Written by Jeremy Alford
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November 2009. How cinematic trickery transforms our beloved Louisiana into something else—and often somewhere else.
WEB EXTRA: Click here to see photos from the Louisiana set of My Own Love Song, starring Renée Zellwegger and Forest Whitaker.
The first narrative feature film shot and produced in Louisiana had nothing whatsoever to do with Louisiana. It was 1908 and William Selig, a Chicago magician-turned-movie mogul, was moving around the country and shooting in far-flung locales in an effort to outrun Thomas Edison. And Selig wasn’t the only one—Edison, true to form, was completely paranoid of anyone else using celluloid film to create moving pictures since he partly invented the process and his lawyers were filing suit again anyone infringing on his patent.
New Orleans surfaced as a safe haven, like it often has for everyone from pirates to gangsters, and Selig set up a fly-by-night production company in the Big Easy to shoot a single-reel version of the Faust legend entitled “Mephisto and the Maiden.” It’s a classic German tale where the protagonist makes a pact with the devil in exchange for knowledge, but in the 1908 version, the trade off was for two hours with a particular female character.
At the time, south Louisiana was viewed as being among the major American regions that could potentially become a hub for the burgeoning motion picture industry. But a number of factors ranging from weather to politics pushed that dream out of the frame. Instead, the Bayou State had to settle for brief glimpses of starlets and only samplings of life on the set—until recent years, that is, which have given birth to a number of aggressive film tax credits to revitalize interest in Louisiana.
Unbeknownst to Selig and his team, they created a foundation for movies that are actually shot in Louisiana, but appear on the screen as somewhere else. Some folks in the industry call it “doubling,” although you could as easily dub it cheating. For instance, some location scouts swear by a small stretch along Baronne Street in New Orleans that can stand in for a New York City from just the right angle, or a nearby alley that can travel back in time after a few clotheslines are thrown up to mask air conditioners.
In short, it’s that proverbial movie magic we hear so much about; it’s the ability to visually transform a place you’ve seen countless times in the flesh, but recognize it as something and somewhere else as you sit in the darkness of a theater or your living room.
Nowhere else is this better exemplified than in the 1917 version of Tarzan of the Apes, which was partly filmed in Morgan City. It was a watershed moment not only for Louisiana film history, but also national cinema, as this Tarzan feature was among the first movies ever to gross more than a million dollars at the box office. The Atchafalaya swamp served as Tarzan’s jungle and more than three hundred locals were hired on as extras—read: cannibals—for a daily rate of $1.75 each.
The original Tarzan flick left such a footprint, in fact, that Bossier City producer Al Bohl is working on a documentary set for release in 2011. He says the silent motion picture is a fascinating story “with more layers than an onion.” Live apes were used for the shoot and many were left behind when the film wrapped—that nugget alone got Bohl hooked. He says his documentary, entitled Tarzan: Lord of the Louisiana Jungle, hopes to not only find out if there were really monkeys running around the bayous, but also if a real lion was killed on screen (a popular myth).
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