Paul "P.J." Lawton, a former Pima County detective, is now chief pyrotechnician and gunsmith at Old Tucson. He first encountered the town as a boy of 8 in 1958.

Benjie Sanders / arizona daily star

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The Duke is here, of course. So are William Holden, Greer Garson, Paul Newman, Lee Marvin and dozens of other Hollywood luminaries who once strode the dusty streets of Old Tucson.

All captured inside the pages of "Old Tucson Studios," a book of nostalgia-inducing photos put together by former Pima County sheriff's detective Paul "P.J." Lawton.

"The hardest part was limiting it to 200 photos," says Lawton, whose goal was to show movie stars and their Old Tucson backdrops together.

"I didn't want just photos of the stars, or just photos of the buildings," says Lawton, who now works as chief pyrotechnician and gunsmith at Old Tucson. As such, he designs special effects and runs live-action gunfights and stunt shows.

But it was his gunsmithing — and a rummaging pack rat — that would lead him to a treasure-trove of long-forgotten photographs.

"There's an old movie building. Half of it we took over as my office; the other half is for record storage," says Lawton. "A pack rat was stealing parts off my guns. I went looking for them."

He found them — and much more — next door. "It was floor-to-ceiling records. It was mostly old personnel records, invoices, all crumbling."

But also stacked there were about 20 boxes of old movie records, interspersed with photographs. "There were proof sheets, negatives and slides," says Lawton. Some had been nibbled by rats.

After gaining permission, he took the photos home and started going through them — all 2,000.

From them came his first book on the subject, "Old Tucson: Then and Now," which shows Old Tucson before and after the disastrous fire that swept through the town and soundstage in April 1995.

"Then I wanted to do a second book," says Lawton. He pitched the idea to Arcadia Publishers, whose Images of America series chronicles the history of towns or regions.

"They wrote back and said they don't do companies," says Lawton. "I said it's not a company, it's a town."

Sold.

Besides culling the photos to 200, Lawton also had to supply the captions for each one. Some of the information came from his own knowledge gained in conducting tours of Old Tucson over the years.

And much came from Bob Shelton, who in 1959 began turning a moribund Old Tucson into a booming tourist destination and prime movie location.

"I have four hours of taped interviews with him," says Lawton.

His first encounter with Old Tucson came back in 1958, when as an 8-year-old he visited the town during "Old Tucson Daze," run during those pre-Shelton days by the Tucson Jaycees.

In 1968, Lawton enrolled at the University of Arizona, majoring in range management. In the early '70s, he interrupted his education to join the Army's military intelligence branch as a Vietnamese linguist. "The Army taught me the language," he says.

After his tour in Vietnam, he returned to the UA, married and eventually took a job with the Sheriff's Department.

"I was there 25 years," says Lawton, whose work included working in narcotics and in the intelligence unit, investigating hate crimes and groups such as the Hells Angels and the Ku Klux Klan.

During that time he wrote "The Last Full Measure: Law Enforcement Deaths in Arizona."

For years, Lawton also did backstage theater work around town.

After retiring from the Sheriff's Department in 1998, he went to work at Old Tucson. "It was three years past the fire, and the town had been rebuilt," he says.

Well, yes and no. The soundstage was gone and with it a major impetus for making movies here in the desert.

Also gone were wardrobe and props valued at around $1 million.

Still, many of the adobe structures built for Old Tucson's first movie, "Arizona," filmed in 1940, were spared.

Since reopening in early 1997, Old Tucson has slowly worked to rebuild its reputation as a scenic shooting location.

"During the last two years, we've shot 35 to 40 projects, ranging from commercials to movies," says Frances Causey, film manager at Old Tucson Studios.

Lawton's been involved with some filming, too. "I did the props and gunsmithing for a couple of movies — none you've heard of."

Never mind. Chances are you will have heard of plenty of the movies — and their stars — in his new book.