Springfield Area Blog

5 Best 417-land Movie Mentions

Not quite a movie mecca, 417-land has still gotten some big-screen nods. Here are our are for the five best flicks with local ties.

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1. Waiting For Guffman (1996)

Movie Cliff’s Notes: Your standard, wacky Christopher Guest mock documentary (think Best in Show and This is Spinal Tap). Small-town Missourians put on a musical as a part of their town’s sesquicentennial celebration. Eccentric characters played by Guest, Eugene Levy, Parker Posey, Catherine O’Hara and Fred Willard have hopes of taking the show to Broadway.

417-land connection: Waiting for Guffman is set in fictional Blaine, Missouri. Although most major online map sites (Google, MapQuest, MSN) place Blaine on the northwestern edge of 417-land near Nevada, Missouri, Vernon County doesn’t have so much as a plat listed for Blaine. At the beginning of the film, actor Larry Miller, who plays the town’s mayor says, “There’s a saying in Missourah, ‘If you don’t like the weather just wait five minutes.’ In Blaine, with hard work, I think we can get that down to three or four minutes.”

In a deleted scene shown on the DVD extras, Willard’s character talks about his days as a baseball player in high school: “You know I came this close to playing professional ball. They had a tryout camp down in Joplin my senior year in high school, and I knew from the competition around here that no sweat, I’d be signed. But the tryout camp was cancelled, so I never pursued it any further. But I still have what I like to call the St. Louey Cardinals letter from Sam Breadon, the owner, expressing an interest in my playing ball for their organization. Actually, it wasn’t from him. It was from me to the Cardinals showing that I was really interested in playing for them. But there was always that connection with the Red Birds.”

2. The Bourne series (2002–2007)

The Bourne Identity (2002)
The Bourne Supremacy (2004)
The Bourne Ultimatum (2007)

Movie Cliff’s Notes: Matt Damon is an amnesiac on the run from the CIA. The agency changed his name from David Webb to Jason Bourne while training him to be a secret operative.

417-land connection: The devil’s in the details. If you’re paying attention to the quick cutaways of Jason Bourne’s passport, you’ll see Bourne was born David Webb on September 13, 1970 in Nixa, Missouri. (He is also, as shown on his dog tags in Bourne Ultimatum, a Catholic with type O-negative blood.)

3. Million Dollar Baby (2004)

Movie Cliff’s Notes: You know, the one all the reviews ran “SPOILER ALERT” next to. Hilary Swank boxes. Morgan Freeman is inspirational. Clint Eastwood directs. The Academy gives ovation.

417-land connection: The movie was adapted from the short-story anthology Million Dollar Baby: Stories from the Corner, whose author, F. X. Toole, was a longtime resident of the Ozarks. For the greater part of the ’90s, Toole lived on Bull Shoals Lake. The film’s heroine, Maggie Fitzgerald (enter Hilary Swank), is a female prizefighter in Los Angeles who hails from Theodosia—a town on Bull Shoals Lake that’s about 80 miles southeast of Springfield. Toole died in 2002 before seeing his writing adapted and without seeing the movie version take home the Academy Award for Best Picture. Eastwood also won the Oscar for Best Director

4. The Shepherd of the Hills (1941)

Movie Cliff’s Notes: John Wayne plays an Ozark Mountains moonshiner with some pent-up anger. Harry Carey arrives with some positive ideas to turn that frown upside down.

417-land connection: There’s nothing like a tagline that lists a film as “Fury in the wild Ozarks! Hatred unleashed on the Trail of the Lonesome Pine!” In book form, The Shepherd of the Hills was first of several books by Harold Bell Wright that sold a million copies. Wright, who lived all over the United States, was a preacher living in 417-land when he published the book in 1907.

Because the novel saw such widespread popularity and was set it Branson, it has been credited with jumpstarting the town’s tourism boom. The 98-minute flick, however, was filmed in Big Bear Lake, California. It’s also not bad to be connected to a little John Wayne history. The Shepherd of the Hills was the legendary cowboy’s first color film.

5. Road House (1989)

Movie Cliff’s Notes: The flick is set in Jasper, Missouri, where Patrick Swayze’s character is hired to settle a raucous crew of violent bar patrons.

417-land connection: A classic case of being so bad it’s good, Road House brings us Swayze as a bouncer extraordinaire at Double Deuce in Jasper, Missouri.

The movie wasn’t really filmed in Jasper, which in real life has a population of 1,001 and is located about an hour west of Springfield. A line in the movie talks about “calling a friend in the FBI in Springfield.”

Road House was nominated in several categories for the 1990 Razzie Awards, the self-proclaimed “dis-honors for [the] worst achievements in film.” Road House didn’t take home any Golden Raspberries, even though it was up for Worst Actor, Worst Director, Worst Picture, Worst Screenplay and Worst Supporting Actor.
 

Source:  417 Magazine