Did You Know?
Yancey Cravat, the character played by Richard Dix, was based on real-life lawyer and gunfighter Temple Houston - the son of Sam Houston, whom Dix played in Man of Conquest and upon whom the 1960s western TV series Temple Houston was based.
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One of the extras was Nino Cochise, the actual grandson of the great Chiricahua chief Cochise. He and his good friend Apache Bill Russell were in this movie as well as several others.
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The land rush scene took a week to film, using 5,000 extras, 28 cameramen, 6 still photographers and 27 camera assistants.
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According to Anthony Holden's book "Behind the Oscar" (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993), R.K.O. lost $5.5 million (approximately $58 million in 2003 dollars, when factoring in inflation) on the movie despite its winning a Best Picture Academy Award.
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The movie lost $565,000 on a budget of $1.433 million. It was re-released in 1935 and the red ink mostly disappeared off RKO's books.
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Arguably the only winner of the Best Picture Oscar to lose money during its initial release. The film received excellent critical reviews, but its initial financial failure was blamed on its being released during one of the darkest periods of the Great Depression.
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The only internally-produced RKO film to ever win the Best Picture Oscar. The Best Years of Our Lives (AA: Best Picture, 1946) was a Samuel Goldwyn production distributed by RKO.
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