Yellowstone Kelly

Yellowstone Kelly, a Western filmed in Sedona in 1959, was a milestone experiment in the way Hollywood studios looked at television. By casting three leading men from hot TV series, they hoped to learn if fans would pay to see the stars they welcomed into their living rooms up on the big screen. They did.

The ‘50s were indelibly marked by the Cold War, but for Hollywood's big movie studios in the early part of the decade the growling bear threatening their way of life wasn't Russia – it was television. It hadn't escaped the studios' attention that as TV ownership rose, movie attendance fell. And indeed, by 1960, 87.3 percent of U.S. households would have at least one TV set.

What the major studios failed to grasp, at first, was the potentially blockbuster revenue television could generate for them. Focused on its threat, they missed the fact that TV was also a huge new market – and promotional tool – for studio product. Television stations had hours of airtime to fill, and found viewers had a hankering for old "B" westerns. By mid-decade, studios were doing nicely selling broadcast rights to their pre-1948 films, creating a new legion of fans for old-timers such as Hopalong Cassidy, Roy Rogers and Gene Autry. Yellowstone Kelly, the last of the 22 films in the '50s to show off Sedona's landscape, was an attempt to spin this formula on its head – take three contemporary stars (Clint Walker, Edward Byrnes and John Russell) who made their names on TV and see if they in turn could now lasso audiences into theatres for new big-screen profits.

Yellowstone Kelly (played by Walker) was a real historical figure, a Shakespeare-quoting Indian fighter, trapper and scout. Born in New York, Luther Sage Kelly fought in the Civil War, then headed west to trap and hunt along the Yellowstone River in Montana, where he learned the Sioux language. Kelly scouted along the geyser basin hot springs, known today as Yellowstone Park, for George Forsyth in 1873, and later resumed his military career in Alaska and the Philippines before retiring (with the rank of Major) to California.

Text © 2006 Sedona Monthly

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