RIDERS OF THE PURPLE SAGE FILM
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Every good story needs a frame.

Director's Statement

5/6/2020

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"Westerns carry meaning and value, codes of conduct, standards of judgment that shape our sense of the world and govern our behavior without our having the slightest awareness of it.”
Jane Tomkins – “West of Everything.”

Some of the grandest things America thinks of itself are symbolized by the settling of the western frontier. Zane Grey helped define the American character by creating Lassiter, the man in black, the first anti-hero bent of vigilante justice, a man who takes matters into his own hands. Regardless of our heroic notions, the themes in “Riders” - sexual harassment, religious zealotry, isolationism, gun control, even a church shooting, are issues we still grapple with. At its core, “Riders” is a power struggle over water. Jane Withersteen owns it. Her churchmen want it to build their empire - and they stop at nothing to demonstrate God is on their side.

If Grey's story provides the blood in this film, mounting the opera is its beating heart. Opera is larger than life, requires the cooperation of legions of artists, is terrifically expensive, and must adapt to survive. Before witnessing this work, even as a musical theatre-lover, opera seemed like a stilted way to tell antiquated stories, but new works are telling stories that matter. Opera gathers all the arts in a single heightened explosion of human experience. It may, in fact, be the perfect art form for our operatic times.

“Riders” is the seminal Western. It’s a story about grief and redemption and what it takes to live in the punishingly beautiful land I call home. With its musical storytelling and grand setting rendered by my favorite living painter, this film about the artistic process and the landscape that inspires it fulfills my soul’s thirst for wilderness and art. 

Kristin Atwell Ford
Director/Producer
Scottsdale, Arizona
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The Landscape of Zane Grey

11/24/2017

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Pipe Spring National Monument
Zane Grey's Inspiration for the Withersteen Ranch

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Last fall, the artistic team of the new opera "Riders of the Purple Sage", set off for fabled landscapes steeped in history. We followed to places Zane Grey visited in Arizona over a century ago that were the novelist's real life inspirations for two key locations in “Riders of the Purple Sage”. We visited Pipe Spring National Monument on the Arizona Strip - a remote sliver of Arizona nestled between the Grand Canyon and the Utah line. Zane Grey visited Pipe Spring in 1908 and discovered the Mormon tithing ranch that would become the bedrock of the plot for his most popular novel.

PIPE SPRING NATIONAL MONUMENT
With its spring fed water supply in the middle of an arid stretch of land, and access to some of the best grazing land on the Strip, it is easy to see how Grey could craft this lonely outpost into the focal point of the struggle for wealth and power that drives “Riders of the Purple Sage.” When we dropped into the valley a rush of wonder engulfed us like a stampede. What a confluence of landscape and longing, what sublime beauty and reverent desolation. What was life like here in the late 1800s on the dusty frontier? Perhaps Zane Grey thought the same thing when decided to turn Pipe Spring into the fictional Withersteen Ranch.

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NOW: The fort doors on Winsor Castle have been restored by the National Park Service.
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THEN: Ranch foreman Edwin D. Woolley, his family and the Chamberlain family, and ranch hands on April 27, 1891. Photo courtesy of National Park Service, Pipe Spring National Monument, PSIP 1074
More Pipe Spring history

The red stone fortress of Winsor Castle is as breathtaking in its own way as the geologic wonder of the Vermillion Cliffs that frame it. Pipe Spring was established by Mormons as a tithing ranch in the early 1870s and brought the first telegraph to Arizona Territory. It was a popular spot on the “Honeymoon Trail.” Travelers on their way to get married in the Temple in St. George would water their horses at Pipe Spring - a piece of history that may have inspired Zane Grey’s iconic opening scene when Lassiter stops to water his horse and interrupts Elder Tull preparing the whip Venters.

Completed in 1872, the fort was built directly over its water source so pioneers could lock themselves inside and persevere through Navajo raids, or outlast troops sent by the Federal government looking to arrest polygamists. Those attacks never came and the settlers peacefully grazed cattle and made butter and cheese that supplied Mormon families in the region until the 1890s.

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"The home of Jane Withersteen...was a flat, long, red-stone structure with a covered court in the center through which flowed a lively stream of amber-colored water."
                                     - Zane Grey, 'Riders of the Purple Sage'

Along with the pioneering history of the Arizona Strip, we discovered Zane Grey's creative process. Grey would visit remote places that were still mysterious and exotic, hear the stories from the people who lived there, and learn the hardships of fashioning a life on the bleeding edge of the frontier. He would then sit down with pencil and paper and voraciously write his experiences of the landscape and its characters with a fictional mix of romance and action. Zane Grey's Western novels defined a new American genre and left a legacy that would inform other novels, movies, TV shows, and the way we think about the mythic territory of the West, for years to come.
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