Our Paramount Ranch story begins with RKO Pictures 89 acre Encino Ranch developed in 1931 for production of the epic film Cimarron. The film was a huge success collecting Academy Award recognition for Best Picture and Best Writing, neither of which have anything to do with the ranch. We mention them because Best Picture is a big deal, and your scribe appreciates writing recognition. Ranch recognition came in courtesy of the award for Art Direction. Creative design of authentic sets including a western town. A town to take on star quality of its own in due course.

Encino Ranch set building didn’t stop at a western town. RKO built sets on the site including cityscapes of New York, English Row houses, slums, medieval Paris, and a Russian village. Other sets included a Yukon mining camp, Mexican outpost, and Saharan fort which brings us back to the western town. In 1954 RKO sold Encino Ranch for real estate development – think urban sprawl. Paramount bought the western town along with a few of its neighbors and moved them to Paramount Studios Movie Ranch.

Paramount established its movie ranch in 1927 on a 2,700 acre site on Medea Creek in the Santa Monica Mountains. There the Old West Town posed as Tombstone, Dodge City, and a Tom Sawyer Mississippi River town when it wasn’t hosting TV Westerns like Gunsmoke and The Cisco Kid. Other sets gave us a Welch mining village, add a little make-up and you have Bernadette’s French village. In fact those make-up tricks took the western town to thirteenth century China no less.

In 1980 The National Parks Service took over Paramount Ranch Park preserving the film sets as park features. Some filming continued at the park under NPS management including 2015’s Bone Tomahawk for any who remember our review of that ‘western’ adventure in cannibalism. I’d rather not. Fire destroyed most of the film sets in 2018.

Next Week: Wm S. Hart and Walt Disney and More
Return to Facebook to comment

Ride easy,
Paul