An Evening With Mark Archuleta

Name: An Evening With Mark Archuleta
Start: 2025-10-14T19:00:00-05:00
Location: Magic City Books

Schedule

Tue, 14 Oct, 2025 at 07:00 pm

UTC-05:00

Location

Magic City Books | Tulsa, OK

Magic City Books is happy to welcome Mark Archuleta for a free, in-store event to celebrate his latest book, The Reel Thrilling Events of Bank Robber Henry Starr, on Tuesday, October 14, 2025 at 7:00pm. This event will take place in the Algonquin Room at Magic City Books, 221 E. Archer Street in the Tulsa Arts District.
The Reel Thrilling Events of Bank Robber Henry Starr was published by University of North Texas Press on July 31, 2025, and you can purchase a copy through Magic City Books.
Note that you can order your book(s) in advance of the event. To start your order, add the book to your cart. If you would like your book personalized: in the "notes" field at check out, please indicate the name for personalization. If you prefer signature only, leave the "notes" field blank. We will make every effort to honor your personalization request, but we cannot guarantee anything beyond a signature.

About The Reel Thrilling Events of Bank Robber Henry Starr
In 1921, headlines across the country announced the death of Henry Starr, a burgeoning silent film star who was killed while attempting to rob a bank in Harrison, Arkansas. Cynics who knew the real Starr were not surprised. Before becoming a matinee idol, Starr had been the greatest bank robber of the horseback bandit era.
Born in 1873, Cherokee outlaw Henry Starr had survived shootouts and death sentences and lived long enough to witness the invention of moving pictures. In 1919, after Starr was released from the Oklahoma State Penitentiary, a hotshot movie producer convinced him he had the looks, charisma, and “wild and woolly” life story to become the next big movie star.
When filming began in 1920, powerful organizations aligned to censor Starr, attempting to prevent him from exposing Oklahoma’s corrupt legal system and the government’s mistreatment of the Cherokee. The Women's Christian Temperance Union pressured theater owners to ban his film, state and federal lawmakers drafted legislation to stymie theatrical distribution, and police and district attorneys threatened to send him back to prison.
Starr's only film, the biographical movie A Debtor to the Law, is lost to history, but through surviving memorabilia, newspaper accounts, and interviews with people who worked with him on set, author Mark Archuleta traces how the reformed gentleman bandit attempted to use the power of cinema to reframe his life story and redeem himself in the eyes of the public, his family, and the Cherokee Nation. The Reel Thrilling Events of Bank Robber Henry Starr is about more than heists and Hollywood glamor. Starr’s journey is about the American myth of reinvention, recidivism, and the founding of the motion picture industry when racial tensions were simmering to a boil.
About the Author
Mark Archuleta is an Emmy-winning screenwriter, journalist, and performer. A fifth-generation Coloradoan of Spanish Basque descent, he grew up steeped in the history of the American West and the colorful characters who inhabited it. Archuleta loves exploring how historical fact is refracted through the prism of film and television. He lives in Green Valley, California.