Tarzan in Louisiana
Back in the year 2000, Al Bohl heard a story that would change his life.
“I was eating breakfast with a group of men at a hotel in Gonzales,” he recalls. “One of them had lived in Morgan City, where the first Tarzan movie was made in 1917. He said that apes and monkeys were brought in for the movie. When the [filming] was over, the apes refused to get back in their cages and were left behind in the Atchafalaya Basin.”
Monkeys cavorting with egrets and alligators? That image stuck in Bohl’s mind. Intrigued, he went online to research the subject. One thing led to another and “I found out that the making of Tarzan of the Apes was as amazing as the movie itself,” he says of the silent film based on the book by Edgar Rice Burroughs. “It was the first feature film to be made on location instead of in Hollywood.”
Burroughs (1875–1950) was as fascinating as his fictional character.
“He was originally from Chicago,” says Bohl. “He failed at a lot of things before he found himself as a writer at thirty-five. He was selling pencil sharpeners door to door. He started reading pulp magazines and said, ‘I could write as bad as this.’ He worked really hard once he found what he wanted to do.”
Burroughs’s book-length manuscript “Tarzan of the Apes: A Romance of the Jungle” was published in its entirety in All-Story Magazine in October 1912. It met with immediate acclaim but was not published in book form until 1914. “After that, he churned them out to make money,” says Bohl, who has read most of the twenty-six Tarzan tomes. “I’ve read the first two over and over,” he says.
Bohl summarizes the story of one of the most popular characters in American culture. “In 1886 there was a mutiny, and Lord and Lady Greystoke were put off the ship in West Africa. They made a hut, and Tarzan was born there. When he was one year old his mother died of a fever and his dad was killed by one of the Mangani apes. They were created by Burroughs as the link between humans and apes. Tarzan was raised by the Mangani tribe. As a feral child he could learn to speak because the apes had language.”
Enter the love interest, Jane. “Jane’s father gets into debt and finds a treasure map and they go to West Africa in search of gold,” says Bohl.
Tarzan made Burroughs a rich man. “When the movie came out in 1918, and it was such a big hit, everything just exploded,” says Bohl. “In 1919 he moved to California and bought land that eventually became Tarzana. He incorporated in 1923; he was the first person to ever incorporate himself. He became his own publisher, and he licensed Tarzan products.”
Digging deeper and deeper into the story, Bohl hit upon the idea of making a documentary about the original Tarzan movie. An artist and illustrator who works at Sci-Port science and entertainment center in Shreveport, he had no film experience. But his daughter Allison is a documentary filmmaker.
After graduating from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette in 2006, Allison stayed on to work in the cinematic-arts program at ULL. A cinematographer and editor, she worked on projects that included I Always Do My Collars First, a well-received documentary in which four Cajun women talk about—ironing.
For three years, Al and Allison sifted through hundreds of photos, videos, and documents. They interviewed scholars, authors, historians, fans, merchandisers, actors, an expert in primates, the curator of the Burroughs collection, and members of the Burroughs family. They traveled to Morgan City, Patterson, Baton Rouge, and New Orleans. They also shot footage in Los Angeles and Tarzana, as well as Ohio, Kentucky, and Illinois.
On eBay, Al found a sixty-minute “digest version” of the original Tarzan movie starring Elmo Lincoln and Enid Markey. “A lot of the footage is just gone,” he says. “From reading the books, I realized that it was out of chronological order, so I put it back in correct order. We used quite a bit of the footage in our documentary.”
He also found stock footage of events from the time the movie was made—World War I soldiers, suffragettes marching, minstrels in blackface. He unearthed five hundred photos, including shots of the film crew in Morgan City and the Broadway theater where Tarzan of the Apes had its world premiere.
He tracked down Burroughs’s grandson and two great-granddaughters. He found Elmo Lincoln’s daughter Marci’a, who had seen the film with her dad when she was eleven. In Morgan City, he talked to friends and relatives of African Americans who played African natives in the movie.
“It was silent, so they had no lines. They were in crowd scenes, mostly running and throwing spears while white settlers shot at them. Most of them were men, but there were some females. There is nudity. The women are dressed from the waist down. Tarzan as a boy is nude. He was played by Gordon Griffith, a well-known child actor.”
Al found that circus acrobats, and gymnasts from the New Orleans Athletic Club, were hired to dress as apes for the movie. Some of the primates swinging from tree to tree were really men in monkey suits.
In 2009, Al and Allison flew to Kentucky to shoot footage of the Burroughs collection at the University of Louisville. From there they went to Dayton, Ohio, to attend the annual convention of Tarzan aficionados. “I interviewed tons of Tarzan fans,” says Al. “Many of them are PhDs.” Then the father-daughter team flew to Los Angeles to interview Marci'a Lincoln at the silent-film house where she first saw the movie. At every stop, says Al, “We collected shots of people doing the Tarzan yell. That will be a special feature of the DVD.”
Father and daughter worked smoothly together “with never a cross word,” says Al. He did the research, tracked down interview subjects, and tended to a million details. Allison did the camera work and editing.
“It started out as a family project and eventually morphed into something much bigger,” says Allison, who is still making films in Lafayette and has a design business with her fiancé Peter DeHart. “There was a turning point when I realized this was a professional thing, not just a hobby.
“A lot of the time we were shooting we were traveling as well. Our equipment was whatever we could fit in the suitcase. I used a Panasonic HVX200 camera, which weighs about eleven pounds. We used the Final Cut Pro program for editing on my Mac. Dad bought a Mac and we traded the hard drives back and forth. He had to learn a new operating system and a new editing program. That’s a huge feat.”
Allison shot seventy hours of footage. “Dad watched it all and made a timeline of the best clips, then wrote the script. He had a three-hour script that we whittled down to ninety minutes and then seventy minutes.”
Allison wore gloves with built-in wrist-rests while doing the tedious work of editing. When the tedium was too much, she relieved stress by grabbing her BB gun, opening the window, and shooting tin cans hung from a line in her back yard. “I’ve gotten to be a pretty good shot,” she admits.
Once edited, Tarzan: King of the Louisiana Jungle went to Shreveport radio personality Kermit Poling, who composed music for it and for the sixty-minute version of Tarzan of the Apes. Poling is also the narrator for the documentary.
The documentary and the short version of the silent film will be shown on April 13 and 14 respectively at the thousand-seat Municipal Auditorium in Morgan City. A festival will celebrate the centennial of the first published Tarzan story, and the Louisiana State Museum in Patterson will exhibit artifacts. “And we’ll have a yell contest for the best Tarzan yodel,” says Al.
With six weeks to go, Allison is putting finishing touches on the documentary in Lafayette while communicating with her dad in Bossier City by phone, email, and text. “He’s obsessive,” she says with a smile. “Every time we talk on the phone we talk about Tarzan.”
Al practically levitates with excitement over the project, while Allison is more laid back. “Before we even started editing, he was telling people all about it,” she says. “Before I talk, I want to make sure I actually have a great film. I’m like, ‘Dad, we really need to finish this before we tell people how great it is.’”
But Al is convinced they do have something great. “I’ve read the books and watched the films so many times,” he says. “But Tarzan is still as fresh to me as when I first started.”
Ruth Laney can be reached at ruthlaney@cox.net. For information on the Tarzan festival contact: www.cajuncoast.com.