Raoul's Story
One of the most successful directors in Hollywood history, Raoul Walsh needs a great documentary! And this is it! The True Adventures of Raoul Walsh tells the story of one of the unsung heroes of classic Hollywood! Walsh was a director who lived a life as big as his movies! Your support for this project will allow us to finish a much-needed 90-minute documentary on one of Hollywood's legendary and most colorful directors (check out our "teaser" trailer above). Humphrey Bogart, James Cagney, Errol Flynn, Clark Gable, Gary Cooper and John Wayne were only a few of the great stars who worked and were friends with the one and only Raoul Walsh!
Walsh’s life and times are as compelling as the movies he made, from his youth in New York City – where his parents regularly entertained dinner guests Edwin Booth (brother of John Wilkes Booth), Buffalo Bill, Frederick Remin![Ealsh, Rusell, Gable]()
gton and Teddy Roosevelt – to his apprenticeship as an assistant director to D.W. Griffith, where, for instance, Walsh himself convinced the Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa that his life (and the execution of his enemies) should be made into a movie. Walsh was an imposing figure in Hollywood, contributing movies that were as energetic as his own lifestyle. He loved to recount how he stood up to mobster Bugsy Siegel’s attempt to bribe him, how he was a committed drinking buddy of Humphrey Bogart and Errol Flynn, and an upstanding figure in the Hollywood Irish mafia that included Jimmy Cagney and Pat O’Brien and a host of Irish directors and actors.
The details of Walsh’s amazing life shape up into a fascinating story that he himself would have liked to direct.
Adventurous and iconoclastic, Walsh gave Hollywood some of its greatest action-adventure yarns. His life and movies are the stuff that dreams are made of, with a career spanning over half a century, from the era of one- and two-reel silents to the tumultuous 1960s, from such classic gangster films as White Heat and The Roaring Twenties, action-adventures as They Died With Their Boots On and Objective Burma!, to Westerns, romances and Civil War epics.
![Walsh]()
Walsh helped to transform the Hollywood studio yarn into a breathless art form. He belongs to that generation of filmmakers who learned to make movies on a dime in a fledgling industry at the start of the 20th century and invented a Hollywood that made movies bigger than life itself.
Off the screen, Walsh also knew an adventure or two. Friend to Pancho Villa and Wyatt Earp, Jack London and William Randolph Hearst, Walsh traveled the South Seas and Mexico as a young man, and then became an actor and ace cameraman for D.W. Griffith before he became a master film director.
Walsh directed the first American gangster epic, Regeneration, in 1915 and in 1930 changed Marion Morrison’s name to John Wayne and put him in his first Western, The Big Trail. Walsh directed Gloria Swanson in the classic silent Sadie Thompson and out grossed Cecil B. DeMille’s epic Carmen by putting Theda Bara in his own spectacular version. He gave Hollywood its first silent mega-hits before he put the light and magic into Douglas Fairbanks’ swashbuckling 1924 The Thief of Bagdad.![They Drive by Night]()
Walsh moved easily from silents to talkies. Working at Warner Bros. beginning in 1939, he made history. He pitted Cagney against Bogart in the classic The Roaring Twenties before he took Bogey up the California mountains in High Sierra and sent Cagney to the “top of the world” in the gangster classic White Heat.
One of Hollywood’s great “tough guy” directors alongside John Ford, Howard Hawks and John Huston, Walsh’s one hundred and forty films created a classic cinema of adventure, romance and American hard knocks both vigorous and tenderhearted. His films moved to the rhythm of bullets and came at audiences with style and energy.
The True Adventures of Raoul Walsh is based on Marilyn Ann Moss's biography of Walsh, Raoul Walsh: The True Adventures of Hollywood’s Legendary Director, and has the approval of the Raoul Walsh Estate.
Raoul's Friends
We've already begun pre-production on The True Adventures of Raoul Walsh, and have completed videotape interviews with:
- Hugh O’Brian (Lawless Breed, Saskatchewan)
- Pierre Rissient (publicist and friend of Walsh)
- Bob Bookman (friend of Walsh)
- Jack Larson (Fighter Squadron)
- Hank Kilgore (Walsh’s nephew)
We've completed audio tape interviews with:
- Richard Erdman (Objective, Burma!)
- Jane Russell (The Tall Men, Revolt of Mamie Stover)
- Anne Francis (A Lion Is in the Streets, Battle Cry)
- Harry Carey, Jr. (Pursued)
- Hisayo Graham (Walsh's friend and secretary)
- Joan Leslie (High Sierra, Revolt of Mamie Stover)
- L.Q. Jones (Battle Cry, The Naked and the Dead)
- Peter Bogdanovich
- Ken Adam (art director)
- Kevin Brownlow (film historian)
Funding will help us conduct more interviews with a large group of film critics, Walsh experts and even some of those actors and actresses who worked with Raoul Walsh!
Even more exciting news to come!
We'll also include hundreds of stills and documents (including love letters to Gloria Swanson, and to Walsh's wives Miriam Cooper and Mary Walsh), posters, clips, trailers, footage of Raoul on the set (working with actors such as Cagney, Flynn, Bogart, Gregory Peck, Virginia Mayo, Ida Lupino, Jane Russell, Gary Cooper, Rock Hudson and Kirk Douglas), footage of interviews with Walsh conducted in the U.S. and Europe, and home movies.
Raoul's Fund
Your contributions will help us produce The True Adventures of Raoul Walsh by funding
- Editing
- Location shoots
- Equipment rental
- Photo, poster and clip licensing for use in the film
- Digital transfers
- Music
- Legal fees
- Narration
- Interviews
- Publicity
- Festival entries
- Post-production: sound design, color correction, graphics, titles, 35mm negs and prints
Raoul's Team
Big Trail Productions was set up to produce The True Adventures of Raoul Walsh and currently consists of:
Marilyn Ann Moss: Producer/Writer
Marilyn Ann Moss is a biographer and film historian. She's the author of Raoul Walsh: The True Adventures of Hollywood’s Legendary Director and Giant: George Stevens, A Life on Film. She also has co-curated the Raoul Walsh restrospective at the American Cinematheque and has spoken on Walsh at such venues as UCLA and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. From 1995 to 2009 she was a film and TV critic for The Hollywood Reporter. Prior to that she was associate editor and film critic for Boxoffice magazine.
Paul Lynch: Associate Producer
Paul Lynch is an American film and television director and film historian. His films include the popular cult movie Prom Night (1980), Flying (1986) and The Keeper (2004). He has also directed episodes of numerous television series, including Star Trek: The Next Generation, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Murder, She Wrote, Moonlighting, The Twilight Zone, Xena: Warrior Princess, Sliders and Lonesome Dove: The Series.
Other Ways to Help Raoul
If you find that you can't contribute monetarily, please contact your family and friends and urge them to help fund this production. Spread the word among your cinema friends, at school and work. Mention us on Facebook and Tweet about us. And use the Indiegogo tools to Like Us.
gton and Teddy Roosevelt – to his apprenticeship as an assistant director to D.W. Griffith, where, for instance, Walsh himself convinced the Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa that his life (and the execution of his enemies) should be made into a movie. Walsh was an imposing figure in Hollywood, contributing movies that were as energetic as his own lifestyle. He loved to recount how he stood up to mobster Bugsy Siegel’s attempt to bribe him, how he was a committed drinking buddy of Humphrey Bogart and Errol Flynn, and an upstanding figure in the Hollywood Irish mafia that included Jimmy Cagney and Pat O’Brien and a host of Irish directors and actors.
Walsh helped to transform the Hollywood studio yarn into a breathless art form. He belongs to that generation of filmmakers who learned to make movies on a dime in a fledgling industry at the start of the 20th century and invented a Hollywood that made movies bigger than life itself.
