Hikers Explore Franklin Canyon’s 'Movie Magic'

Picture Opie Taylor skipping a rock in the water during the opening credits of The Andy Griffith Show, Special Agent Gibbs investigating a car crash on NCIS or Capt. Kirk falling in love with an Indian maiden on Star Trek. There is one thing all these scenes have in common: They were filmed at  in Beverly Hills.

While Opie was supposed to be in North Carolina, Gibbs in Washington, D.C., and Kirk on an entirely different planet, Franklin Canyon Park has enough environments to provide the backdrop for these locations and more.

“That’s one of the reasons we’re so popular for shooting all different kinds of geographic areas,” Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy volunteer naturalist Diane Isaacs said. “You can pretend that you’re all around the world—everywhere from the Louisiana Bayou to the Pacific Northwest or even Europe—because of the different environments we have.”

Isaacs took visitors to the park on a “Franklin’s Movie Magic” hike Saturday for a firsthand look at its many filming locations. She has been leading the hike since graduating from docent training 15 years ago.

“Because I was in the motion picture industry, they thought I would be a good person to let people know about filming here at Franklin,” Isaacs said.

The hike started in the parking lot, which is surrounded by deodar cedars, making it the perfect location for scenes set in Europe. In fact, for five years in the 1960s it was the set of the television show Combat! about soldiers caught behind enemy lines during World War II.

“They built an entire French village and a farmhouse here, and they used the entire park while they were filming,” Isaacs said. “That’s how they could pretend they were in France and Germany, because of those big, tall trees.”

The cedar trees, along with the redwood, sycamore and eucalyptus ones, are not native to Southern California. They were planted as part of the Work Projects Administration’s program to give people jobs during the Depression.

“One of the programs involved planting trees, so that’s why we have all these different trees here,” Isaacs said.

The trees certainly come in handy when the park needs to look like Wisconsin for the movie The Great Outdoors, Washington state for the television show Twin Peaks or Georgia for the movie Big Momma’s House.

Another draw for filmmakers is the park’s lake, which was much larger before the dam was removed in the 1970s.

“Back in the 1940s and 1950s, they came here for the water because of this beautiful lake,” Isaacs said. “So now there’s not as much water, but filmmakers still come to film here.”

The production crew of the 2006 remake of When a Stranger Calls built a house by the lake and basically took up residence for six months of filming.

“It disrupted life here in the park for quite a while, but it really paid off because the house ends up being the star of the movie,” Isaacs said. “When you see the movie trailer, it’s really cool because the camera sweeps over our lake and then shows the house.”

Of course, neither the house nor any of the sets from any other film projects are still at the park, since filmmakers must leave the park in the same natural state that they found it.

“There’s nothing left here from the movies because this is parkland, but we can use our imaginations,” Isaacs said. She also provided photos, some shot during filming and some stills from the movies, to show the various locations.

Probably the most famous scene filmed at Franklin Canyon is the hitchhiking one from the 1934 best picture Oscar winner It Happened One Night.

“Claudette Colbert hikes up her skirt to get a car to stop, and that hitchhiking sequence was shot right here,” Isaacs said, pointing to an access road near the park’s Heavenly Pond.

Movie lover Michael Shearer of Encino has been on several film site tours and said he really enjoyed the Franklin Canyon hike.

“I liked the fact that the guide brought pictures of everything so you could directly correlate what was filmed where with what you were looking directly at,” Shearer said.

This was Shearer’s fourth visit to Franklin Canyon Park, but before Saturday he had no idea that anything had been filmed there, he said.

“To have someone walk you through the park step by step pointing out the different filming locations, it kind of brings things to life,” Shearer said.

The money the park makes from film permit fees helps maintain the William O. Douglas Outdoor Classroom and supports the activities that the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy holds for the public, Isaacs said.

“We are kind of beholden to the motion picture industry, but it’s a love/hate relationship," she said. "We want them to come here, but we also need to teach everybody who does come here how to respect the nature here at the park."

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