Lake Powell, Arizona -- As the tour boat Ethel G. glides
from Arizona into Utah along Lake Powell, our navigator and guide
Bob alerts his passengers.
"That red butte way over there," he says, pointing to the
right, "that's Castle Rock. It was Mt. Sinai in The Greatest Story
Ever Told." Another tour boat, the Canyon King, he adds, was an
"extra" in Broken Arrow.
On a cool, rainy morning, a passenger finds it easy to let
thoughts drift to the movies. For decades, calls of "Action!"
have echoed across Lake Powell and through the town of Page on
its Arizona shore. In a state that Hollywood has virtually co-opted
as a sound stage for scores of films and commercials, Page stands
out as an unofficial museum of filmmaking in the West.
You can see the valley that turned into the Planet Of The
Apes and the buttes that became background to the Flintstone film,
Viva Rock Vegas.
"Location people come here and they go 'Wow!' " Bob explains.
Their reaction is understandable. Lake Powell, with its
402 square km of emerald waters, its deep rust buttes, its Forbidden
Canyon and its Gunsight Bay, seems made to order.
"The presence of this immense body of water, in the middle
of an other worldly sandstone environment, makes such an impact
on the viewer," says Steve Ward, who represents the Lake Powell
Film Commission.
But until the late '50s, Page and Lake Powell did not even
exist. On the site of the Lake was Glen Canyon, where the Colorado
River flowed through a terrain many felt rivalled that of nearby
Grand Canyon.
Two films preserve images of the old canyon. In 1965, director
George Stevens seized on the location's scenic possibilities for
The Greatest Story Ever Told.
Three years later, Charlton Heston, who in Stevens' film
had waded into the Colorado as John the Baptist, returned to shoot
Planet Of The Apes.
In 1957, over the objections of some conservationists, the
U. S. Department of Reclamation began building the giant Glen
Canyon dam, turning the trickling Colorado into Lake Powell with
enough water to cover Pennsylvania a foot deep. A resort offering
fishing, swimming and boating grew up at the edge of the Lake.
Page blossomed to become one of the top-rated small towns in the
U.S. And filmmaking flourished.
Clint Eastwood came for The Outlaw Josey Wales. Harrison
Ford came as Indiana Jones searching for the Temple of Doom. Superman
flew in three times. But the most spectacular shoot occurred in
1994 when Warner Bros. erected a fiercely authentic, $1-million
Western street set on the shores of Lake Powell for Maverick.
GUIDE JESSE Allan shows visitors
where Broken Arrow was shot in Antelope Canyon.
Ward recalls how reverently Maverick director Richard Donnor
treated the Page landscape. "If someone so much as stomped out
a cigarette butt on the beach," Ward says, "he was let go."
"It's all very good business," comments Joan Stavely, of
Page's Chamber of Commerce. "A commercial shoot can bring in $100,000,
and we do 70 commercials a year."
Stavely and her family have been part of the Page film scene
for years. Though she was only a child at the time, she vividly
recalls the day John Ford staged a cavalry procession in nearby
Kayenta.
"I was crazy about horses," she remembers, "and I kept pestering
my mother to let me ride one of the beautiful ones they'd brought
in. Finally Ford growled, 'Get that blankety blank horse over
here and take this kid for a blankety blank ride.' " A few years
later she learned the tall stranger had been John Wayne.
Another favourite story concerns an arrogant film star who
brought his entourage into Page's popular Zapata's Mexican Restaurant.
Finding every seat taken, the star offered to buy the dinners
out from under the diners. The manager said no.
"Do you know who I am?" the actor shouted, red-faced. The
scene escalated into a High Noon standoff. Then, in a pointed
speech audible throughout the hushed dining room, the manager
steadfastly refused to let Hollywood upstage Page. He brought
down the house.
Bouncing along in a van down a dusty trail to Antelope Canyon,
just outside of town, guide Jesse Allan rubs the white stubble
on his jolly round face and tells about how crews hauled banks
of lights into the 37 metre canyon, that was hard going he said.
Rock formations in Lake Powell. 
GUIDE JESSE Allan shows visitors
where Broken Arrow was shot in Antelope Canyon.