Hollywood from the AV to the High Sierra
On a recent trip to the Eastern Sierra town of Lone Pine, everywhere we stayed and visited reminded me of Hollywood’s connections to the Antelope Valley and history of the movies from the earliest days.
Keep scrolling on any of the streaming services and sooner, rather than later, you will hit any number of John Wayne movies, most notable among them “Stagecoach,” from 1939, which made “The Duke” a breakout star after a dozen years of old white hat-black hat Westerns. Also, the other John Ford classics like “Fort Apache” and “She Wore a Yellow Ribbon.”
People who lived here for generations before the population boom of the 1980s and 1990s, recall Wayne wasn’t always Wayne. He was born Marion Morrison, raised by itinerant farmers who had a hard time finding fortune in the Antelope Valley coming from Iowa.
A pre-teen, Marion rode a swayback horse in the desert and attended Lancaster Elementary School.
After jackrabbits ate the family crop, the Morrisons moved to Glendale. Wayne played football for USC and changed his name to John Wayne for better theater marquee appeal, on the urging of his mentor, film director John Ford.
Movies and mountains put the family driving vacation in the middle of the high country of the High Sierra.
My son Garrett, with wife Katharine and five-year-old Phillip, checked into the Best Western Frontier motel in Lone Pine, last week. Without realizing it, the adult son triggered my childhood memories, among them, of Roy Rogers and his horse Trigger.
My dad checked us into the same hostelry when I was 11, just steps away from where my son and his family stayed, keeping time on a driving vacation styled right out of the good old PostWWII years.
They stayed in “The Richard Widmark Room,” right down the walkway from, yes, “The John Wayne Room.”
“Never heard of Richard Widmark,” my son said.
On review of a few online Hollywood publicity photos, he recognized a guy who was once a leading man. He starred alongside Wayne in “The Alamo,” the only movie Wayne ever directed and that persuaded Hollywood not to let him direct again. Over budget. Under box office.
The magic of the driving vacation, for younger children, is the motel swimming pool. It was no less so at the Frontier Motel. Splashing into the pool with a “floaty vest” that had a black fin on it, straight out of “Jaws,” the grandson paddled.
From the pool, we could gaze up to see the sun setting on the tip of Mt. Whitney.
Hotel swimming, combined with purple shadow sweeping across the continental United States’ highest mountain ... Sweet.
The next day, we were off to the tumbled rock formation of the Alabama Hills, a short drive from Lone Pine and scene of dozens of movies. Lone Pine hosts The Western Film History Museum nestled along US 395, which I wrote about for the Valley Press and Associated Press and somehow, never got to visit.
This time, we made it, with my grandson Phillip gazing up at the “Jawas” from “Star Wars,” parts of which were filmed out there. I took in Humphrey Bogart’s fully restored roadster from “High Sierra” and multiple posters of one of my favorite noir thrillers, “Bad Day at Black Rock.” It was a good day in Lone Pine, remembering how movies touch us no matter when we are born.