December 2011.

In 1987, Lloyd Doré left his home in Abbeville, in the heart of Cajun country, and drove for three and a half hours to New Orleans to see an exhibit at the Presbytere on Jackson Square in the French Quarter.

Titled “Starring Louisiana: A Romance of the Real and the Reel,” the exhibit recounted the history of films made in the state. It started with 1909’s Mephisto and the Maiden and encompassed more recent examples such as Cat People, starring Nastassja Kinski and Malcolm McDowell, which was filmed in New Orleans in 1982. The exhibit was illustrated with scripts, posters and other memorabilia, much of it from the collection of the Louisiana State Museum, whose director of special projects, Vaughan Glasgow, had curated the exhibit.

Doré was dazzled to see how many films had been shot here. “Mephisto and the Maiden was a silent two-reeler,” he said. “No copy of it exists today. It was shot in New Orleans. In fact, a slew of silent pictures were filmed in New Orleans.

“That exhibit piqued my interest,” said Doré, who still lives in his native Abbeville. “Growing up, movies were our main entertainment. The Franks Theatre always had double features on Saturday afternoons. We’d see a cartoon, a serial and a double feature, with an intermission in between. Most of the serials were science fiction or horror films. Things like Rocket Men, Commando Cody: Sky Marshal of the Universe, Rocket Ship X-M and 13 Ghosts, which was in 3-D—you wore red-and-blue-colored glasses to watch it.”

By the time he attended LSU in the 1970s, Doré was a dedicated moviegoer. “I saw a lot of films at the Colonnade Theater in the Union,” he recalled. “They showed movies there nearly every night. That’s where I saw Peter Sellers in Dr. Strangelove and The Party.

“Downtown, the Paramount showed all the blockbusters—Dr. Zhivago, Gone with the Wind, 2001. It had a huge screen.”

At the Presbytere exhibit, Doré bought the fall 1984 issue of the Southern Quarterly, which was entirely devoted to Louisiana films. He began watching movies obsessively, searching out those made in the state.

While checking out The Witchmaker (1969) on cable TV, he noticed a character descend into a dungeon. “The TV Guide said it was filmed in Louisiana,” he said. “But I wondered. I checked the American Film Institute guide and discovered the cellar scene was filmed elsewhere, but the majority of film was shot near Marksville.”

Doré was so taken with the idea of locally made movies that he called the Louisiana Film Commission for a list of productions shot in the state. “They had destroyed most of their files, but they faxed me a list,” he said. “It was not comprehensive. Some of the movies on it had not been filmed here. Others that should have been on the list weren’t there.”

Add Comment