures were partially shot in this picturesque Oklahoma town over the last few months.
Given its lovely, old-timey downtown — with brick streets, Victorian architecture and (sorry if this sounds too cornball, but hang me; it’s true) copious frontier charm — it isn’t surprising that Guthrie, Okla., has been used as a shooting location for Hollywood movies. What might be surprising is how often this happens.
Off the cuff, I can think of three movies that were shot there, at least in part: “Rain Man,” “Twister” and “My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys” (this last one is recommended because it stars the always-outstanding cowboy actor Ben Johnson).
Interesting to see that, over the summer months, two other films — both of which look promising (at the outset, anyway), and both of which have as their origins very good books — did some significant filming in and around Guthrie, a community of about 10,000 just outside Oklahoma City.
These are “The Killer Inside Me” and “You Can’t Win.” Filming for the former wrapped in early July, and filming for the latter began a couple of weeks later.
“The Killer Inside Me,” a moderately budgeted-for-Hollywood crime thriller starring Casey Affleck, Kate Hudson, Jessica Alba, Bill Pullman and Ned Beatty, was actually filmed in Guthrie, OKC, Cordell, Tulsa and Enid (along with some shooting in New Mexico).
With names like those in the cast, the list of local luminaries who stopped by to visit the set of this production at various points included Gov. Brad Henry and Tulsa Mayor Kathy Taylor.
But Guthrie, along with all the other Oklahoma locales cited above, was just a backdrop, not a literal location. Like the famous 1952 pulp novel (with the same title) on which it’s based, “The Killer Inside Me” is actually set in west Texas. This novel is by Oklahoma native Jim Thompson, a prolific-yet-grim-spirited author for whose work the adjective “psycho-noir” might have been invented. (Other Thompson novels later made into hit films include “The Grifters” and “The Getaway.” The second title is another movie featuring the aforesaid Ben Johnson; he was also from the Sooner State.)
The other film at hand, “You Can’t Win,” had just begun shooting as this column was completed. At that time, producers for “You Can’t Win” were also scouting various locations in southeastern Oklahoma.
“You Can’t Win” is likewise based on a book with the same title. In this case, it’s the 1926 autobiography of a man named Jack Black — not the hero of “School of Rock” and “Shallow Hal,” mind you, but a professional burglar and longtime hobo who hopped freight trains and escaped prisons from coast to coast in the late-19th and early-20th centuries. He later wrote a play based on his memoir and was also briefly employed as a screenwriter for MGM.
Long on underworld shenanigans and full of hard-luck characters, Black’s book — a collection of autobiographical sketches that began life as a series of newspaper columns — actually argues for honor among thieves. Black saw himself, rightly, as reformed; his book urges all criminals to see the error of their ways, while also depicting the nation’s prisons as pointless (and even lawless) institutions.
Taking its thematic cue from the Progressive politics of Black’s heyday, “You Can’t Win” was quite the exposé — the book is thought to have led to changing views among Americans concerning prisoners’ rights. It was also, by the by, especially cherished by the maverick Beat novelist William S. Burroughs.
Although production for this film is based in Guthrie, as has been reported by the Oklahoma Film & Music Office, “You Can’t Win” draws upon a cast, crew and extras from throughout Oklahoma.
I’m happy to add that the crew for “The Killer Inside Me” largely comprised Oklahomans as well. Eighty percent of ’em, in fact.
The activist inside Jessica Alba
Since we’re on the subject, “The Killer Inside Me” is the film that the lovely Jessica Alba (who plays a prostitute in said movie, incidentally) was working on when she encountered all that legal unpleasantness while visiting our state. In brief, and in case you missed it, after filming for this project in Guthrie was concluded, the set moved to downtown OKC. It was there, in early June, whereupon Alba was caught, well, vandalizing. That is, her image was captured by a digital-camera-wielding blogger as she plastered 3-foot-tall photographic posters of sharks (yes, sharks) on various city-owned structures. Alba apologized in a statement released to the media; she was trying to bring attention to the decreasing population of great white sharks. The OKC police did not press charges. And the wonderful headline at the Internet Movie Database Web site that drew my attention to all this went like so: “Jessica Alba Jumps the Shark in Oklahoma.”
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Scott Gregory hosts “All This Jazz” on Public Radio 89.5 KWGS, where he also serves as the producer and editor of “Studio Tulsa.”
