Blockbuster Movies Filmed in Moab, Utah

When John Ford and John Wayne visited Moab’s White Ranch they fell in love with the area and brought Hollywood to Moab.

May 25, 2024

“For over 30 years, the film industry pretty much ran Moab,” said Brian Hunnings, General Manager of Red Cliffs Lodge. “From the late 1940’s to the early 1970’s, a ton of feature films, commercials, and television shows were filmed here.”

Hollywood first discovered the Moab region when George White, the owner of White Ranch — known today as Red Cliffs Lodge — reached out to legendary film director, John Ford.

“White told John Ford that Moab had more spectacular scenery and better infrastructure than where they had been filming. White invited Ford out to take a look for himself,” Hunnings explained.

Not long after, Ford, along with movie star John Wayne, visited the ranch. Both men immediately fell in love with the area. Soon, a string of epic westerns — Comanchero, Wagon Master, and Rio Grande — were being filmed on-location in Moab.

In 1949, to further facilitate the needs of production companies and their crews, White founded the Moab to Monument Valley Film Commission. The organization holds the title for the longest running film commission in the world and has coordinated with numerous groups within the entertainment industry. The current director of the film commission, Bega Metzner, said, “Working for the commission keeps me on my toes. I’m a facilitator and a fixer. No two requests from productions are alike and no two days are alike.”

Through the hard work and diligence of the commission, and with help from the community, Moab became a popular spot for movie studios to shoot.

“Over 2,000 productions have filmed here,” said Hunnings. These include blockbuster movies like Thelma and Louise and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, to cult classics like Galaxy Quest and 127 Hours.

Most recently, a western series has been filming in the area entitled Horizon: An American Saga. The Civil War saga is produced, directed, and stars Hollywood legend Kevin Costner. The first two movies of the tetralogy will premiere this summer with Chapter 1 hitting theaters on June 28th and Chapter 2 on August 16th. Costner will continue production on the last two films later this year.

As Hunnings explained, “Costner has always been a fan of John Ford and John Wayne and he’s always loved this area.”

Filming a western in southern Utah seems like a fitting way to honor the legacy of both Ford and Wayne, and coincidentally, it aligns with the 75th anniversary of the Moab to Monument Valley Film Commission and Utah’s 100 years in film.

To celebrate these special occasions, the commission has planned numerous grassroots festivities including a gala event in the autumn. Additionally, Red Cliffs Lodge has partnered with the John Wayne family and the John Wayne Cancer Foundation to host the True Grit Race Series. The 5K and 10K races will take place on June 1st, where the off-road path follows the breathtaking imagery from some of “The Duke’s” most iconic films.

Prior to race day, there will be a tasting dinner on May 30th featuring wine, tequila and whiskey from Wayne’s collection. On May 31st, the lodge will present the “Cosmic Cowboy Celestial Cinema,” which includes a silent auction, food trucks, and bands. Guests are encouraged to dress as their favorite character from the western thriller, Rio Grande, and a best costume prize will be awarded, and a pre-movie panel of surviving cast and crew members will entertain the crowd with memories from their days on the movie set. Once the sun goes down, Rio Grande will be shown on the “Grand Lawn.”

The year-long celebrations will also acknowledge the positive impact the film industry has had on southern Utah.

Said Metzner, “The benefits of film on the Moab community reach into nooks and corners that are often unseen and untold. The film crews follow the rules of permitting and leave the place the same or better than when they found it. As such, they could really be considered stewards of the land. They also spend a serious amount of money in stores, restaurants, hotels, and even at the vet if they are here long enough. As an old friend and local film guy Karl Tangren once said, ‘they take nothing but pictures and leave nothing but money.’”

The John Wayne Museum in the Moab Museum of Film and Western Heritage. Photo courtesy of Red Cliffs Lodge.

Another way the local community has honored its collaboration with the world of film is through the creation of the Moab Museum of Film and Western Heritage. The collection is located at Red Cliffs Ranch and includes displays, photos and memorabilia from actors, film crews and production sets.

The museum draws cinephiles from all over the world, and during Moab’s peak season, upwards of 400 people will walk through the exhibition daily. Numbers like this show how important the film industry is for Moab and the entire state. Explained Hunnings, “For every dollar Utah spends on the film industry, it brings back seven dollars in revenue.”

Fortunately, Moab continues to see film tourism flourish year after year. More importantly, the public’s desire to be entertained and engaged is constantly growing. For Hunnings, the reason for this seems apparent. “People want to feel connected to things that make them feel emotions. We are human beings and we love stories.”

Local Spotlight, Moab, Utah Film

Brandi Christoffersen

Moab

Inside Moab’s Political Divide: Land, Tourism, and the Future of Grand County, Utah

In the late 1950s, Edward Abbey took a job as a park ranger at Arches National Monument, just outside Moab. What he found there, and what he watched happen to it, would shape the rest of his life. Roads were being cut into the canyon country. Cars were replacing foot traffic. The National Park Service, in the name of accessibility, was engineering a kind of industrialization of the wilderness he’d come to love. Abbey wrote about it in Desert Solitaire, published in 1968, and the anger in that book wasn’t abstract. It came from watching something specific be changed by people who either didn’t understand what they had or didn’t care.

Grand County has long been the most reliably left-leaning county in the state, a fact that puts it in sharp contrast to nearly everything around it. To understand how that happened, and where things stand now, I spoke with longtime residents and politicians who’ve watched it from the inside, people who’ve served in local government and lived through the shifts firsthand.

Robert Greenberg.

Bob Greenberg came from New York in 1976, took a job at the community mental health center, and never left. He went on to chair the Grand County Democratic Party and serve on the county council. When he arrived, he said, “the Democratic Party was said to be able to meet in a phone booth” — and even then, its members were a contradictory bunch. Yellow Dog Democrats from the oil patch were fiscally conservative but surprisingly open socially, allowing different demographics to feel safe moving to the county.

“The town fathers were desperate to have new people come to town,” Greenberg recalls. “They just didn’t want the people who actually showed up. They wanted some other people.”

What followed was a demographic shift nobody planned. The people who filled the gap left by the bust were river guides, federal agency workers, artists, and eventually waves of outdoor recreationists discovering that southeastern Utah was among the most spectacular landscapes on earth. Tourism ended up being the only economic development avenue that actually worked. Manufacturing never had the labor force or market access, sewing factories came and went. The people the tourist economy attracted tended to be younger, more outdoor-oriented, and more liberal.

Kevin Walker.

Kevin Walker, a former Grand County commissioner who moved here in 1990 for the landscape, puts the county’s diversity in context. “Moab [is] a pretty diverse place since, I think, at least the 1950s with the uranium mining boom,” he says. “So it’s not a typical Southern Utah town.”

Part of what makes Grand County distinct is self-reinforcing. Federal agencies like the Park Service, the Forest Service, the BLM, have large presences here and pull in a different demographic than surrounding counties. People looking to live in Southern Utah with certain values gravitate toward the place where those values already have a foothold. Over time, that critical mass has made Grand County what it is politically, while neighboring counties went in very different directions.

The defining conflict in Grand County has always been over land.

In the 1970s and 80s, it was extraction versus preservation in the starkest terms. County commissioners floated toxic waste incinerators. A plan emerged to site a high-level nuclear waste repository at the entrance to Canyonlands National Park.

“It really, really galvanized environmentalists everywhere, but particularly in Grand County,” Greenberg says. Activists put up signs at the park entrance, watched them get chainsawed down, and came back with steel reinforcement. That stubborn, physical, unglamorous persistence became part of the local political character.

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Moab

Moab Trail Closures: The Fight Over Public Land Access and Off-Roading

Trail closures threaten livelihoods and slowly limit access to ordinary families, says Dave Hellman, owner of Xtreme 4×4 Tours in Moab. Wilderness advocates argue that stronger protections are necessary to preserve fragile landscapes. As lawsuits reshape trail access across southern Utah, Moab increasingly sits at the center of a growing conflict over who public lands are really for.
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Nine Mile Ranch: Preserving Utah’s Historic Nine Mile Canyon

Nine Mile Canyon is famous worldwide for its Fremont and Ute rock art panels, some of which are pecked ‘petroglyphs,’ while others are painted ‘pictographs.’ The canyon, home to the Fremont people and a seasonal pass-through for the Utes, preserves prehistoric pit houses, rock shelters and granaries. It’s the most concentrated rock art spot in North America.