Made in Louisiana

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.”

Doré, an accountant who serves on just about every board and committee in his town of twelve thousand residents, became obsessed with that list. In 1990, his wife, Susan, formerly an archivist at The Historic New Orleans Collection, contacted Glasgow at the Louisiana State Museum. Glasgow agreed to let Doré do research at his offices in the Cabildo.

“He was a really nice, personable fellow,” said Doré of Glasgow, now deceased. “He was very knowledgeable on a number of subjects. He appreciated that someone was interested. He was very accommodating. He gave me a desk and allowed me to make copies.

“I spent a week there,” Doré said. “Vaughan gave me access to all their files, all the research they had done for the exhibit. I rented a Compaq portable computer and started to put together a database of Louisiana movies with the title, year made, year released, cast, crew and locations.” He found the sheer number of films overwhelming. “I had to set parameters. I gave up on including short, thirty-minute films because the number is so vast.”

He modeled his research after scholarly reference books such as Halliwell’s Film Guide and the American Film Institute Catalog. He focused on feature films, feature-length documentaries, made-for-television movies and continuing TV series, all actually filmed in Louisiana.

“You almost have to watch a film to confirm that it was made here,” he said. “A lot are set in Louisiana but filmed elsewhere. Feast of All Saints (based on the Anne Rice novel), for example, was filmed entirely in Canada. You have to watch the credits,” he said, squinting to demonstrate how he strains to read the small print at the end of a film.

Doré wrote to production companies for press kits with photos, press releases and posters. He bought copies of films on VHS, checking them to confirm whether a movie was in fact made in Louisiana or just “set” here.

As his interest grew into an obsession, Doré made it his mission to acquire as many copies as possible of movies made in Louisiana. He estimates his collection includes six hundred videos and DVDs, forty-four posters and ninety-two press kits.

His home office houses three file cabinets full of press materials, research notes, news clippings and magazine articles. There’s a computer for online research and a Toshiba unit with a VHS player on the left and a DVD player/burner on the right. “I’m converting old VHS tapes to DVDs,” he said. But he won’t be throwing out those VHS tapes, which soon will be artifacts of the past, if they aren’t already.

“Sometimes I’ll be watching a movie and I’ll say, ‘Wait, that’s the State Capitol.’ That happened when I was watching Enemies Among Us and realized it was shot in Louisiana. It was made in 2009 and went straight to cable. The other night I saw Cyborg Conquest, which has Louisiana locations. I’ve watched a lot of bad movies. I watch four to five movies a week.”

He has found many items on eBay, including lobby sheets from the movie The Blob, shot right there in Abbeville in 1988. “I had a couple of relatives who were in it,” Doré said. “The premise of the story is, it’s a mountain ski town suffering because there’s no snow. Two or three weeks after they finished filming and left town, Abbeville got a freak snowfall. People went to early Mass and came out to find three inches of snow on the ground!”

He finds some information in unlikely places, such as cassette tapes of long-ago radio broadcasts. “While listening to an old radio play, I heard an interview with Vivien Leigh, who discussed filming A Streetcar Named Desire in New Orleans,” he said. “That told me that she and Marlon Brando actually did shoot some scenes in New Orleans.”

Streetcar, directed by Elia Kazan in 1951, is on Doré’s personal top ten list, which also includes Panic in the Streets (1950), a film noir shot in New Orleans, directed by Kazan and starring Richard Widmark; The White Rose (1923), directed by D.W. Griffith; Evangeline (1929), a silent film based on the Longfellow poem, shot in St. Martinville and starring Dolores del Rio; Saratoga Trunk (1945), starring Gary Cooper and Ingrid Bergman; Man in the Moon (1991) starring Reese Witherspoon; The Joy That Kills (1985), adapted from a Kate Chopin story; Secretariat (2010), starring Diane Lane; and Huey Long (1985), the Ken Burns documentary on the Kingfish.

A particular favorite is Louisiana Story (1949), the famed documentary directed by Robert Flaherty, which premiered at the Franks Theatre in Abbeville. “I had heard my grandparents talk about it, and I had seen pictures that Elemore Morgan took at the premiere,” he said. “I first saw it at LSU in an old, scratchy print. Later, Elemore’s son Elemore Morgan Jr. and I did presentations on it at the local library.” Doré and Morgan also championed the installation of a plaque about the movie that now stands in front of the theater.

In addition to his top ten, Doré has compiled lists of Academy Award nominees and winners and a list of B-movies called “So Bad It’s Good.”

He has considered writing a book but realizes that the current frenzy of movie-making in the state makes it hard to keep up. “I’d like to do a book about the first hundred years, from 1909 to 2009, divided by decades,” he said.

Meanwhile, he’s happily hunting for the elusive films he hasn’t yet acquired. “The research is like treasure hunting,” he said. “I never cease to be excited when I find information or a copy of a movie I have been looking for.

“This started as an interest, developed into an obsession and ended up as an ongoing historical project.”

One movie Lloyd Doré is trying to track down is Run for Your Wife, an Italian film in which Ruth Laney had a feature role. She can be reached at ruthlaney@cox.net.