In the Archives, a Western Treasure Trove

Storyboards from The Hanging Tree, Courtesy of Department of Special Collections and University Archives, Stanford University Libraries.

Andrew Patrick Nelson, an assistant professor of film history and critical studies at Montana State University, spent several weeks as a visiting scholar at the Center this spring. He is co-editing an anthology on filmmaker Delmer Daves.

AND THE MAN WHO GETS AROUND…. Delmer Daves, who directs, writes and produces, is a veteran Hollywood craftsman. A native of San Francisco, he is a graduate of Stanford University, with his earlier schooling taking place in Los Angeles. His first studio work was as a property man with James Cruze. He became an actor in “The Duke Steps Out” with William Haines and Joan Crawford because the director thought he looked more like a college man than the film’s prop boy. He started writing scripts. In 1942, for Warners, he directed his first picture, “Destination Tokyo,” from his own script. It was for the Burbank studio that he has made some of his best films, including the recent “Parrish,” “Susan Slade” and “Rome Adventure.”

Warner Bros. production notes for Spencer’s Mountain (1963)
Delmer Daves Papers (box 65, folder 34)
Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries

My time at the Bill Lane Center for the American West was dedicated to researching an anthology on American filmmaker Delmer Daves, whose extensive personal papers are held in Stanford University Libraries’ Special Collections. After graduating from Stanford with a law degree in 1927, Daves moved south to Hollywood, where he worked continuously from the late 1920s until the mid-1960s, first as a writer and then as a director and producer. Some of his best-known films include Destination Tokyo (1943), Dark Passage (1947), 3:10 to Yuma (1957) and A Summer Place (1959).

Few filmmakers created as unique a body of work in Hollywood as Daves, yet few have been as critically overlooked in existing scholarship. Daves is often regarded as an embodiment of the self-effacing craftsmanship of classical and postwar Hollywood, a competent but conventional studio man whose films lacked the kind of distinct perspectives and predilections detected by critics and scholars in the work of contemporaries like John Ford and Howard Hawks.

One of the principal aims of my work is to dispel this notion and reveal Daves for who he truly was: a supremely talented artist with a distinct worldview, whose films offered viewers a progressive portrait of masculinity and repeatedly avowed the importance of cooperation and community for the advancement of humanity. As Daves wrote—by hand—on his extensive “character notes” for the film Jubal, “Each of us must have a REASON FOR LIFE, and no man can free himself of a sense of failure…while he refuses to see or create in himself a REASON for life” (Box 41, Folder 3).

While claims about this or that director’s “greatness” have often rested solely on analyses of the finished products of their efforts—detecting recurring themes in films and tracing these back to an underlying authorial personality—personal archives provide researchers with new sources of material with which to develop more nuanced arguments about the artistry of moviemakers. Textual analysis can now be augmented by insights gleaned from studio memos, film scripts, personal correspondence and other documents.

Delmer Daves’ personal papers offer a rich array of such historical documents, revealing, in different ways, the consummate artist and professional that the man was. For every page of screenplay Daves produced, he wrote two or even three times that amount about the history of the events surrounding the story, or about the motivations of the various characters. He drew detailed maps of his locations, from expansive plots of the area surrounding Sedona, Arizona—a favored location for making Westerns—to intimate interior sets. Looking at his shooting scripts—the screenplays he had with him on set as he directed his films—we find not only copious annotations, but detailed storyboards: illustrations, drawn by Daves, of how he wanted particular shots to look, complete with notes about camera lenses, camera movement and sound effects. Some of these storyboards are even watercolored.

Having the privilege of looking through these materials was an awesome and, in many ways, overwhelming experience. As much as one man’s life can’t be contained in a series of boxes held in climate-controlled storage, in looking through these materials I felt a kind of closeness to my subject that I hadn’t experienced previously. Translating the essence of these materials to the printed page is proving to be a daunting task, but I’m working on it.

I’d like to publicly extend my thanks to Kathy Zonana and the Bill Lane Center for the American West for facilitating this incredible research opportunity, as well as to Tim Noakes and the intrepid staff of the Stanford Libraries’ Special Collections and University Archives, who helped make my short stay both enjoyable and productive.