As H.I. says in the flick, this ain’t no Ozzie and Harriet. Parole Board, Gynecology Office & Elsewhere Old Phoenix City Hall, 125 West Washington Street “We got a name for people like you, Hi. That name is called recidivism.” Julie Asch Kareus Left: Holly Hunter in Raising Arizona. Above: Hunter off set with TJ Kuhn, who played Nathan Arizona Jr. Circle Films/20th Century Fox Coen from p 27 department until the production supervisor, Alma [Kuttruff ], kept saying, ‘Yeah, we need you.’” Connie Hoy, then a film student at Scottsdale Community College, was simi- larly persistent and was hired as a produc- tion assistant. “I kept showing up and asking to work until they took me on. You’re just a young kid who was getting into the biz and you didn’t want to ask too many questions. I was just a scared little film school student that just wanted to do my job,” she says. “As a PA, you’re doing whatever you can do to help out the crew. When there’s a guy shooting a gun at Nic as he’s running by, after they yell cut, you start sweeping up as they reload.” Debra Knoblauch, who worked on the Phoenix Film Commission for 30 years, remembers taking the brothers location scouting for the film. “We went around looking and found things that they liked. And then they brought out their art department and loca- tion manager and scout again, and kept working together to pin it down,” she says. Filming on Raising Arizona ran approxi- mately 12 weeks in locations across the Valley, from north Phoenix to Apache Junction, in desert landscapes and old- timey restaurants like the now-demolished Reata Pass Steakhouse in Scottsdale. Phoenix New Times is taking a tour of many of these same locations used in the film in honor of Raising Arizona’s 35th anniversary this week. It’s also a trip down memory lane, as we’ve spoken with a number of people involved on both sides of the camera for their recollections from those days. When Debra Knoblauch began reading Raising Arizona’s script and saw it called for locations like boardrooms and doctor’s offices, she had a suggestion: downtown Phoenix’s historic City Hall. Built in 1928, the former courthouse and onetime municipal hub was closed at the time and awaiting renovation, and had a number of official-looking rooms suitable for the Coens’ film. (It’d already been featured in a few movies, including 1981’s Used Cars.) “So we showed them that as a possi- bility, and they ended up using that as a cover set for a ton of locations if the weather was bad,” Knoblauch says. “They did the police station, the adoption agency, and a lot of other stuff there.” Linette Shorr remembers helping prep and decorate shooting locations at historic City Hall for filming. “It’s a very beautiful sort of Art >> p 33 29 phoenixnewtimes.com | CONTENTS | FEEDBACK | OPINION | NEWS | FEATURE | NIGHT+DAY | CULTURE | FILM | CAFE | MUSIC | PHOENIX NEW TIMES MARCH 17TH– MARCH 23RD, 2022
