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Ex-rapper turns old movie set into Tulsa museum Message from 'The Outsiders' captivated Danny Boy O'Connor BY TIM FARLEY
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Above, Danny Boy O’Connor inside the Outsiders house. ormer hip hop star Danny Boy www.theoutsiders.com O’Connor watched the movie “The Right, Gray Frederickson and director Francis Ford Copolla. Outsiders” when he was 13-yearsold and its message stuck with him. house used as one of the sets for the 1983 film. The movie
Decades later, he bought the north Tulsa house where much of the movie was filmed and turned it into a museum honoring the legendary flick that included a plethora of current day stars including C. Thomas Howell, Tom Cruise, Rob Lowe, Matt Dillon, Emilio Estevez, Patrick Swayze, Ralph Macchio and Diane Lane. The movie was directed by Francis Ford Coppola and produced by Gray Frederickson, who lives in Oklahoma City. But it was the movie’s message that attracted O’Connor, who made his home in Los Angeles until the big move to Tulsa where he and many volunteers would renovate the old 24 ion Oklahoma MAY/JUNE 2021
focused on two rival gangs in Tulsa during the 1960s – the poor lower-class greasers and the rich Socs, short for Socials. Issues of gang violence, underage smoking and drinking, foul language and family dysfunction permeated the book and movie and created public controversy. O’Connor, the former hype man for the hip-hop group House of Pain, has been a longtime fan of the film and S.E. Hinton’s novels, which include “The Outsiders.” “The movie mirrored my life in a lot of ways,” O’Connor said, referring to a dysfunctional family that included his father who was in prison at the time. “I became obsessed
