Last year, a grant from the Southwest Border Cultures Institute gave a boost to Dr. Julia Smith’s efforts to restore and digitize the films of the late Orville Wanzer, who was an NMSU professor and pioneering filmmaker from the 60s, 70s, and 80s whose influence helped shape the modern Western. Scott Brocato recently spoke with Dr. Julia Smith, a filmmaker and former NMSU professor of English and Gender & Sexuality Studies, about Orville Wanzer and her efforts to preserve his film legacy.
Scott Brocato:
Your project is about Orville Wanzer (Smith's forthcoming documentary, "Birth of the Acid Western"). Who was he? Tell us about him.
Dr. Julia Smith:
Orville Wanzer was a NMSU film professor who came here in 1959 to teach English from Miami University after serving in the Korean War with the Navy, and during that time he was a projectionist and worked on film cameras. And before that, he grew up in the streets of Brooklyn, where he told me in one of his last recorded interviews that he was "movie made.” And the movies really influenced, and cultivated in a lot of ways, his life.
Scott Brocato:
You're in the process now of restoring and digitizing his films. When and why did you become interested in doing that?
Dr. Julia Smith:
It was a kind of lightning strike moment where I had come here shortly after I got my PhD. I had gotten a PhD very much in film studies and studies, with an emphasis on film and gender and sexuality studies as well. And I was adjuncting here in English teaching a film course, “Film As Art”. And I believe that was actually the original title of Wanzer's film as art class that he started teaching here in 1959, in addition to the campus film society.
I came across this because I am a nerd and was by the archives. It was Thanksgiving break, and I went upstairs to look at an MFA thesis from somebody who I knew well when I got my master's in literature here as a grad student. Anyway, I read this, but what happened there was not that this MFA story was that interesting, but meeting Dennis Daily, the head archivist at the Rio Grande Historical collections, who found out I was teaching film, starts talking to me about this film professor who made...he described it as a “vampire western”. And so that immediately, like, perked my interest, because I'm very interested in outsider art and cinema that's made outside of the contrivances of the Hollywood machine, as Orville Wanzer called it. It just piqued my interest. I found out there's all these reels in there, no one knows what they are because there's no capacity to look. There's a light box, but we couldn't really know what the films were other than looking at them through a reel-to-reel light box.
Scott Brocato:
How much stuff are you working with? 142 containers, I think I read, something like that?
Dr. Julia Smith:
Yeah, it was actually probably more. We've eliminated some that weren't technically part of the collection, maybe like a commercial film, like a D.W. Griffith or something that Wanzer might have just had, you know. But by and large, it's student films, and some of it is Wanzer original material as well.
Scott Brocato:
And there's some KRWG student films.
Dr. Julia Smith:
Right. That was some of the more interesting discoveries last summer with the Southwest Border Culture Institute Grant, was that there is some 8mm in there. And so we kind of didn't know what those might be and some of those early KRWG (films), the first ones, were done on 8mm, and then some around 16mm. And I've been able to talk to a couple students from around that time who had memories of working on these films, and they were the first time that there might have been a TV spot on anything in Las Cruces. This is such early days of TV out of the PBS state-run sort of news programming. And so it was very exciting and memorable for a lot of students.
Scott Brocato:
Well, his full-length feature film is "The Devil’s Mistress”.
Dr. Julia Smith:
Right.
Scott Brocato:
Talk about that. What's that about? Or is it self-explanatory?
Dr. Julia Smith:
Well, no, it's not. And I think my interest in it comes at it in a kind of academic way as well. So "The Devil’s Mistress” is the first film ever made in New Mexico. And this argument is in some ways not counting, like, the very earliest days of silent cinema, when there were movies being shot in Las Vegas and El Paso, but not really this area either, the Las Cruces region.
So it's certainly the first film ever made in the Las Cruces region. And it is a...what I would call a proto or the first-ever “acid Western”, which is a contemporary genre of the Western that inverts the common narrative plotlines. So it’ll look like a Western in all of the dressings, except the plot will be existential, absurd; oftentimes it'll have mythological or allegorical sort of characters. Some people think of the “acid Western" in terms of the counterculture. They’re connected with the “spaghetti western”, for example. They're connected with "Hang ‘Em High”, which was shot the year after “The Devil's Mistress”, which I'm really kind of digging into right now, his role in that film being produced here and students shooting behind the scenes documentary with him.
So "The Devil’s Mistress” is a film that he wrote, directed and edited, and they did it with a Bolex camera that one of them had. So it was shot on one camera, and watching the film, you know you can tell it's an amateur movie, but when you realize the heroic effort that it took to take these heavy equipment out to the Organ Mountains--and that was, like, not paved roads back in the day; they were using horses to get to sets. These were just locals making a film that had a Hollywood release. And what I'm discovering is that there were some regional cinemas emerging at this time in the early 60s. But nothing quite like this, and certainly no professors making movies.
It was also--in some ways, this is adjacent to "The Devils Mistress”--but the fact that Orville Wanzer was cultivating a film community here through teaching film as a form of art, but also creating a film society where he was showing movies from the Museum of Modern Art to students, in addition to this course, but also the community. He was in--I think it was the Chemistry building or the Physics building; it's like a 200-seater room of people from the community and students here that were going to see, like, Maya Deren and Bergman, and, you know, Italian neorealist cinema and American avant-garde cinema, and the European cinema, great silent films. And it was so exciting for me to hear that something like that was happening here in Las Cruces, because I really couldn't even imagine that ever, even having lived in Las Cruces for many years in my life.
Scott Brocato:
And there's a film you mentioned coming to the Fountain Theater that's going to be screened at the Fountain Theater. “George Andrews”?
Dr. Julia Smith:
Yes, "George Andrews” is also written, directed, and edited by Orville Wanzer, and also stars Orville Wanzer as an NMSU professor who gets into a terrible car accident and it changes him and...
Scott Brocato:
Was he involved in a car accident in real life?
Dr. Julia Smith:
No, but he did have some kind of accident that took away his hearing. I don't remember exactly what it is. Peter Goodman was a close friend and he told me this story. But there was a disability that he had that did affect his life. And I think about that sometimes. But also maybe this idea of, like, in a metaphorical way in the film, he sort of has this, you know, existential crisis about writing these academic papers for God knows who, and this kind of middle-class lifestyle that he did actually reject later as well. And he was going through a divorce at the time, and he was having an existential crisis as a young man. I mean, this was five years after "The Devil’s Mistress”, when he had established a film school here at KRWG and helped start the KRWG Media TV programming.
Scott Brocato:
When will this film ("George Andrews") be screened at the Fountain Theatre?
Dr. Julia Smith:
"George Andrews” will be screened on February 24th, which is the anniversary of Orville Wanzer's death in 2019, just shortly after I discovered the project and saw "The Devil’s Mistress”. And interviewed him four times before he died.
Scott Brocato:
And where are you at now as far as finishing all your archiving and digitizing?
Dr. Julia Smith:
That's a good question. The grant last semester (from the Southwest Border Cultures Institute) allowed me to find out everything in the archive. So I know everything that's in there. I've digitized most of it in this unique collaboration with the Institute of Historical Survey Foundation here in Mesilla Park. There's a lot more work to be done, but for the purposes of my documentary ("Birth of the Acid Western"), I have more than enough. I would love to continue working on that, but I just have...it’s a huge endeavor.
So for now, I think I'll finish the film by doing the last set of fundraising. I'm currently putting together a trailer that I can screen with “George Andrews”, and then I'm planning to screen "The Devil’s Mistress” across all of the historic theaters that are still running in New Mexico. And after that, I'm hoping I'll have some grants together, or I'll have raised enough money to at least offload the film to an editor and have the thing edited. And it's done. I feel like it could either be a kind of small local film, or it could be something that wins an Academy Award. I honestly believe it could be amazing either way, but I do believe that this story is interesting and big enough to do something beyond the confines of Las Cruces. Just like Orville Wanzer's film.
