Pictured at left are eight lobby cards (11" by 14") courtesy of Dave Hadsell

Movie Brochure, single fold, two panels each side, 10 1/2" tall, Photo courtesy Eric Tudor

Shown below are individual photos from xerox of this movie brochure.

Below is a smaller brochure (6-1/2" tall) advertising the 1919 silent movie, The Shepherd of the Hills.  In the extreme left panel we see Dad Howitt (the Shepherd) teaching Sammy Lane.  In the four left panels we see (L to R) 1. Shepherd and Aunt Molly; 2. Young Matt and maybe Sammy; 3. The Shepherd's artist son talking to Maggie, Matt and Mollie's daughter, before deserting her;  4. Old Matt or Jim Lane talking to Shepherd.

     In June, 2002 twelve unique postcards (plus 2 duplicates) stated to be from the 1919 silent movie, The Shepherd of the Hills, were offered on eBay.  The cards were purchased by Dave Hadsell, Gerry Chudleigh and Robert McCarty, and are shown below.  These are not publicity photos, but appear to be snapshots taken for someone's personal use.  The cards are quite worn, evidently from being looked at by many people over the last 80+ years.  All the cards are real photo, AZO, divided back, in the style that AZO used from 1904 to 1918.  None of the cards has any identification on the front or back, so the descriptions are my own.  For a more complete analysis of these cards click here.

After several weeks of furious discussion among Harold Bell Wright students and one graduate student producing a documentary about the Bald Knobbers, we have arrived at the almost-firm conclusion that these photos were taken in 1918 when Harold Bell Wright and a small production crew visited Branson to begin filming the first segments of the movie, The Shepherd of the Hills.

Rick Gunter, an expert in Harold Bell Wright movies, tells us Harold Bell Wright planned to shoot the 1919 movie in the Branson area, using much local talent.  But after only a few days of filming, Harold Bell Wright returned to California, promising that he would return to Branson in a few weeks to finish the movie.  But instead of returning a few weeks later, Wright sent a letter to the Branson newspaper , announcing that his production people decided it would be too expensive to produce the movie in Branson-- so they would film it in California.  It is our belief that the photos below are from the early footage shot in Branson.  Since no copy of this movie is known to exist today, there is no way to know for sure if any of these scenes appeared in the final 1919 movie. 

If these photos are early footage from the 1919 silent movie, The Shepherd of the Hills, they may be divided into two groups: 1) candid pictures of the crew and cast eating, standing around, and riding on a boat, and 2) re-enactments of events mentioned in the book as having happened earlier.  In the book, for example, Aunt Mollie tells the Shepherd some history of the area--about the Bald Knobbers, a vigilante gang that used to roam the hills at night, but was broken up years earlier by federal agents.  This history was important because Wash Gibbs, Jim Lane and their friends had been members of the old Bald Knobbers.  In a book history can be worked into the dialog, just as would be done in a modern movie.  But in a silent movie there is no dialog, so events that happened before the beginning of the story must be acted out on the screen.  Apparently, the 1918 shoot in Branson concentrated on background events that do not actually happen in the book, but are talked about.

1.  Without a magnifying glass, the thin man to the right of the camera appears to be Harold Bell Wright.  But if you click here you can see close-ups that have convinced most students it is not.  Rick Gunter believes the man to the left of the camera is the only cameraman Wright used at this shoot, E.J. Vallejo, and the other man may be the director, G. T. Gaskell, though we have no other photos of either man to compare.

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