And the Tilghman goes to …
The Oklahoma Film Critics Circle has announced the winners of this year’s 2009 Tilghman Award, celebrating achievement in cinema in the Sooner State, and they’re at opposite ends of the Turner, doing much the same thing: Brian Hearn, curator of the film program at the Oklahoma City Museum of Art, and Clark Wiens, president of the Circle Cinema Foundation, which operates Tulsa’s Circle Cinema. Building an audience for independent films in these towns would be, I suspect, nearly impossible without these two guys on the job. (OKC readers: If you haven’t been to the Circle, get going before the turnpike tolls go up [pdf] next month. You won’t regret it.)
And who was Bill Tilghman, exactly? Primarily a gunslinger, a lawman in the days of the Territories, but also the man behind the first motion picture shot in Oklahoma: A Bank Robbery (1908), filmed near Cache, in which actual reformed bank robber Al Jennings pulled off a simulated heist. Sam Elliott played Tilghman in a 1999 biopic, You Know My Name.
McGehee »
20 July 2009 · 1:35 pm
Tilghman also gave a young Louis L’Amour a ride on one of his wanderings, of which L’Amour wrote and was the first I ever heard of the lawman. Oddly enough, with the reading I’ve since done about him, I hadn’t known of his cinematic contributions.
Sarah »
20 July 2009 · 8:17 pm
I want Brian Hearn’s job. The Noble Theater is one of my absolute favorite things about OKC.
I can’t wait to check out Circle Cinema. I’ve been following them for awhile on Facebook, and am really impressed with their programming.