Lights! Camera! Arkansas! Tells Story of Arkansas and Arkansans in Hollywood Film

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Lights!

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. – Lights! Camera! Arkansas: From Broncho Billy to Billy Bob Thornton ($24.95 paper and e-book), by University of Arkansas professors Robert Cochran and Suzanne McCray, and published by the University of Arkansas Press, is the first book to chronicle the roles played by Arkansas and Arkansans in Hollywood’s film industry.

The book traces movie stars, from Broncho Billy Anderson, the first cowboy star, to Mary Steenburgen, Billy Bob Thornton, and many others. The book also examines the movies set in Arkansas, filmed in Arkansas, or with other Arkansas connections. Cochran and McCray, who are married, screened close to two hundred films in their research for the book – from laughable box-office bombs to laudable examples of great filmmaking. Their spirited chronological narrative is enhanced with an appendix on documentary films, a ratings section (including top ten lists for both authors), and illustrations based on a Lights! Camera! Arkansas! exhibit curated by the authors for the Old State House Museum in Little Rock in 2013.

While the connections between Arkansas and Hollywood may not be obvious, Cochran and McCray write that Arkansans have played “Huck Finn innocents and homicidal sociopaths, noir detectives and cowboy gunslingers, and bathing beauties menaced by prehistoric creatures. The story of the Natural Sate’s role in the nation’s film entertainment mecca is a tangled, compelling tale full of surprises. Recent years have been spectacularly fruitful, but Arkansas has been from territorial times a place of mythic resonance, and Hollywood was sure to come calling.”

Lights! Camera! Arkansas! was supported by the Old State Museum and the Arkansas Natural and Cultural Resources Council. The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette’s Philip Martin called the book “a valuable resource for anyone interested in Arkansas’s place in movie history.” The book is sure to entertain and inform those interested in Arkansas and the movies for years to come.

Cochran and McCray will be discussing Lights! Camera! Arkansas! at the Old Statehouse Museum in Little Rock at 2 p.m. Sunday, March 8, and they will be at the Books in Bloom Literary Festival at the Crescent Hotel in Eureka Springs on May 17.

Cochran is a professor of English in the J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences, chair of the American Studies Program and director of the Center for Arkansas and Regional Studies, He has lived in Arkansas for 30 years and produced many articles, books and documentary films devoted to the arts in Arkansas, including Our Own Sweet Sounds: A Celebration of Popular Music in Arkansas and A Photographer of Note: Arkansas Artist Geleve Grice.

McCray, a Fort Smith native, is a faculty member in the College of Education and Health Professions, vice provost for enrollment management, dean of admissions and director of the office of nationally competitive awards.

The University of Arkansas Press, founded in 1980, is an academic publishing house that is part of the University of Arkansas. A member of the Association of American University Presses, it has as its central and continuing mission the publication of books that serve both the broader academic community and Arkansas and the region.