The strange reason why ‘Oklahoma!’ was not actually filmed in Oklahoma
When Rodgers and Hammerstein wrote their hit 1943 Broadway musical Oklahoma!, they couldn’t have been more obvious with their use of an exclamation point to emphasise the importance of the show’s significance to the South Central US state.
Given how much money there was in adapting popular musicals into films during the 1950s, it was almost inevitable that the stage show would eventually be transferred to the silver screen. Fans of the show were hotly anticipating seeing how director Fred Zinnemann would choose to depict the luscious green pastures of the state’s farmlands where the story takes place, as were Oklahomans who were simmering with excitement at their home state being at the centre of attention.
There had been significant interest in adapting Oklahoma! for the screen ever since its Broadway debut, but it wasn’t until 1953 that the rights were officially granted to the Magna Theatre Corporation. With that, production began almost immediately, with the film arriving in cinemas in 1955, but those expecting to see Oklahoma itself were left significantly underwhelmed, owing to the fact that not a single scene was shot within the state’s borders.
The issue was that Oklahoma, as a region, had undergone a relatively significant industrialisation over the course of half a century, with the story having taken place in 1906, a year before it was even recognised as a state in its own right. By this point, the landscape that the characters would have lived in had now been surrounded by oil wells, power lines and tall buildings, none of which would have been possible to remove during edits to create an authentic setting.
Instead, the studio opted to relocate to Arizona after a lengthy scouting process, noting how the state had plenty more to offer in the way of its landscape. The production of the film would eventually decamp to the state’s San Rafael Valley, where the cast and crew could easily travel to surrounding locations that boasted other remote settings that boasted far more rural charm than 1950s Oklahoma was able to offer.
However, anyone with a keen eye for topography and a knowledge of agricultural practices would have been able to tell that Oklahoma! was not filmed in Oklahoma – for starters, much of the backdrop in Arizona was far more mountainous than the comparatively flat surroundings of the story’s setting, and on top of this, the fact that the story is set on a corn farm meant that producers had to transport stalks of corn via flatbed trucks all the way to the shooting location a year before filming began to give it even the slightest chance of growing to the height that one would expect in Oklahoma; a height it never quite managed to reach.
The sound stage, interior and backlot shots of the film also weren’t shot in Oklahoma, nor were they shot in Arizona. Due to the production’s insistence on undertaking principal photography using both the brand new Todd-AO process as well as in CinemaScope, MGM Studios in California had to be used in order for their precise technical specifications to be met.
Despite the fact that we’re told not to believe everything we see in films, location supervisors have a long history of choosing to shoot films in places far from the supposed setting and then trying to cover up the fact. Many westerns were famously shot in Almeria in the South of Spain, but none of them went to the ridiculous effort of hiding this. In the case of Oklahoma!, no press for the film, nor the official historical societies of either state, has any record of this ever taking place.
Virtually everything else about the film adaptation is accurate to the original Broadway musical, with Rodgers and Hammerstein personally ensuring that no changes were made to the songs or general plot. The location, however, clearly didn’t seem to matter to them. They may as well have renamed it Arizona! if we’re being perfectly honest.
