Malibu has long been a getaway for film stars. On its beaches in the 1920s, one might have caught a glimpse of leading man Ronald Coleman surfing near his Malibu Colony home. Many others joined the “Lost Horizon” star: “It Girl” Clara Bow, Jack Warner, Harold Lloyd, Gary Cooper, John Gilbert, Gloria Swanson and more flocked to the relatively, quiet remoteness of Malibu’s beauty. (Of course, Malibu has drawn more than just the well known—many with families came here for its rural paradise beginning in the forties, including Reeves Templeman, former publisher of The Malibu Times newspaper, who worked at a local gas station to supplement his income from the paper. Gary Cooper would sit outside on a stoop at the station and chat with Templeman, stepping into the background when customers came around.)
Today, Malibu is still a prime draw for celebrities and business and entertainment moguls buying a first-time home, and even their second, third or fourth… (Oracle CEO Larry Ellison purchased five beachfront lots several years ago for a reported sixty-five million, plus two prime restaurant locations). The keyword for why they do buy here? Location, location, location …
That’s also the keyword for why production companies seek out Malibu to film on its premiere beaches and in its enchanting surrounding mountains.
Television shows such as the hit bathing suite series “Baywatch,” the most watched television show on the planet, have made extensive use of Malibu shores. “Baywatch,” of course, was not the first series to romp along Malibu’s seaside—James Garner’s “The Rockford Files” character lived in a trailer in a parking lot in Paradise Cove during the late seventies run of the hit series. And, of course, the legendary fifties teenage surfer girl movie “Gidget,” starring Sandra Dee and Cliff Roberston, was one of the first beach films that put Malibu, and Surfrider, on the big screen. The film “Back to the Beach,” brought “Beach Blanket Bingo” favorites Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello back to Malibu in 1987.
More recent films such as “Spanglish,” starring Malibuites Téa Leoni and Adam Sandler, which was shot in a beach home in the La Costa area, and the film “Broken,” (to be released in 2006) starring Heather Graham, shot on Westward Beach near Zuma, have taken advantage of the sereneness of Malibu’s coast as well. The latest big-time movie shoot (currently under production at the time of this writing) in town is “Fun With Dick and Jane,” starring Malibu’s own Jim Carrey and again, Leoni.
However, Malibu’s Mediterranean-like coastline has not always been the main draw for movie or television making. So important was an unspoiled wilderness setting for location filming during the Golden Age of Hollywood that two major studios — Paramount and 20th Century Fox — owned huge spreads near Lake Malibu (often spelled “Malibou”); both properties, in the industry terminology of the day, were called “ranches.”
It was in 1927 that Paramount bought a twenty-seven hundred-acre site complete with streams, canyons, and groves of trees, less than thirty miles from the studio in Hollywood (this was important as the studios had to pay union workers extra if they had to travel more than thirty-five miles from Hollywood). With the completion of an old Western street, followed by reproductions of early San Francisco and a couple European villages, it was perfect for filming such classics as the 1937 “Wells Fargo,” DeMille’s “Union Pacific” (1939) and “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” (1938), and the second version of the 1946 “The Virginian.” Several television Westerns of the 1960s— among them, “Gunsmoke,” “The Rifleman” and “Bat Masterson” — were also shot there. The place has passed for Tombstone, Arizona, Dodge City, Kansas, the Ozark Mountains and Tom Sawyer’s Missouri, even for thirteenth century China (the 1938 film The Adventures of Marco Polo” with Gary Cooper). Many of the biggest stars of the time trod the ranch’s dusty roads, from John Wayne and Cary Grant to Marlene Dietrich and Barbara Stanwyck.
By the 1980s, when the public’s interest in Westerns was dying and the ranch was used less and less, the site was transferred to the National Park Service’s Santa Monica Mountains National Recreational Area. Reduced to four hundred thirty-six acres, it is open to the public free of charge.
But filming continued as well on what is the only movie ranch owned by the federal government. Although it has been used in a number of projects (among them the 2001 season finale of “The X-Files”), from 1991 until 1998, with its Western town redressed as Colorado Springs in the 1860s, it was the location for CBS’s “Doctor Quinn, Medicine Woman,” which starred Malibu resident Jane Seymour.
Easily as famous as a Malibu-area location was 20th Century Fox’s nearby ranch at Malibu Creek State Park. The first known production filmed, in part, on the site, however, was one of MGM’s last silent movies, 1927’s “Annie Laurie” starring Lillian Gish. In 1936, the studio shot “Tarzan Escapes” on the ranch, with, of course, Johnny Weismuller in the starring role and Maureen O’Sullivan as Jane.
Fox didn’t buy the ranch until 1946, but actually started filming there in 1941 with the sentimental “How Green Was My Valley,” directed by John Ford with Maureen O’Hara and Walter Pidgeon, and “Brigham Young,” starring Dean Jagger, Vincent Price, Tyrone Power and Linda Darnell. Then 20th got busier, using the location for the 1943 film, “My Friend Flicka,” starring Roddy McDowall, 1948’s Cary Grant/Myrna Loy picture, “Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House” and “Viva Zapata,” made four years later with Marlon Brando and Anthony Quinn. This was followed by such hits as 1967’s “Dr. Dolittle,” with Rex Harrison, and the 1968 classic, “Planet of the Apes” with, of course, Charlton Heston and, again on the site, Roddy McDowall). The sea battle scenes for the 1963 “Cleopatra” film were shot in a huge shallow water tank built on the ranch; so were the Pearl Harbor attack shots for the 1970 “Tora, Tora, Tora.”
The ranch was purchased by the state of California in 1974 and opened as the Malibu Creek State Park two years later. But, as in the case of the Paramount Ranch, that didn’t mean that filming stopped. Beginning in 1972, Fox had begun filming exteriors at the ranch for a television series that remains one of the best in the history of the medium: “M*A*S*H” (the interiors were shot at the studio). In 2002, as part of the series’ thirtieth anniversary special, Alan Alda, who played Hawkeye Pierce, claimed the remoteness of the site (requiring portable electric generators, trucked-in water and meals, as well as portable toilets) actually added to the realism of a show whose storyline set it amidst daily hardships. The fire in the last episode of the series, “Goodbye, Farewell, and Amen”(one hundred thirty million viewers laughed and cried when the show aired in 1983) was also real; the producers had to add it to the storyline, and it also forced shooting to wrap early.
Today, the Malibu Creek State Park, dubbed “the Yosemite of Southern California” by Sunset magazine, boasts some ten thousand acres, including the Fox Ranch. It includes facilities for hiking, bird watching and horseback riding, and miles of streamside trails through the chaparral covered canyons. If you remember “M*A*S*H” well, you will be able to find the old helicopter pad – it’s about a two-and a-half mile trek from the parking lot. The park is about six miles up from Pacific Coast Highway on Malibu Canyon Road (if you reach Mulholland, you’ve gone too far).
Although some of Malibu’s residents and its City Council have complained about how filming here disrupts the peace and quiet, and causes traffic and parking problems, and they have tried to implement restrictive filming rules, it is doubtful that studios and filmmakers will give up on getting that “best shot” in paradise.