Little Hollywood: Over One Hundred Films in a Canyon Town
Near Kanab, Utah
Kanab sits at the edge of a landscape that Hollywood could not invent. Red sandstone cliffs rise hundreds of feet above the valley. The Vermilion Cliffs burn orange in afternoon light to the southeast. Coral Pink Sand Dunes shimmer to the northwest. Almost everywhere, the terrain looks so perfectly cinematic that directors who came here once tended to come back.
The film history of Kanab began in nineteen twenty-four, when the silent-film cowboy Tom Mix arrived to shoot a Western called Deadwood Coach, bringing his horse Tony the Wonder Horse and a crew that needed authentic desert scenery the studio backlots could not replicate. Mix was one of the biggest stars of the silent era, and his presence in Kanab put the town on the Hollywood map. More filmmakers followed. By the time director William Wellman arrived in Kane County during the nineteen forties to shoot a film about Buffalo Bill, he described the area as a little Hollywood all its own, and the nickname stuck.
Over the following decades, Kanab became one of the most frequently used film locations in the country. More than one hundred feature films and television productions have been shot in and around this town of roughly forty-seven hundred people. Among the landmark films are Clint Eastwood's The Outlaw Josey Wales, the Frank Sinatra western Sergeants Three, and episodes of Gunsmoke, The Lone Ranger, Lassie, Wagon Train, and Planet of the Apes. The landscape appeared in productions spanning every decade from the nineteen twenties to the present, because the Vermilion Cliffs and the canyon walls around Kanab don't go out of style.
The Little Hollywood Museum at the edge of town is a free, nonprofit institution dedicated to preserving the sets, photographs, and memorabilia from this era. Original building facades and props from various productions remain on display. Some of the film locations are still visible today in Johnson Canyon and along the road to the Paria ghost town east of town. In Kanab, the Western is not nostalgia. It is a form of local history.
