'Outsiders' house: Tiny Tulsa museum draws big names

TULSA, Oklahoma (AP) — This summer, it was Leonardo DiCaprio. Then it was Green Day. A tiny museum in Tulsa, Oklahoma, dedicated to a movie classic and run by an entertainer, is drawing big names in the Heartland.

The Outsiders House Museum was created by Danny Boy O'Connor, formerly of the hip-hop group House of Pain. It's been a labor of love for O'Connor, who bought the house several years ago and renovated it.

The modest white bungalow with a wide front porch was used as a central set in the 1983 film “The Outsiders,” which was based on S.E. Hinton's classic 1967 novel of the same name.

“That was our ‘Gone with the Wind.’ That was our ‘American Graffiti.’ Every generation finds the cool archetypes of who we could be, and that for me was the movie,” O’Connor said in a recent interview inside the house. He said visitors have ranged “from 8 to 80 -- to everything in between. It’s usually the whole family. It’s a family museum.”

Director Francis Ford Coppola shot the film in Tulsa with a young cast of future A-listers, including C. Thomas Howell, Ralph Macchio, Matt Dillon, Diane Lane, Patrick Swayze, Rob Lowe, Emilio Estevez and Tom Cruise.

The museum also includes memorabilia from the film set, including furniture, photos, posters and the leather jacket worn by Dillon's character, Dallas Winston.

“The Outsiders” takes place in Oklahoma in the 1960s and features rival teen gangs: the Socs, short for Socials, and the Greasers. The house was home to the Curtis brothers and a hangout for their Greaser friends.

The building was in disrepair when O’Connor bought it back in 2015 after visiting the tenants and tracking down the owner. Before he embarked on the project, he hadn't been sure what he was going to do next, having plowed through most of his savings.

Still, when...