In this feature-length examination of the role places play in storytelling, travel author Rolf Potts examines how the state of Kansas has been imagined, mythologized, and distorted in cinema and television for more than a century.
Following in the tradition of Thom Andersen’s Los Angeles Plays Itself, Potts turns his lens toward his own home state to examine a cinematic paradox: While Kansas has long occupied a symbolic space in American storytelling, it almost never appears as itself. From The Wizard of Oz to Superman and Capote, Potts reveals how Kansas, often used as archetypal visual shorthand for “home,” “the Heartland,” or “Middle America,” has rarely been employed as an actual filming location.
Blending archival film clips, historical analysis, and deeply personal narration, Kansas Never Plays Itself traces how cinematic shorthand shapes our collective imagination. The video essay invites viewers to reconsider what it means for a location to “play itself” — and what’s lost when the real landscapes and communities behind our most beloved stories remain unseen.
Reviews:
“Kansas is Rolf’s launch point, how it lives in the American imagination, which, he proposes, is as a kind of footnote to the movie The Wizard of Oz. …The thesis is larger, a meditation on place and identity, which more than once brushes up against the ideas of Barthes and Baudrillard. …Rolf’s whole presentation argues that the myriad media representations, stylized and exaggerated, have in fact decertified, altering our sense of place to the point where it’s a kind of chimera we live in, less and less able to conceive the world as it was before there was the reproduction of images.”
—Gutenberg Elegies author Sven Birkerts, on Substack
“[Potts] leads with the question of sense of place, but ends up tackling all sorts of problems of representation: How generic attempts to evoke place fail to be a stand-in for the particular, and how investing in the particular can actually form a bridge for different people to connect to something broader.”
—Chilean-Canadian multidisciplinary artist Beatriz Herrera
“The idea of how movies see places in America they don’t really understand has pretty much never been addressed better than Rolf does [in Kansas Never Plays Itself].“
—Brat Pack America author Kevin Smokler
Chapters:
0:00 – Intro: Not in Kansas Any More
Movies and TV shows mentioned: The Wizard of Oz (1939); Showdown at Abilene (1956); Gunsmoke (1955-1975); Dances with Wolves (1990); Kansas (1995); Capote (2005); The English (2022).
2:00 – Part 1: No Place Like Home (or, Hollywood can’t tell the truth about places)
Movies and TV shows mentioned: Suits (2011); Law & Order: SVU (2006); Elementary (2019); The Affair (2014); Slumber (2017); Vancouver Never Plays Itself (2015); Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003); Panic in the Streets (1950); Wichita (1955); Stark: Mirror Image (1986); Seinfeld (1992); Planes, Trains and Automobiles (1987); The Ice Harvest (2005); The Beach (2000); Mutiny on the Bounty (1962); Brigadoon (1954); Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989); Star Wars: A New Hope (1977); Game of Thrones (2012); The Game Camera (2025).
15:05 – Part 2: Why Place Matters (or, The Wizard of Oz and Superman might be a little bit racist)
Movies and TV shows mentioned: The Wiz (1978); The Wizard of Oz (1933); The Wizard of Oz (1925); The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1910); Oz the Great and Powerful (2013); Wicked (2024); Smallville (2001); Superman IV: The Quest For Peace (1987); Man of Steel (2013); The Music Man (1962); Meet Me in St. Louis (1944); Gone with the Wind (1939); Swing (1938); Birthright (1939); Lying Lips (1939); Shaft (1971); The Learning Tree (1969); Oscar Micheaux documentary (2021); Adventures of Superman (1952–1958); Superman (1978).
32:25 – Part 3: Why Location Matters (or, How movies lie when depicting places)
Movies and TV shows mentioned: Office Space (1999); Swingers (1996); Little Shop of Horrors (1986); Avatar (2009); The Matrix (1999); The Breakfast Club (1985); Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986); Splendor in the Grass (1961); Picnic (1955); Stand by Me (1986); Kansas (1988); Paper Moon (1973); In Cold Blood (1967); In Cold Blood TV miniseries (1996); Capote (2005); Infamous (2006); Smoke Signals (1998); Geronimo (1962); Navajo Joe (1966); Masterson of Kansas (1954); Buffalo Dance (1894); Last of the Renegades (1964); “Keep America Beautiful” PSA (1971); In the Land of the Headhunters (1914); Among the Cannibal Isles of the South Pacific (1918); The Rider (2017); Reservation Dogs (2021-2023).
54:15 – Part 4: Why Kansas Matters (hint: it’s because all places matter)
Movies and TV shows mentioned: He Got Game (1998); Crooklyn (1994); Do the Right Thing (1989); Lady Bird (2017); Boogie Nights (1997); Citizen Ruth (1996); Election (1999); About Schmidt (2002); Jayhawkers (2014); Ninth Street (1999); Destination Planet Negro (2013); The Incredible Brown NDN 2 (2020); Dancing on the Moon (2003); The Dead Can’t Dance (2010); Unsurety (2022); Fear Not (2020); Somebody Somewhere (2022-2024); 42nd Street (1933); King Kong (1933); Citizen Kane (1941); Guys and Dolls (1955); Sweet Smell of Success (1957); The French Connection (1971); Dog Day Afternoon (1975); Annie Hall (1977).
1:09:00 – Postscript and end credits
Full text transcript to Kansas Never Plays Itself (video essay).