The “King” of Texas Filmmakers: King Wallis Vidor (May 20, 2026)
by Scott Sosebee
Hollywood, of course, is not in Texas, but one could perhaps argue that without Texas the center of American filmmaking would be a little less than it is. According to one film historian, Texas as a movie setting has shaped the core of American film, particularly since the plurality of the industry’s most singularly iconic form—the “western”—were set in Texas. The Lone Star State has also had its share of notable and award-winning film directors, innovators such as Terrence Malick, Wes Anderson, Helen Catherine Hardwicke, and John Lee Hancock. Such a list could go on for pages, and one name that would dominate it is a Texan that perhaps few know, the “godfather” of Texas filmmakers: King Wallis Vidor.
Vidor’s father, Charles Shelton Vidor, was prominent in his own right. Charles Vidor owned the Miller-Vidor Lumber Company, one of the foremost of the lumber companies that had begun to exploit the vast forests of East Texas. The town of Vidor was named for him, even though the name of the town and the family pronounce their names’ differently (the city is said with a long “i,” while the family name’s first syllable is “VEE”). Galveston native Charles married Katie Lee Wallis, a member of a prominent Galveston family, in 1890, and the couple welcomed their first son—who they christened “King Wallis”—in 1894, an apropos year since that was when the first paid movie theater opened in the United States.
The nascent industry of film called to the young Vidor early in his life. When he was fifteen, he went to work as a ticket taker and sometimes projectionist at Galveston’s Globe Theater on Market Street. His experiences at the Globe set him on his path. He made his first “film” in 1909 with his best friend George Roy Clough (who would later serve as Mayor of Galveston) when he filmed a storm surge that hit buildings along the then new Seawall. He would eventually make a longer film about the Galveston Hurricane of 1900, which his family survived, that allowed him to open his first movie company, Hotex, in Houston in 1915. His new company became almost instantly successful, which allowed him to return his family to financial security after the slow-down in the East Texas lumber industry had greatly diminished his father’s company. The new company made a few small films in and around Houston, but soon Hollywood called and Vidor moved his company to California.
His first full-length film after the move, The Turn in the Road, became a box office hit that set one of the patterns that he would follow throughout his career. He enjoyed making “epics,” grand sweep films quite often of a religious nature. The Turn in the Road, for example, is the journey of a family toward spiritual happiness and is largely based on the premises of Christian Science, of which Vidor was an adherent. He also directed taut dramas as well as comedies, but his overriding theme was “ordinary people doing extraordinary things.” He made the first production that depicted the lives of the “grunt” infantry man in The Big Parade, and became the first major director to make a film about African Americans with 1929’s Hallelujah, which he based on the African American communities and towns he had encountered during his travels to the lumber camps with his father when he was young. He made the movie with an all-Black cast instead of white actors in “black face,” unheard of in Hollywood of the 1920s.
The transition from silent films to “talkies” ended a number of directorial careers, but Vidor made the switch almost seamlessly. He made some of his most celebrated films during this initial period in the 1930s. The Champ in 1931 told the poignant story of an alcoholic fighter (Noah Beery) of no renown who came out of retirement in order to win the respect of the son (Jackie Cooper) he has neglected. Stella Dallas (1937) began the rise of stardom for Barbara Stanwyck when she portrayed a working-class mother who sacrifices most of her life for her social-climbing daughter. Perhaps his most noteworthy of the period, though, came in a film in which he received no credit. Victor Fleming directed two of the most anticipated films of 1939: The Wizard of Oz and Gone With The Wind. Such a situation caused him to do much of the work on the two at the same time, so when he was called away to work with Vivian Leigh and Clark Cable on Gone With The Wind, MGM called in Vidor to film all of The Wizard of Oz’s black-and-white scenes.
Vidor was already a famous name as the 1940s began, but that decade would bring him to new heights. He would direct what many consider his “masterpiece” in 1946: Duel in the Sun. The film told the story of a Texas family dynasty, the McCanles. The patriarch, played by legendary actor Lionel Barrymore, is a cruel man whose only purpose is to maintain a grip on the wealth, power, and status that his life as a large rancher has afforded him. He is particularly vicious to his disabled wife, Belle, a role filled by Lillian Gish. The family has two sons, Jess and Lewt. Jess (Joseph Cotton) is educated and kind, like his mother, while Lewt—played by a young Gregory Peck—is a ruthless ogre like his father and his rape of an orphan the family adopted frames the drama and murder that is the climax of the film. Critics praised the work, but the film’s dark themes were not a hit with audiences and led MGM to fire Vidor. He went to work for Warner Studios, where he made a number of other notable moves into the 1950s, including an epic adaptation of War and Peace (1956) and the huge box office hit Solomon and Sheba (1959), which was his last full-length film.
Vidor retired in the 1960s and taught filmmaking at UCLA until the mid-1970s. He had been nominated for Academy Awards five times during his career but had never won. The Motion Picture Academy did give him a Lifetime Achievement Award in 1978. The “King of Texas Filmmakers” died in Los Angeles on November 1, 1982.
The East Texas Historical Association provides this column as a public service. Scott Sosebee the Executive Director of the Association and can be contacted at sosebeem@sfasu.edu or via www.easttexashistorical.org.