Paramount Movie Ranch

"Paramount Ranch" redirects here. For Paramount Ranch Racetrack, see Paramount Ranch Racetrack.
Paramount Ranch
General information
TypeFilm and television production studio
Location2903 Cornell Road
Agoura Hills, California
60618
Coordinates34°07′05″N 118°45′09″W / 34.1181°N 118.7525°W / 34.1181; -118.7525
Opening1927
Owner

Paramount Ranch is a historic movie ranch and public park located in Agoura Hills, California. It is owned by the United States National Park Service and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places as a historic landmark.

History

In 1927, Paramount Studios purchased a 2,700-acre (11 km2) ranch on Medea Creek in the Santa Monica Mountains near Agoura Hills, between Malibu and the Conejo Valley. The studio built numerous large-scale sets on the ranch, including a huge replica of early San Francisco, an Old West town, and a Welsh mining village (built by 20th Century Fox for How Green Was My Valley (1941), and later redressed (with coal mine tipple removed) as a French village for use in The Song of Bernadette (1943), and again used for The Inspector General (1949)). Western town sets posed as Tombstone, Arizona, and Dodge City, Kansas, as well as Tom Sawyer's Missouri, 13th-century China, and many other locales and eras around the world.

It is now Paramount Ranch Park in the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area. The National Park Service took over a section of the lot in 1980 and restored the sets, working from old black and white photographs. The NPS website lists movie and TV productions filmed there. The Western Town was constructed during 1954 when Paramount purchased (Academy Award-winning) sets previously used at RKO Pictures Encino Movie Ranch, and was a location for some of the era's popular TV Westerns, including The Cisco Kid and Gunsmoke. This remaining set of buildings continued to be used in filming, notably for the Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman television series and the HBO series Carnivàle, and more recently Westworld.

Paramount Ranch was also used as the primary filming location for the 2010 revisionist Western comedy film Big Money Rustlas produced by Psychopathic Video, the home video production arm of the Psychopathic Records label owned by the Insane Clown Posse.

Paramount Ranch was most recently used as a filming location for The Mentalist, Weeds, The X-Files, Hulu's Quickdraw and season 3 of Escape the Night, a YouTube Premium show by Joey Graceffa.

The Paramount Ranch was also the home of the original Renaissance Pleasure Faire of Southern California from 1966 to 1989, the home of the Topanga Banjo•Fiddle Contest, held each May, and the eponymously titled Paramount Ranch, an alternative art fair founded from 2014 to 2016.

The Paramount Ranch structures suffered near-total destruction during the November 2018 Woolsey Fire. By that time, it was managed by the National Park Service, but some filming had been done here for Westworld Seasons 1 and 2. Parts of the 2015 movie Bone Tomahawk were filmed here. The National Park Service launched a campaign on November 16, 2018 called The Paramount Project, to aid in the reconstruction efforts to rebuild Paramount Ranch.

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 Sollly, Meilan (12 November 2018). "100 Years of Hollywood History Lost as California Inferno Destroys Paramount Ranch". Smithsonian.com. Smithsonian Institution. Archived from the original on 27 November 2018. Retrieved 26 November 2018.
  2. 1 2 "Paramount Ranch Road ≈(off Cornell Road), Agoura Hills, CA. / (818) 597-9192". www.seeing-stars.com. Retrieved 2024-01-25.
  3. ↑ Calabasas, Mailing Address: 26876 Mulholland Highway; Us, CA 91302 Phone: 805 370-2301 Contact. "Paramount Ranch - Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area (U.S. National Park Service)". www.nps.gov. Retrieved 2024-01-25.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)
  4. ↑ "Psychopathic Records and Juggalo Ringmasters The Insane Clown Posse Team with Short Dog, Inc. to produce "BIG MONEY RUSTLAS!"". PR Web. February 11, 2009. Archived from the original on March 16, 2022. Retrieved 23 February 2009.
  5. ↑ Dominic, Serene (October 29, 2008). "(Not) just a juggalo". Metro Times. Archived from the original on 3 November 2008. Retrieved 2008-10-30.
  6. ↑ "Topanga Banjo Fiddle Contest and Folk Festival". Topanga Banjo Fiddle. Retrieved 2024-01-25.
  7. ↑ "Paramount Ranch, LA's Newest Fair". artnet News. 2015-02-01. Archived from the original on 2019-01-14. Retrieved 2019-01-14.
  8. ↑ "Paramount Ranch Hosts New Art Fair". The Hollywood Reporter. 30 January 2014. Archived from the original on 2019-01-14. Retrieved 2019-01-14.
  9. ↑ "Big Collectors Head to Paramount Ranch 3". artnet News. 2016-01-31. Archived from the original on 2019-01-14. Retrieved 2019-01-14.
  10. ↑ Hibbard, James (November 9, 2018). "Certain Westworld sets burn down in California wildfire". Entertainment Weekly. Archived from the original on November 10, 2018. Retrieved November 9, 2018.
  11. ↑ "Paramount Ranch, Location For HBO's Westworld and Countless Movies, Burns to the Ground". Gizmodo. 2018-11-10. Retrieved 2024-01-25.
  12. ↑ "Campaign Launched to Rebuild Paramount Ranch". US National Park Service. November 16, 2018.