Indiana Jones and Iron Man: location, location, location

by Matthew Jaffe, Sunset senior writer

We moved into the summer movie season this weekend and as usual the West is making cameos as every locale from Afghanistan to the Amazon. Even in an era of increasingly sophisticated computer generated effects, nothing beats location shooting, as two of the year’s biggest movies, Iron Man and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull are proving. (For a look at some of these and other film locations, check out Vacation On Location at fandango.com.)

Living in SoCal, I’ve grown accustomed to seeing places I know pop up on screen, even in comic book movies such as Iron Man.  Movies always require a certain suspension of disbelief, but this one a bit more so than usual thanks to its use of familiar locations.

Tony Stark’s mansion for example was computer generated then plopped down on one of my favorite coastal spots, Malibu’s Point Dume— which luckily has stayed mostly free of such architectural megalomania. There are key scenes at Walt Disney Concert Hall, a building that managed to look every bit as futuristic as Tony’s home, while the Alabama Hills and the Eastern Sierra near Lone Pine stood in (and convincingly) for Afghanistan.

Along with Kanab, Utah and Monument Valley on the Arizona-Utah border, Lone Pine is one of several remote spots around the West with a long movie tradition. Filmmaking in this High Desert Hollywood dates to the 1920s and the stark landscape has appeared in numerous westerns, as well as in epics ranging from Gunga Din to Gladiator.

Each October, the community hosts the Lone Pine Film Festival, which features screenings and tours of movie locations, including a special guided trip, Iron Man and Beyond, that will take visitors out to sites used in the film. The Lone Pine Film History Museum (which has a new Iron Man exhibit) also offers an excellent self-guided tour brochure with ten stops in the Alabama Hills along what has come to be known as Movie Road.

Indiana Jones also made extensive use of western landscapes. The movie opens in Nevada, which is actually played by New Mexico’s Ghost Ranch northwest of Santa Fe. With appearances in 3:10 To Yuma and The Missing, Ghost Ranch has emerged as a go-to filming location in recent years. Then again, Steven Spielberg, Ron Howard et al have nothing on artist Georgia O’Keeffe; she moved to the area in the 1930s and eventually lived for 50 years around Ghost Ranch and Abiquiu.

The landscape became synonymous with her art, and she described it as “perfectly mad looking country—hills and cliffs and washes too crazy to imagine all thrown up into the air by God and let tumble where they would. It was certainly as spectacular as anything I’ve ever seen—and that was pretty good.”

The other major location for Indiana Jones is the Puna District on the Big Island south of Hilo. Spielberg used the dense jungles of this, the wet side of the Big Island, during a chase scene that ranks with the best in the Jones series. The swinging vines and chaotic thickets of albizzia and wild guava are the botanical opposite of the open high desert expanses of Ghost Ranch. It helps give the movie the geographic sweep that viewers have come to expect in the Indiana Jones films and is a reminder of what Hollywood has known for generations: to see the world, all you have to do is get out and explore Sunset’s West.

(Movie Stills copyright Paramount Pictures)

Utah’s best ice cream sundaes

By Peter Fish, Sunset Editor-at-Large

Here are three reasons to go to Logan, Utah.

1. It’s right on U.S. 89.
The most direct route between Salt Lake City and Yellowstone.   

2. Prettiest town of any size in Utah.
All around it are green mountains and green pastures—Cache Valley is a famous dairy region. Downtown Logan’s Main Street is lined with nicely spruced-up early 20th century buildings; the older residential streets have beautiful craftsman bungalows sitting primly beneath cottonwood trees.

3. The Bluebird Cafe
Reasons one and two are self-explanatory. As for reason 3, The Bluebird Cafe has been in Logan since 1914, and it’s just what a small-town cafe should be: A cool retreat where shiny chrome stools are arrayed in front of a long marble counter and your biggest dilemma is deciding which ice cream sundae to order.  (The Bluebird has a regular cafe menu too but really, you want to go here for ice cream.)  I chose a simple hot fudge and it was perfect--not enormous but at $3.95 a good value. In the “interesting but not entirely successful” category was the accompanying soft drink, an old-fashioned concoction called an Ironport that tasted a little like cherry soda mixed with bitters.  Bluebird Cafe, 19 N Main St., Logan; (435) 752-3155.

Book report: Salt Lake City

By Peter Fish, Sunset Editor-at-Large

Sam Weller’s Zion Bookstore is to Salt Lake City what Powell’s is to Portland--essential, irreplaceable, wonderful. It’s been there a long time (since 1929) and has woven itself into the city’s history--enviro writer Terry Tempest Williams supposedly met her husband while both worked there. What I like about it most—along with its beautiful pressed tin ceilings—is that it has the books you know you want and also the books you don’t know you want until you see them. For me, that second kind of encounter usually occurs in Sam Weller’s big section of books about the West, where you find items like Uncle Sam’s Camels, the saga of the U.S. Army’s 19th century effort to replace Army mules with, well, Army camels in the desert southwest.   A relative newcomer is the Coffee Garden, the bookstore’s caffeinated corner where you can get lattes and muffins and sit reading what you’ve just bought.  Which could be In Style or Sports Illustrated but which was in my case Uncle Sam’s Camels. Here’s my equation: cappuccino + camels = pleasure.

The real Speed Racer...in Utah

By Peter Fish, Sunset Editor-at-Large

Speed Racer may be playing at every multiplex in the universe. But in Moab, Utah, a terrific new photography show honors the real speed racers--the daredevil drivers of Speed Week on Utah’s Bonneville Salt Flats, where countless land speed records have been set. San Francisco-based photographer Richard Morgenstein has spent over a decade hanging out at Speed Week, and he catches the saline, surreal scene with beautiful precision. His show is up at Moab Art Works through May, and if you’re traveling Utah, it’s worth making a detour to see. Go Speed Racers, GO!

The art of the West: Minerva Teichert in Provo

By Peter Fish, Sunset editor-at-large

A couple of years ago I was visiting Maynard Dixon’s studio in Southern Utah when I learned about another Utah artist. A woman I had never heard of. Minerva Teichert.  She was, I was advised, as remarkable an artist as Dixon was. She had as remarkable a story. 

Both these things are true, as you can see yourself if you visit Brigham Young University Museum of Art’s exhibit, Minerva Teichert: Pageants in Paint, running in Provo through May.

Teichert’s life seems to have been taken from a novel: she’s a cousin to Willa Cather’s Thea Kronborg, or Wallace Stegner’s Susan Ward—gifted women trying to create beauty in the wilderness. Born in 1888, she grew up on a homestead in Idaho, second child in a Mormon family of 10. She began sketching in charcoal at age 4. By 14 she was studying art in San Francisco; a few years later she traveled east to study at the Chicago Arts Institute, and finally at the Arts Student League in New York City.

You would give almost anything to know just how the ranch-raised girl dealt with the noise, the crowds, the grimy energy of early 20th century Manhattan. We know that she performed rope tricks and Native American dances to help pay her tuition.  And that Robert Henri, among the artists who exhibited at the scandalous Armory Show of 1913, placed her among his very best students—high praise considering that his other students included Edward Hopper and Rockwell Kent.  “Miss Idaho,” he referred to her.

If Miss Idaho had stayed East perhaps she would have become part of Henri’s American avante garde. But she didn’t. The West called her home, as did her Mormon faith. She returned to marry a Wyoming rancher named Herman Teichert.

But the art didn’t end. For the rest of her long life she painted, painted, ranch scenes, murals illustrating the Book of Mormon, all of them done in a tiny studio in a ranch house near Cokeville, Wyoming. While she earned considerable acclaim within the world of the LDS church, she was ignored outside it. Now that’s beginning to change. Which is as it should be, as you see when you wander through the BYU exhibit.  Teichert is an original: a woman who throughout her life chose her own paths and made them blossom for her, the blossoming visible on almost every canvas. 

ABOVE: Minerva Teichert, Indian Basket and Pottery Makers, c. 1935, Oil on canvas, 72 x 98 in., Private Collection.

TOP: Minerva Teichert, Herding Cattle Across the River, 1956, Oil on canvas, 48 x 72 in., Stark Museum of Art, Orange, Texas, 31.260/5.