Why we love old movie locations — especially the Iverson Movie Ranch

For an introduction to this blog and to the growing interest in historic filming locations such as the Iverson Movie Ranch — the most widely filmed outdoor location in movie and TV history — please read the site's introductory post, found here.
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Wednesday, March 7, 2012

Off the Beaten Path: A tale of two filming locations

This post is a little off topic, as I usually focus on the Iverson Movie Ranch. But it concerns two filming locations that pop up regularly in many of the old Westerns and other movies that also feature Iverson: Vasquez Rocks and Corriganville.

Vasquez Rocks, Agua Dulce, Calif.

The above photo is a contemporary shot of the stunning Vasquez Rocks, just north of Los Angeles, located more or less between the Santa Clarita Valley and the Antelope Valley. In case you're unfamiliar with the rocks and their scale, it's a massive formation. If you click on the picture to enlarge it, you may be able to make out a tiny group of people near the middle of the shot, positioned atop the recessed portion of the rock.

Tiburcio Vasquez

The rocks are named after the bandit Tiburcio Vasquez, who, legend has it, hid out there in the 1870s. A great many movies and TV shows have been shot at the site over the years — not quite approaching the sheer volume of productions shot at Iverson, but still pretty respectable. Even today you can sometimes spot new TV commercials featuring the distinctively angular rocks of Vasquez. Car companies are especially fond of shooting their ads at the location.

Captain Kirk fights the Gorn at Vasquez Rocks in the "Star Trek" episode "Arena" (1967)

Among the hundreds of productions shot there, a few of the more famous ones are "Blazing Saddles," the "Flintstones" live-action films — where the rocks provide the backdrop for the town of Bedrock — and some episodes of the original "Star Trek" TV show.

Melody Ranch — before it was destroyed by fire in 1962

Santa Clarita Valley natives are rightfully proud of their area's movie history, which, like that of Iverson in Chatsworth, goes all the way back to the silent era. Unlike Chatsworth — where development took hold faster than it did in the more remote Santa Clarita area — the SCV still has a few working movie ranches, with Disney's Golden Oak Ranch and the rebuilt Melody Ranch among the main ones.

The Santa Clarita Valley Historical Society does a good job of getting the word out about the area's movie history, and a number of events take place regularly in the area — classes, tours, the Cowboy Poetry Festival, etc. — to help keep the legacy alive. This information is easy to find online, with the Historical Society's website a great place to start.


Promo still for "Death Valley Rangers" (1943): Incorrectly labeled on scvhistory.com

A while back I discovered a mistake on SCVHistory.com, where a 1943 photo of some early Western actors at Corriganville in Simi Valley, seen above, was attributed to Vasquez Rocks — about 35 miles away. Most site visitors would never notice the mistake, even though the rock formations don't look much like Vasquez Rocks. But any film location researcher familiar with Simi Valley and the Santa Susana Mountains — and there are a few of us — would easily recognize the rocky formation toward the left of the shot. The photo is a promotional still from the 1943 Monogram Western "Death Valley Rangers," shot at Corriganville.

Corriganville's Fort Apache, with Fort Apache Rock in background

The formation, which has been known as Fort Apache Rock for decades, is seen in the backgrounds of countless productions filmed at Corriganville. The above screen shot is just one example, from the 1952 Ben Johnson movie "Wild Stallion." Fort Apache Rock was easy to spot behind Corriganville's Fort Apache, as in the above shot, or looming over many of the movie ranch's chase roads. There's no mistaking that it's the same formation seen in the shot of the movie cowboys above it.

Interpretive sign at Corriganville

Underscoring the point that there's no question about this sighting, Fort Apache Rock even appears on one of those "interpretive signs" at the former site of Fort Apache, which is now part of Corriganville Regional Park. A couple of the other hills seen in the SCV Historical Society photo can also be seen here.



I made an attempt at the time to let the SCV Historical Society know about the mistake, but I never heard back. Nothing alarming about any of that — people are busy these days, and who has time for that sort of thing? Unfortunately, I soon realized that, as tends to happen in the digital age, the misinformation had already found its way all over the Internet.

John Boston's Santa Clarita Valley book, with the wrong photo on the cover

Sadly, one place the errant photo appears is right on the cover of what I'm sure is a terrific book, "Santa Clarita Valley," part of the "Images of America" series. Poor John Boston, author of the book. He's a highly respected SCV historian, known as "Mr. Santa Clarita Valley," and from all accounts, a great guy. And it doesn't seem to me that any of this is his fault. He apparently got his photos from the Santa Clarita Valley Historical Society, which is co-credited on the book. I'll just say that if I had written a book about, oh, say Chatsworth, and then found out the cover actually had a picture of Moorpark ... well, let's just say it would bug me.

Magic Johnson, focus of the "Magic Johnson Effect"

My heart goes out to the people involved in the book and the website. These kinds of mistakes are all too easy to make. The only way to be sure we avoid them would be to not do anything, and that's no good. I often cite as an example what I call the "Magic Johnson Effect." It's well-known that Magic led the Lakers to nine NBA Finals and five NBA championships during his Hall of Fame career, but it's less well-known that he also led the NBA in turnovers. The point is he made things happen, and when you do that, sometimes things go wrong ... and it's OK.

An argument could be made for keeping quiet about all this. After all, it's an unfixable problem, to some extent: The book's already out there, and the photo is all over the place, mislabeled as Vasquez Rocks. But as a historian, we are nothing if we are not accurate. I hope the people at the Historical Society, presumably also being historians at heart, understand this and don't mind finding out that they made a mistake ... and then more to the point, get to work on fixing it. Anyway, below is a link where you can buy the book off Amazon — maybe they'll change the cover for later editions and this one will end up being a collector's item.


Off the Beaten Path is a series of posts that are not specifically focused on the usual subject matter of this blog, the Iverson Movie Ranch. Past subjects have included Bell Ranch, Pioneertown and other old filming locations. You can go directly to the Off the Beaten Path posts by looking up the term "Off the Beaten Path" in the long index of labels at the right of the page, or by clicking here.

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