How the Garcia Girls Spent Their Summer gets its limited-release debut this Friday, after two years of lingering on the festival circuit without a distributor.  Although some critics have praised its good-natured look at sexuality and overall sunny demeanor, it's likely that the real reason Georgina Riedel's feature-length debut is finally seeing the light of day is the newfound TV stardom of its lead actress, America Ferrara.  Still, the reason I want to see it is simple:  it's set in Arizona.  I was born and raised in Phoenix, at a time when everyone from there was from somewhere else, and while I don't really miss the place, I still have that hokey boosterism that makes me raise an eyebrow whenever I hear a movie or television show is set there or filming there.  During the early days of Hollywood, the movie business was obsessed with the 48th state -- largely because it had only recently become a state.  It was the last of the frontier, the final remnant of the proud plains and deserts of the New West, and while the vast majority of the western shoot-'em-ups set in Arizona were really made on a back lot five blocks from La Cienega Boulevard, there's still plenty of movies out there claiming Arizonan provenance.  As the state has morphed into Southern California's bedroom annex, with all the strip malls and chain stores that implies, there's continued to be a few standout films that use the Grand Canyon State as their setting; here's five of them.

IN OLD ARIZONA (1929)

The filming of this early classic western didn't get within 300 miles of Arizona, but like a lot of early cowboy pictures, it's set there.  In Old Arizona has a lot of the corny qualities that modern audiences associate with this era of filmmaking, but it's worth seeing -- and historically significant -- for a number of reasons.  The first full-length talkie ever released by 20th Century Fox, it was also the first talking picture to be filmed outdoors.  Director Raoul Walsh was set to play the lead himself, but a car accident robbed him of the chance, and cost him an eye, leading to the eyepatch that became his tradmark in later years; his replacement was Warner Baxter, who won only the second Best Actor Oscar in history for his performance as the Cisco Kid.  Finally, the movie has a memorable twist ending that sets it apart -- courtesy of the original story, by O. Henry.

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It may not be the most glamorous career in Hollywood, but without dialogue coaches, we'd have a lot more Kevin Costner movies to contend with.  As part of its occasional  "Working Hollywood" series on the people in the industry who do the jobs that won't land you on the cover of Entertainment Weekly, the Los Angeles Times profiles Francie Brown, who came to southern California to act and ended up helping other actors to embarrass themselves, and us, a little less.

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In our ongoing efforts to give our readers what they want, this week we're premiering a weekly column called DVD Digest, a roundup of the week's notable Region 1 DVD releases that will run every Tuesday morning. DVD Digest is not meant to be a comprehensive list of new offerings on DVD, but should work as a convenient rundown for anyone going DVD shopping.

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In Slate, Brett Sokol explains how a recently remade Western added a word to the Cuban lexicon. "Take a walk down any of Havana's main thoroughfares," he writes, "and you'll hear American visitors hailed as yumas, while the United States itself is affectionately dubbed La Yuma." This is a spin on the term "La Yunay", which was, back in the bad old Batista days was inspired by the omnipresent United Fruit Company but was the closest most Cubans could come to saying "United." Cuban audiences were nuts about American Westerns, though, and when the original 3:10 to Yuma played Havana, Cubans looking for a catchy slang terms for Americans were quick to trade up to "Yumas," which was similar to "Yunays" but more lovable in its associations. Castro's government eventually mostly banned American Westerns from Cuban screens in favor of ideologically pure entertainment from the Soviet bloc. But by the late 1970s even Fidel must have been getting sick of movies starring tractors, because the freeze on American pop culture thawed a bit, and both 3:10 to Yuma and the slang word it had inspired made a comeback.

For Elmore Leonard, on whose novel of the same name the film was based, this is all just a reminder of how fluky pop culture can be: he simply picked the name "Yuma" because that's where the prison was. Of course, that was in another lifetime, before he figured out that the big money for him was never going to be in writing Westerns; back in 1957, he scored $4,000 for the screen rights, with a clause assuring him another $2,000 if the story was filmed again. His feelings about the remake? "My agent is working on getting me that two grand." — Phil Nugent