Alabama Hills

Alabama Hills is Hollywood's oldest backlot — the rounded granite boulders and natural arches under the Sierra's jagged wall where four hundred Westerns got their landscape. The name came from the Confederate raider: prospectors sympathetic to the South named their claims for the CSS Alabama, and when the Kearsarge sank her, the Union men named a district and a town for the victor. The hills kept the loser's name.

The filmography is the file's spine — from the 1920 silents through Gunga Din, High Sierra, How the West Was Won, the Randolph Scott cycle, Joe Kidd, Maverick, Tremors, Django Unchained, and Iron Man, the boulders have been the West for a century of cameras. Mobius Arch framing Mount Whitney is the shot; Movie Road is the itinerary; the Lone Pine Film Festival still tours the locations every October.

The land holds the older history too — the 1872 earthquake fault runs through, the Paiute homeland under the Hollywood overlay, the arches and boulders the BLM now manages as a National Scenic Area. The file keeps the double exposure: the real Owens Valley landscape and the four hundred movies that taught the world what the West looked like — the hills that played more roles than most actors.

Alabama Hills is the archive's backlot file — the granite boulders under the Sierra where four hundred films shot the West, named for a Confederate raider, Mobius Arch framing the continent's highest peak.