Lone Pine museum hails lost film era
By Sam McManis, Sacramento Bee
LONE PINE — These days, sad to say, movie location scouts are so eager to flee California for cushy tax enticements that they don’t even deign to shoot films supposed to be set in the Golden State on our terra bella.
Toronto is sometimes fobbed off as Los Angeles, Vancouver stands in for San Francisco. Heck, in the recent film “Kill the Messenger,” a scene in a Sacramento Capitol news bureau was filmed in Atlanta.
Atlanta? Really?
Ah, but once, there was a California town – mountainous and craggy, sandy and tumbleweed-strewn – that stood in for any hundreds of far-flung locales on the silver screen.
Need a place that can look like the Khyber Pass in Afghanistan (“Charge of the Light Brigade,” 1936) or maybe the vastness of the Himalayas (“Gunga Din,” 1939)?
Go to Lone Pine, the cinematic little town up Highway 395 in Inyo County.
The Lone Pine Film History Museum is fun. But please be sure to drive 12 miles north of Lone Pine on Hwy 395 and visit the Manzanar historic site museum. Unforgettable.