Alabama Hills Sunrise
Hollywood Westerns Adventures
I recently returned from several days exploring California’s Owens Valley.
This week, I’m talking about the Lone Pine area.
How Many Westerns?
If the lead photo looks vaguely familiar, it should! Just west of the town of Lone Pine are the Alabama Hills. It was named after the Confederate ship, CSS Alabama, by prospectors who were sympathetic to the Confederate cause.
The Alabama Hills were the perfect silver screen backdrop for over 400 westerns made between 1919 and the 1960s.
The first known westerns filmed in the Alabama Hills are Water, Water Everywhere and Cupid, the Cowpuncher. Both were shot in 1919 and released in early 1920. Sadly, these films are lost. The oldest surviving film is The Round-Up (1920), starring Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle.
Other famous westerns filmed there include The Walking Hills, Yellow Sky, Springfield Rifle, The Violent Men, Bad Day at Black Rock, the Budd Boetticher/Randolph Scott "Ranown" cycle, How the West Was Won, Joe Kidd, and Django Unchained.
Nearly every major western actor of the 1930s, '40s, and '50s rode their horses in the hills. They include John Wayne, Gregory Peck, Gary Cooper, Gene Autry, Tom Mix, Randolph Scott, Robert Mitchum, William Boyd, Audie Murphy, and Roy Rogers.
Between 1949 and the late ’60s, more than 100 western television shows were on the airwaves. Many of them were shot in the hills. The Gene Autry Show, The Lone Ranger, Bonanza, and Annie Oakley are among those shot in the hills.
Once cowboy fever passed, other movies started to be filmed in the area. Blockbusters filmed here include Gladiator, Man of Steel, Iron Man, Tremors, Star Trek Generations, Disney’s Dinosaur, G.I. Joe, and Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen.
The Museum
If you’re in Lone Pine, be sure and visit the Beverly and Jim Rogers Museum of Film History located in town. The museum celebrates and preserves the diverse movie history of Lone Pine, Death Valley, and the Eastern Sierra.
Exhibits at the museum reflect the museum’s extensive collections and include early silent films, post-war films, science fiction and the many cowboy heroes who worked locally.
The Shot
This photograph is from my first trip to the Alabama Hills in 2009. It’s dawn and the low angle light of sunrise is painting the Sierra Nevada Mountains and Mount Whitney in brilliant orange alpenglow.
Thanks for looking,
Chuck Derus