Paramount Ranch: A Movie Ranch in the Santa Monica Mountains, and a Fellow's Interview

Paramount Ranch, in Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area, is the National Park Service's only site dedicated to telling the story of American filmmaking, past and present — and it is still a working movie ranch where the public can watch films being made.

A studio's backlot

• In the late 1920s, Paramount Pictures bought 2,700 acres in the Santa Monica Mountains for a movie ranch.
• From 1927 to 1943 the studio made more than 130 films there.
• The ranch stood in for the American West and the eastern United States, and for places around the world — South America, Africa, Europe and Asia.
• Westerns of the 1950s on television also made use of its natural landscapes.
• The National Park Service bought the ranch in 1980, two years after Congress established the national recreation area.

The landscape as a character

The ranch is surrounded by varied ecosystems, and several miles of easy to moderate trails pass through chaparral, riparian and valley oak savanna plant communities. That landscape, more than any set, was the real star: it let filmmakers conjure distant places without leaving the Santa Monica Mountains.

A fellow's interview

On August 29, 2023, Abby Stone Lauer, a fellow in a Public Land Corps project, interviewed Mike Malone, a former volunteer coordinator for the recreation area who had become a park volunteer and local historian at the ranch. He described the ranch's filming history and its connection with the Park Service, suggested ideas for future programs, and afterwards sent her sources, including the ranch's cultural landscape report and a history of the studio. From the interview and that research she wrote a public program on film and the ecosystems around the ranch.

More: plan a visit to Paramount Ranch · Paramount: past, present and future.

Sources

Based on "Paramount Ranch Interview," by Abby Stone Lauer, part of the series A Day in the Life of a Fellow, National Park Service; a work of the United States government in the public domain, rewritten in hubnx's own words. Its photograph of the ranch, credited to the author, is not reproduced.