<Begin Segment 18>

KL: Do you have other kids besides Gary and Martin?

KP: No.

KL: That would indicate a pretty powerful connection to this place and the people here, that John Wayne would come when he was dying to say goodbye.

KP: Yes. But loved Lone Pine because he worked up here a lot, and he made quite a few movies up here. So I found out more about that after the film festival started.

KL: Tell us about that. That's a nice segue. [Laughs]

KP: Nice segue into the film festival?

KL: Yeah, we'll make you a ranger, that was an excellent transition.

KP: Twenty-seven years ago, twenty-six years ago almost, I started the... I had the idea for the film festival, for a film festival. I was part of an art group that was going to do a big festival at the Lone Pine Park. And I thought about having a film festival because I had seen posters in the Sportsmen Cafe in Lone Pine at the stoplight, he had movie posters in there. So I thought, well, I know that movies worked up here, so why can't we have a little film festival? And also I had the idea to have a marker put at Movie Road, one of those white stones with a marker on it, as a historical marker that so many movies were made on Movie Road, and in the Alabama Hills that I remembered. Because when I was seven, Gunga Din was made in the Alabama Hills, and my sister and I got to go up there and see the elephants, actually roaming around in the Alabama Hills, in "our hills," there were actually elephants, and we were so thrilled to get to actually see elephants. Then I remembered that, so I contacted the man from the restaurant and asked him where he got all these posters, and he said in L.A. on Sunset Boulevard. So I talked to the art group and I said, "Would it be all right if we had a little film festival and maybe a dedication at Movie Road along with the arts festival?" And they said sure, that would be great. Because October is usually good weather, October, Columbus Day weekend. So I thought that would be a good weekend for us, too. I had no idea what a film festival was, none. [Laughs] I therefore went ahead and went to Sunset Boulevard and found all these folders with pictures of our mountains and the hills with movie stars in 'em. And I said, "This is too much, we definitely have to do a film festival." And I was going to use those to decorate motel rooms, because we were doing another twenty units and I wanted to put the pictures in the rooms and make a note about the stars that had actually worked up here and stayed at the motel. Where was I now? I'm lost. [Laughs]

KL: You went down to get those posters.

KP: We went for the posters, okay.

KL: And you were kind of working on planning the festival.

KP: Yeah. Well, we came back, and I said, "I have all these pictures, and I'd like to have somebody come and dedicate this stone marker at Movie Road." And he said, "I have a pheasant hunting club down at Sage Flat, and I can get Roy Rogers to come." So he called Roy.

KL: Who said that?

KP: The man that had the restaurant, Easton. And he said, "I've got Roy coming, you just tell me when in the fall," and I said, "Well, we're already kind of thinking of October, Columbus Day weekend." And he said, "He can come, he'll be there to dedicate your plaque in the Alabama Hills at Movie Road, and that'll be part of the film festival." And so then I found out that Dave Holland had been writing this book On Location in Lone Pine, and he had been researching it for twenty years about all the movies that were made in Alabama and Lone Pine and the area. And so I met him, and he and I hit it off. He said to me, "Do you know how to do a film festival?" And I said, "Absolutely not." [Laughs] So we put little stickers on the wall in my dining room for a two-day weekend film festival, and he said, "I want to do tours, and we always do panels, and of course the most important thing is movies." We'll show movies, which most film festivals are movies, but the beauty of our film festival is we have the Alabama Hills that was used, and they're right here, and people can go on tour up there and play Cowboy and Indians, which was ideal. And then he thought about the buses from Mammoth to be used for that part of it. So the first year I was the director until I realized it was insane, and it was too much for me as a grandmother with a grandchild that I was helping raise at the time. And I told Dave Holland he had to be director, which he was for about six years or seven years after that. But we didn't think that the film festival would go on that long. It's still going on, and we're going in our twenty-fifth year coming up soon.

KL: When did you know it would continue?

KP: Well, I found out that there were fans all over the world of our movies, and they loved coming back and playing Cowboy and Indians in the rocks and at the Portals and all around. And they just encouraged us to continue doing it. And we added another day, and now we're adding another day this year with the concert on Thursday night instead of Friday night. So that's expanding us for another day, which is really hard to do with the volunteers. We have to have volunteers do everything. So then the museum came, segued out of that.

KL: Good job, good job. I wanted to hear about the relationship between the two.

KP: Well, it was, what, seven, eight years ago that Jim Rogers of NBC TV affiliates in Las Vegas had heard about the film festival, and he came and he loved it, because he loved the old Westerns because of the family values. He loved the family values involved in the old Westerns, and he wanted to see us have a museum to go on from our film festival. So he met with a few of us in Lone Pine and he offered to build a museum. But we had to get the land to do it.

KL: You said he really valued, he really appreciated the family values in the Western movies. Did he ever elaborate on what those were and sort of how he saw them?

KP: Well, usually, especially in the early movies, usually the good guys win at the end of it. The good guys win, and Roy stood up for... Roy was a strong Christian gentleman, and he did come for the dedication that fall, and dedicated our plaque at the Movie Road. And his son and his grandson, they all three came, and then they went to the Pheasant Club after that. But he always stood, he had a code, code of conduct, and so did Gene Autry, they had their kids clubs, and they had these code of conduct which was all family values. Do the right thing, take care of your neighbors, take care of your, take care of the weak people, do all these things, the right thing, and be honest. Of course, they had guns, they shot 'em once in a while. But you didn't see a lot of blood. You didn't see a lot of blood at all, thank goodness. So that's what he was interested in, and he, most of the things in the museum are parts of his collection.

[Narrator note: My husband Raymond Powell continued his flying career in Cessna 250s and 180 small planes flying locally for Bob Whites Flying Service for about 20 years. He flew tourists into the Sierra Mt. landing strips mostly the Whites tent camp at Tunnel meadows air strip. He also flew for the Forest Service on snow surveys and flew business people to meetings in cities in the West. Later on we had our own plane and flew all over the West ourselves to Best Western meetings, etc.]

<End Segment 18> - Copyright © 2013 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.