The Shooting of “Bonnie & Clyde” — 1966
by Paula Bosse
On location: Greenville Avenue (click for larger image)
by Paula Bosse
Today is the 80th anniversary of the ambush and killing of Bonnie and Clyde. Since I’ve written about Ted Hinton (one of the ambushers and erstwhile motor lodge operator) and Clyde Barrow (as a not-yet-completely-delinquent 17-year old) (and dressed up in a sailor suit), why not a brief look at the movie?
I was hoping to find a bunch of local as-it-was-happening anecdotes in the newspaper archives, but I found very little. (Hey, Dallas — you had a major motion picture with Hollywood celebrites in it — couldn’t you have devoted a little more ink to it?)
The photo at the top is the only one I could find that showed shooting (…as it were) at a Dallas location. The above was shot at the Vickery Courts motor lodge at 6949 Greenville Avenue (just north of Park Lane, across Greenville and up a bit from where the old Vickery Feed Store was).
So photos were practically non-existent, but I did learn that the interiors were shot at a large soundstage on Dyer, just off Greenville, called Stage 2, owned by Bill Stokes of Bill Stokes & Associates (where I spent a blink-of-an-eye interning back in high school).
Below are two photos of Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway between shots in Lavon, Texas, just outside Wylie — talking with one of the extras, Billy Joe Rogers, a saddlemaker from Wylie.
The reactions to the finished movie from the local critics was interesting. The reviewer for The Dallas Morning News hated it. Hated it.
Bonnie and Clyde were a couple of rat punks who created terror in a vast area simply because they had no hesitation in gunning down those who stood in their way. […] They became for a brief span the nation’s most hunted outlaws and finally were shot down […] like the mad dogs they were. […] In a word: There is nothing entertaining about mad dogs; they should be killed — and quickly. (William A. Payne, DMN, Sept. 14, 1967)
I don’t know anything about the reviewer, William A. Payne, but my guess is that he vividly remembered the real-life Bonnie and Clyde and, like many other reviewers of the time, deplored the perceived glamorization of violence. (As an aside, I wondered why I wasn’t finding listings for “Bonnie and Clyde” in the early ’30s when I searched through the Dallas Morning News archives. As I learned from Mr. Payne, the two were commonly known as “Clyde and Bonnie” back then. So there you go!)
The review from Elston Brooks of The Fort Worth Star-Telegram, on the other hand, was ecstatic.
“Bonnie and Clyde,” which had every right to be a B-grade gangster shootout in double-breasted suits, is instead a shattering emotional experience, a fascinating film and — oddly enough — an important motion picture. (Elston Brooks, FWST, Sept. 15, 1967)
My guess is that Brooks was about 30 years younger than Payne and had little, if any, personal connection to the real-life outlaws who killed real people.
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The film ran up against a lot of studio problems. Warner Bros. head Jack Warner called it “the longest two hours and ten minutes I ever spent,” and the plan was to dump the movie in drive-ins and second-string-movie houses and be done with it. But producer-star Beatty was persistent and got it into the Montreal Film Festival where the positive reviews as well as the 9,000-word rave from Pauline Kael in The New Yorker assured it got the attention it merited. And it did. It was nominated for 10 Academy Awards and is considered a classic move of the 1960s.
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The movie had its Southwestern premiere at the Campus Theater in Denton in September, 1967. Watch (silent) news footage of the premiere from WBAP-TV (Ch. 5) at the Portal to Texas History, here (it begins about the 4:41 mark). Here’s a screen capture of Warren Beatty that day — also appearing were Michael J. Pollard and Estelle Parsons.
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One last little interesting tidbit was what happened after the movie wrapped production in Dallas. Warren Beatty donated the so-called “death car” to a local wax museum. Unfortunately for the wax museum, the car’s bullet holes had been filled in to shoot another scene, so the museum had to search for someone to professionally and authentically re-riddle the car with bullet holes.
It’s always something.
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Sources & Notes
Top dark and grainy photo of location shooting at Vickery Courts from The Campus Chat (newspaper of North Texas State University, Denton), Nov. 30, 1966.
Photos of Beatty and Dunaway in Lavon, Texas from The Wylie News, Oct. 20, 1966. An article and more photos from the set (local extras, etc.) can be found here and here.
Here’s a bonus Fort Worth Star-Telegram article on the fun and unusual bus trip that Beatty and other stars of the film took to some of the small towns they’d filmed in when they were back in the area for the local premiere in Denton (click to read):
FWST, Sept. 14, 1967
And a good overview of the making of the film can be found at TCM’s website here.
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Copyright © 2014 Paula Bosse. All Rights Reserved.
Flashback : Dallas 
Warren Beatty, meet with the men who shot Clyde Barrow at North Park for lunch to buy the copy right to the book that came out in the 1940’s that Hinton had co written I recall his son telling me, the place by Neiman,s at a Mexican cafe…..
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[…] a “from the vault” post I posted a couple of weeks ago on Facebook and Twitter — “The Shooting of ‘Bonnie & Clyde’ — 1966,” about the location filming in and around Dallas of the Warren Beatty/Faye Dunaway film. […]
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[…] “The Shooting of ‘Bonnie & Clyde’ — 1966″: The Bonnie & Clyde movie was shot in and around Dallas (hometown of Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow); this post has a couple of location photos, but for me it was most interesting to read local reviews of the movie, one obviously written by a man who clearly remembered what the “rat punks” were like in real life and was disgusted by the glamorization of the Barrow Gang in the movie. […]
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Speaking of false glamor, I came across an interesting contemporary description of both Bonnie Parker and the Trinity River in a collection of early writing for Vanity Fair. It’s worth a quote. In “The Moll in Our Midst” (1934), Stanley Walker wrote:
“Bonnie was a redhead, not unattractive in a freakish way, and easily recognizable by her striped sweater, which gave her the look of a slim hornet, an insect with which that female sharpshooter had much in common.
“Her background follows a familiar design; she was brought up in that section of Dallas, Texas, which borders on the foul swamps of Trinity River. . . .”
Oooh. Stop there. I love it. That would be the unreconstructed, unloved and un-promoted Trinity of my childhood. Walker gets some details wrong (Bonnie Parker was not a sharpshooter, and she insisted on her femininity: it outraged her that she got bad press about smoking cigars when she was only goofing for the camera). But the image of Bonnie Parker as a hornet rising from the fetid swamps of the Trinity River charms me.
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That is GREAT!
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This film also highlights the meaning of West Dallas, and ho they came from such while it is not a good backdrop to say how horrid it was back then,it was and so was the South End where Bonnie came from, Poverty in Dallas Texas in the 1930’s was bad…
.And the tabloids made very good of the day as did Radio and the Movies, how else did they Become Public Enemy Number ONE…..by the way Dillinger was shot by a Movie theater also in his last days….
.in or near Chicago…..and as the Silent Film began to talk with a bang as with Scar Face, the First Gangster film By Howard Hughes…. an…… So long live Bonnie and Clyde in their graves, far away they are buried in real life…..one day to be reunited……
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I lived on Park Lane near Greenville at the time they shot the movie. I was not quite 12 and we walked by the motor court every day on the way home. We received a notice at home not to worry about the machine gun noise we would be hearing while they were shooting at night. I always heard that Bonnie attended the same elementary school I attended — the original Vickery School, which was torn down some years ago. Sadly there is nothing I can find on the Internet on the original school. Two story brick with radiators and ceiling fans. Fond memories of a simpler time.
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Pretty cool, Cathy. I don’t know whether you kept the machine gun notice, but it would be a pretty interesting thing to find in someone’s scrapbook! I think Bonnie Parker attended school in West Dallas — in Cement City. Here’s a photo: http://www.panoramio.com/photo/19014916
I’ve looked for photos of the Vickery school before but have had no luck. That’s a really interesting area (which people inevitably confuse with Vickery Park). You might enjoy this lengthy thread of people remembering (and misremembering!) Vickery here: http://phorum.dallashistory.org/read.php?2,67900,page=1
(Be sure to click to the next page at the bottom to see all six pages of comments.)
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I have a picture of Vickery Scool somewhere. I will post when I find it.
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That would be great!
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[…] historians at Flashback Dallas last year dug up a photo of the film crew at the Vickery Courts moto… at 6949 Greenville Avenue, just north of Park […]
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[…] historians at Flashback Dallas last year dug up a photo of the film crew at the Vickery Courts moto… at 6949 Greenville Avenue, just north of Park […]
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[…] The Shooting of “Bonnie & Clyde” — 1966: Tidbits about the Dallas-area filming of the Warren Beatty-Faye Dunaway movie classic. […]
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I worked at Bill Stokes Associates/The Stokes Group, now Post Asylum for 6 years and legend has it that Gene Hackman based his character of Buck Barrow partially on Bill Stokes who was a horse trader (he raised Arabian horses) and quite the character himself! The soundstage at Stokes where interior scenes for the film were shot was essentially unchanged for 30 years, until they had to take some of the space for new digital editing suites! Bill’s son, Don, is still around and involved in production through the Dallas Producers Association.
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Thanks, Paul!
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