American Gam

“The difference between life and the movies is that a script has to make sense, and life doesn’t.” ~ Joseph L. Mankiewicz

While in Malibu we went for a hike in Malibu Creek State Park. This park is well known for its rich history of movie and TV productions being filmed here. It encompasses more than 7,000 acres of hiking, biking, camping and rock climbing territory within the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area. And in November 2014, another 700 acres opened to the public – land once owned by director James Cameron.

The first film shot here was Daddy Long Legs, a silent movie starring Mary Pickford, made way back in 1919. Over the ensuing years, more than a hundred movies and TV shows made use of this terrain, including Charlie’s Angels, Dr Quinn, Medicine Woman, The Rifleman, and How Green Was My Valley (1941), which won five Academy Awards including Best Picture – more than any other movie shot in Malibu Creek State Park.

The land was purchased by 20th Century Fox Studios in 1946 and over the next twenty-eight years, before the state of California bought this area and set it aside as parkland, the film studio used this location in numerous films and TV shows. Among them: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), Elvis’s Love Me Tender (1956), The Seven Year Itch (1955) starring Marilyn Monroe, Windtalkers starring Nicholas Cage (2002) and the 1960’s TV show Daniel Boone. A number of Tarzan movies, Pleasantville (1998), and Robin Hood: Men in Tights (1993) were also filmed here.

This is also where they filmed some of my childhood favorites: The original Planet of the Apes trilogy starring Charlton Heston.

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid jumped from that rock outcropping into Century Lake below…

But our goal on this day was to reach the site of the TV hit M*A*S*H, so we ventured onward, down the dirt roads, dusty trails, and dried up stream beds, only to find a dead end with no bridge to get us across Malibu Creek

That’s right! Our hope of visiting the set of the iconic TV show M*A*S*H was thwarted. The bridge was destroyed in the 2018 Wolsey Fire. They have a temporary metal bridge that they remove seasonally each Spring for fear of it being washed away during the rainy season runoff. As you can see…they haven’t put the bridge back in its place…yet. Perhaps another day we’ll bridge that gap.

It was a beautiful day for a hike. We got some exercise, fresh air in our lungs, plenty of sunshine, a film and television history lesson, some communing with nature, and some quality alone time. (They don’t allow dogs on the trails so Kodi stayed home to watch over the camp.) All in all, a pleasant and memorable day.

I hope you enjoy a good movie. 🎥

The gam continues…