The Gal Who Took The West - 1949

Three Hours to Kill - 1954

Gunga Din - 1939
Alternate: 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7

From the "Calexico Chronicle" of June 7, 1933
Hoot GIbson and Ken Maynard to face off in National Air Races at Los Angeles

From the "San Pedro News-Pilot" of July 3, 1933
Hoot Gibson crashes in air speed race at the National Air Races just held in Los Angeles.

The Names Remain

From the "San Bernardino Daily Sun" of July 4, 1933
Hoot GIbson injured in National Air Races at Los Angeles

Hell Bent for Leather - 1960

Broken Arrow - 1950
James Stewart, Jeff Chandler, Debra Paget

Sets Still In Use

Usually, movie companies took down their sets as soon as filming was completed, selling or giving away the debris, much to the delight of Lone Pine residents.

Dr. and Mrs. George Shultz used the wood from the Rawhide stage station (Fox 1951) to build a cabin along Lone Pine Creek. Lumber from the Yellow Sky house and barn (Fox 1948) did double duty: it went into a new home for the Clarence Christenson family and a cabin for Don and Alice Homer. Paramount turned over its Star Trek V sets to Jodi Stewart and Mike Patterson to use renovating the old mining town of Cerro Gordo. And when Gunga Din's big native village of Tantrapur set was taken down in 1938, Russ Spainhower trucked remnants of that to his Anchor Ranch at the southern edge of town on U.S. 395 and began building the only permanent set Lone Pine had for years, a mission/hacienda/ranch house complex.

OLLP

Gregory Peck and Anne Baxter

Gregory Peck and Anne Baxter

Gregory Peck, Richard Widmark,
Robert Arthur,
John Russell , James Barton,
Charles Kemper

L/R: Leonard Nimoy, George Takei, Walter Koenig, James Doohan, DeForest Kelley, Nichelle Nichols, William Shatner

Jack Elam and Susan Hayward

Hugh Marlowe and Tyrone Power

Susan Hayward

The First Filming

To highlight the added historical significance of The Roundup, it is generally accepted that this was the first film made in Lone Pine.

Those scrapbook snapshots are dated January, 1920. In those early days, it was hard to avoid the movies in Lone Pine. Some of the companies would film town scenes right out on Main Street or on the side streets. The bank looked like a bank so they filmed bank robberies thee. Other companies (like Fox for its 1925 Tom Mix adventure, Riders of the Purple Sage) would actually cover real buildings with their own facades or put up false front buildings right in the middle of a street if that's what would look best.

So thee would be a lot to talk about at dinner - particularly if Dad or Brother did what so many of the young rancher-cowboys in and around Southern Inyo County did on those early cowboy pictures: they signed themselves (and their horses) on as background extras. And why not? It paid five dollars a day!

"And you earned it, I'll tell you," laughed Roy Cline of Bishop, who would later play one of John Wayne's vigilante "singing Riders" in 1935's Westward Ho (they wee the ones who wore white scarves and rode white horses so they would be quickly identified in a big fight with the "bad guys.")

"In the beginning," Cline told me, "they didn't haul the horses out, you'd ride 'em out. Ride one and lead six."

Henry Olivas - everyone called him "Leakey" - remembered it that way, too. "There were no paid wranglers in those days," he once told the Lone Pine Chamber of Commerce when it began preserving memories of the "movie days."

"After breakfast," he said, "you had to go to the corral, catch your own horse, saddle him and ride to location,. You worked all day, rode back at night and then took care of your own horse. No hired wranglers to do this for you (like now-a days)."

"And you really did it all for five dollars," Cline said. "You did a fall or rode or played one of the good guys and one of the bad guys, it didn't matter, it was everything for five dollars, sun-up to sundown. So seventeen of us formed the Inyo Riders Association and got a raise to $7.50. Then, when the Actors' Guild came in, it went to $11 for eight hours." And he laughed again.

"(You) did whatever there was to do," Henry Olivas said, "Wrangling, packing, be an Indian, I did it all. Sometimes I drove a dump truck or the water truck," he continued.

"When we did Army Girl (1938), Cline said, "there was one scene where we had to slide down those sand bluffs east of Lone Pine on our horses so they greased up some two-by-twelves and put 'em just under the dirt so the horses would slide better.

"In another shot in that picture," he went on, "one of our riders was a fella name Hardrock Jim. He wore these big thick glasses, couldn't see a thing without 'em and naturally, they didn't want him wearin' the glasses on camera so there we are, racin' along with this tank chasin' us right toward a four-inch cottonwood tree. That's where Hardrock and his horse parted company." Cline couldn't help laughing. "That night," he grinned, "he took his axe and went out there and took that thing down."

Even into the '50s, townspeople signed up as extras. "'Bout al you had to do was show up to be in a crowd scene," Rellis Arnick said. "On Brigham Young (1940), I think half the town was down thee for the river shots. And they almost roasted. Everybody was bundled up like it was winter and it was 100 in the shade!.

OLLP

From the Los Angeles "Daily Illustrated News" of July, 1933
Hoot GIbson escapes death

Glenn Strange, Frank McGlynn Jr., Sheila Bromley,
John Wayne

Sheila Bromley and John Wayne

Roscoe (Fatty) Arbuckle

Fatty Arbuckle and Mabel Julienne Scott

Courtesy - EMOVIE POSTER

11/24

Roscoe (Fatty) Arbuckle
(Photo courtesy of eBay)

From the "Madera Daily Tribune" of July 5, 1933
Hoot Gibson is improved following his crash at the National Air Races held recently in Los Angeles

From the "San Pedro News-Pilot" of April 21, 1928
Hoot Gibson suffers painful but not serious injuries when he is trampled by a horse stampede.