AUTUMN OF THE WEST, PART III: BAY AREA HORROR

After a few days in the Eastern Sierras, L and I headed west through the bayous of the Central Valley – a strange sight for two people who are usually think of California geography in terms of mountains, deserts and rocky coastlines. As we passed through Lodi, we listened to hometown hero John Fogerty’s desperate longing for cultural variety… and felt grateful that we weren’t stuck in Lodi. We didn’t stop again until we got to Santa Rosa. For me, this was the beginning of a short tour of Nightmare America – locations where filmmakers Alfred Hitchcock and John Carpenter made their mark.

Santa Rosa is the stand-in for idyllic small town America in Hitchcock’s film SHADOW OF A DOUBT (1943) and, although the town is much more metropolitan today than it was when the film was made, you can still catch glimpses of WWII-era America there. All you have to do is take a short drive down McDonald Avenue and stand in front of the house where Hitchcock’s film was shot. The Newton family home still looks exactly as it did in SHADOW OF THE DOUBT, and the rest of the neighborhood is equally charming. On our visit, we experienced a constant shower of bright autumn leaves as we strolled down the street… adding to the sense that we had just stepped into a picture postcard. What better place for a murder?



Closer to the coast, we visited another famous Hitchcock filming location: Bodega Bay, home of THE BIRDS. Hitch claimed that he chose Bodega Bay because he wanted the film to have a foggy, overcast look. When it came time to shoot the film, however, the coastal community was bright and sunny. L and I had more suitable weather for our visit.

Our first stop was at the old schoolhouse on Potter Road, where Hitch loosed a flock of angry birds on unsuspecting children. According to a plaque on the front gate, the two-room school has been around since 1873. By 1961, when Hitchcock used it in THE BIRDS, the building was abandoned and condemned. A few years later, the Taylor family bought and restored it. Three generations of the family have lived in the house, and they are still gracious enough to allow film fans inside on the weekends. For hours, see www.bodegaschool.com.

Not far from the school is winding Old Bay Road, which leads straight down into the village, past The Tides Restaurant where Mitch (Rod Taylor) and Melanie (Tippi Hedren) take refuge during the apocalyptic attack. From the back of the restaurant, you can look across the harbor and see where Mitch’s house once stood. In the film, Melanie took a motorboat to the other side, but today there’s a half-sunken sailboat in the way… and what looks like a trailer park on the other side. We didn’t have a motorboat, so we continued down the coast to Inverness, where John Carpenter made THE FOG.




Most of the main shooting locations for THE FOG have been well-documented by Sean Clark over at Horror’s Hallowed Grounds… but I note that when he visited Point Reyes Lighthouse, it was annoyingly clear and sunny out. We, on the other hand, had plenty of natural atmosphere. In Carpenter’s film, lighthouse keeper Adrienne Barbeau takes a long drive through rolling coastline hills to get to her destination. Tourists face the same laborious trek. The drive through Point Reyes National Park was so long that we were worried we’d run out of gas on the way to our destination… and the closer we got, the more the fog rolled in. The lighthouse itself is an impressive sight, sitting on the westernmost edge of the California coast, at the bottom of a narrow 308-step staircase.




Afterwards, we made a valiant attempt to visit Muir Woods, just north of San Francisco… but the place was so crowded that we couldn’t find anywhere to park. Thus, inadvertently, we passed over Muir Woods just as surely as Hitchcock did. Originally, the director had intended to use the park as the location for his film VERTIGO, but he shot instead at Big Basin State Park, south of San Francisco… so that’s where we headed.

We breezed through San Francisco in the pouring rain – past Fort Point, where Jimmy Stewart rescues Kim Novak after she throws herself into the San Francisco Bay – and wandered up the rain-soaked hills to the oldest (and arguably the least inviting) state park in California. By the time we got there, it was nearly 4pm and the woods were eerily dark. (Most of the trees are so old, and their growth so thick, that they blot out the sky on the sunniest of days.) After an hour of driving – with no idea how far we were from the famed “circle of Redwoods” that Hitchcock featured in VERTIGO – we decided to turn around and head back to our hotel in Half Moon Bay.

The next morning, we set out again for our destination… and found the park to be infinitely more impressive in the early morning sunlight. As we drove, shafts of heavenly light (look at the photos – there’s no other way to describe it) broke through the fog and lured us in. The Redwoods themselves were just as amazing – several of them towering 300 feet above us, and boasting 2,000 years more life experience than any of us will ever have.

Being there brought to life one of my favorite scenes in any Hitchcock film – a brief bit in VERTIGO where Kim Novak muses on her death and resurrection. In a haunting whisper, she traces the years between her two lives via rings on a cross-section of a giant Redwood. “Here I was born,” she says, “and here I died.” The scene has such ethereal lighting that I’d always assumed Hitchcock used some kind of filter in this scene – like the kind old studio directors used on aging actresses, to soften their features. After visiting Big Basin, I now realize that the ethereal quality of the scene has much to do with the way that the fog naturally diffuses the sunlight there.




We managed to catch more Hitchcock location on our trip… but this one came as a complete surprise. For a couple of years, I’d been eager to visit Point Lobos State Park in Monterey – even since I saw a couple photos of the place in a travel guide. One was a photo of a grove of twisted cypress trees, looking like something out of a childhood fairy tale, and the other was a photo of a stone stairway beside a wall of strange succulents. I was even more captivated by some of the stories I’d read about the park’s mythic inhabitants, The Dark Watchers. Over the years, many visitors (including John Steinbeck!) have claimed that the Watchers are real… and that Point Lobos is a natural hub of psychic energy.

I’m a sucker for these things, so I fell in love with Point Lobos immediately. When we stopped at an old whaling cabin on the shores of the park, I learned (via a museum exhibit) that Alfred Hitchcock had the same reaction. In fact, he shot his first American film, REBECCA (1940), here. In an interview with Francois Truffaut, Hitch explained that when he came to the States he was eager to incorporate specific American landscapes into his stories. If he had made REBECCA in England, he said, “the house would not have been so isolated because we’d have been tempted to show the countryside and the lanes leading to the house. But if the scene had been more realistic, and the place of arrival geographically situated, we would have lost the sense of isolation.”Almost twenty years later, Jimmy Stewart and Kim Novak visited the same site for a pivotal scene in VERTIGO (1958).  It is, not coincidentally, the moment when Stewart finally embraces the illusion that will destroy him.

Point Lobos conveys the sense that one has reached the end of the earth... or maybe fallen over the edge. Whether that’s due to the strange sights all around the place or to the presence of Dark Watchers, who can say? Either way, it was a perfect end to the trip.

AUTUMN OF THE WEST, PART II: THE GHOST TOWN OF BODIE

When I rounded the bend and got my first look at the ghost town of Bodie, I felt like I’d been transported back in time. Over the past few weeks, that’s exactly how I’ve described it to people: “Walking through Bodie is the closest you’ll ever get to visiting the Old West. “

I’ve thought of Bodie quite a bit recently, imagining what the town must look like right now, buried under 15 to 20 feet of December snow. That gets me thinking about what Bodie must have been like a hundred years ago, when it was still thriving. The residents must have been tough as nails in order to survive the extreme cold, rampant illness and total isolation of winter in the Eastern Sierras. I can’t help comparing it to Barrow, Alaska – the setting of the vampire movie 30 DAYS OF NIGHT. While Bodie may not have to worry about demonic bloodsuckers, it’s not surprising that so many articles about the town inevitably echo the sentiments of a long-dead little girl who reluctantly settled there with her family: “Goodbye, God! We’re going to Bodie!”

The town of Bodie is named for one William S. Bodey, a prospector who discovered gold in them thar hills in the summer of 1859. Bodey didn’t survive his first subsequently winter in the mountains. Friends found his skeletal remains in the spring thaw, and helped to organize the Bodie mining district. The town started small, in the shadow of the nearby silver-mining town of Aurora. Then, in 1875, a cave-in exposed a particularly rich lode of gold ore in Bunker Hill, and Bodie became a boomtown overnight.

According to the Reno Gazette in February of 1878: “Bodie has a population of 1,500, about 600 of whom are out of employment, and of which the latter number, not 250 would work if they could find work to do. There are in town 17 saloons, 5 stores, 2 livery stables, 6 restaurants, 1 newspaper, 4 barbershops, 2 butcher shops, 1 fruit store, 4 lodging houses, 2 boot shops, 1 tin shop, 1 jewelry store, 1 saddle shop, 2 drug stores, 3 doctors, 4 lawyers, a post office, Express Office, 15 houses of ill fame, 1 bakery, 2 blacksmith shops, 2 lumber yards, 2 stage lines, the usual secret societies and a Miners’ Union… There are six good mines and about 700 locations… The average new arrivals per day is 10.”






The town continued to grow for the next few years – reaching a total of roughly 8,000 residents and necessitating the building of a schoolhouse – before it went into decline. By 1911, there were only about 700 residents left in Bodie. That same year, the town of Bodie finally got electricity… just in time for a typically miserable winter storm. According to James Watson and Doug Brodie, authors of the book BIG BAD BODIE: “That winter of 1910-1911 was not especially harsh by high country standards. A ‘normal’ winter in Bodie could often equal the worst winter elsewhere. The 8,396-foot altitude is more than a mile and a half up. Temperatures drop to 40 degrees below zero, and occasionally more. Blizzards can last for days. In fact, that’s just what this one did in 1911.”

In circumstances like this, it’s no wonder that many families routinely abandoned their homes for the winter… but this caused just as much hardship as weathering the storm. In 1915, the Saturday Evening Post ran an article on “Ghost Cities of the West,” suggesting that the entire town of Bodie had been completely abandoned. The announcement drew looters by the truckload. When some families returned to their homes, they found that most of their belongings had been pilfered. This pattern continued for decades. Marguerite Sprague, author of BODIE’S GOLD, offers another theory for brazen robberies: “When you talk to these former Bodie citizens, you hear a consensus that Bodie was a wonderful place to grow up. People felt safe and part of a community. Bodie was still a town where no one locked their doors and children roamed the hills at will, their parents free of worry about kidnappers and other atrocities.” Visitors, she suggests, took advantage of this “open door” policy.






With the population numbers on the decline, Hollywood also took advantage – filming the early western HELL’S HEROES (1929) in Bodie, just a few years before a massive fire wiped out three quarters of the town. The fire – blamed on a boy who lit the fateful match to protest the serving of Jell-O (instead of ice cream) at his birthday party – claimed most of Bonanza Street and erased the more disreputable section of town. The rest of the town emptied out after gold mining was outlawed in 1942. When the mines closed down, the Cain family took over and hired caretakers year-round to protect the surviving structures from vandals. One of those caretakers has become a subject of local legend – the current park rangers remember that he liked to patrol the grounds carrying a shotgun and a bottle of wine. His methods, apparently, were effective. While the neighboring town of Aurora was picked clean and erased from the map, Bodie remains intact.








Since 1962, the state of California has preserved Bodie in a state of “arrested decay.” Every winter, Mother Nature buries the town and tries to crush the buildings. Every spring, the town resurfaces and the state of California reinforces those buildings that are still standing. In recent years, private investors have also tried to destroy the town through extensive strip-mining, but the ghost town and surrounding land are now completely owned by the public, and protected for future time-travelers.

LONG LIVE BODIE!

AUTUMN OF THE WEST, PART I: THE EASTERN SIERRAS

I’ve lived in Los Angeles long enough to know that there are definite weather patterns, but (this past week’s freak rainstorm notwithstanding) the shifts are not usually very dramatic. After four years on the West Coast, one of the things I miss most about central Virginia is autumn leaves… so this November, L and I decided to take a trip north up Highway 395 into the Eastern Sierras – a popular destination for photographers. And since I hardly ever plan a vacation that doesn’t have some kind of movie tie-in, we made several stops along the way at locations immortalized in late-era Westerns.


Our first stop was the Alabama Hills in Lone Pine. Even if you don’t know anything about the awesome cinematic history of this place, it’s still hard to escape being awe-struck by the natural grandeur. The Alabama Hills sit halfway between Death Valley and Mt. Whitney, providing a picturesque buffer between the lowest basin and the highest peak in the continental United States. The region is unquestionably a testament to Mother Nature’s power, so it’s fitting that so many of the silver screen’s larger-than-life myths came to life here. The Alabama Hills was home to the western genre at its height – from early silent films starring Tom Mix to Budd Boetticher’s "Ranown cycle" with Randolph Scott in the late 1950s. By the early 1960s, contemporary westerns like THE MISFITS (1960), LONELY ARE THE BRAVE (1962) and HUD (1963) were signaling the end of an era. The genre remained commercially viable until 1972, but the general tone changed dramatically – westerns went from being righteous and celebratory to cynical and somber.

Ironically, around the same time, filmmakers moved away from the Alabama Hills. The main reason, probably, was that the hills had simply become too familiar to movie-going audiences. Even a location as inherently dramatic as the Alabama Hills can become mundane when you see it every week on black and white TV.

In the early 1960s, director Henry Hathaway (who left his mark on the Alabama Hills with BRIGHAM YOUNG in 1940 and RAWHIDE in 1951) made three westerns at the Hot Creek Geological Area off of 395. The first of the trio was NORTH TO ALASKA (1960), a surprisingly good John Wayne vehicle. Biographer Gary Willis opines that this comic western marks a turning point in The Duke’s career, because it “sees John Wayne for the first time adopt the genial bluff, hearty persona that he was to use for most of his subsequent Westerns.” Instead of pitting Wayne against a gun-slinging villain, NORTH TO ALASKA matches him against high-maintenance woman (Capucine) when the duo gets stranded in a remote fishing cabin. The bathing sequences were shot in the steamy waters of Hot Creek… Fellow blogger The Great Silence explored the area in detail. In recent years, “renewed geological activity” has forced state regulators to fence off the area. Swimming is now prohibited, due to frequent underground geyser eruptions that have raised water temperatures and arsenic levels. During our visit, we also saw some ominous signs warning that the creek is also “New Zealand mud snail positive.” We stayed out of the water.



Although the location is forbidding today, Hathaway returned twice more – for the final shootout sequence in NEVADA SMITH (featuring 36-year-old Steve McQueen as a vengeful teenage half-breed) and for a scene in TRUE GRIT (1969), where John Wayne encounters bad guys Robert Duvall and Dennis Hopper. (Again I defer to The Great Silence, who has been much more thorough in his location-hunting than I.)

Until recently, TRUE GRIT was known as the film that earned John Wayne an Oscar, for his portrayal of a fat, one-eyed bounty hunter named Rooster Cogburn. For younger generations, it is now known as the basis of the new Coen Brothers film. A few days ago, I managed to catch the Coen Brothers remake, which features Jeff Bridges in the role that Wayne made famous. 90% of the film is a scene-for-scene remake, up until the last five minutes of screen time… but, as David Denby notes in a recent New Yorker article, the tone of the film is completely different. According to Denby, the purpose of the Coen Brothers film is to illustrate “the arbitrary casualness” and the “savage moral incoherence of the West” – not unlike NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN.

In contrast, the original TRUE GRIT aimed simply to lionize John Wayne. The final scene was particularly flattering… and, much to my surprise, the Coen’s left that scene out of their remake entirely. As far as I could tell, it was the only major change in the narrative… and, in my opinion, it is the only false note in the Coen Brothers film. Sure, John Wayne’s farewell in the original TRUE GRIT was a bit maudlin… but, since I can’t shake off my own memories of the original, I can’t help feeling that Jeff Bridges earned that send-off scene in the remake. What’s a hero without a big final hero moment? The Coen Brothers, true to their own form, opted instead for a more searching finale, and Denby is probably right in suggesting that this is “as close to an emotional climax as they will ever come.” Maybe that’s all I should realistically expect from a 21st century western. We are, after all, talking about a remake of a 40-year-old film that served as a capstone on a dying genre.

In order for westerns to work for contemporary audiences, they have to emphasize the savagery of the West. Director Sam Peckinpah was already considering this possibility as early as 1961, when he made RIDE THE HIGH COUNTRY – a surprisingly un-sentimental traditional western. With that film’s narrative, Peckinpah threatened to turn western icon Randolph Scott into a cold-hearted mercenary. He couldn’t quite do it, of course. Ultimately, RIDE THE HIGH COUNTRY asserted that although times change, the heroes of the Old West cannot… When they do, the genre dies.






Many of the most memorable establishers in RIDE THE HIGH COUNTRY were shot near Mammoth Lakes, and at least one of those key locations has succumbed to the ravages of time. Horseshoe Lake – the site of the opening sequence in the film, in which Joel McCrea rides his horse down from the high country – is now a Carbon Dioxide Hazard Area. Warning signs went up on the shores of the lake a few years ago, after a series of earthquakes opened naturally-occurring pockets of hazardous gas. Now the soil around Horseshoe Lake is saturated with the stuff, and many of the trees in the area are dead or dying. In order to get an accurate sense of what this area was like in 1961, you’d do better to drive down the road to Lake Mamie, and then zip across the street to an overlook of idyllic Twin Lakes, also featured briefly in RIDE THE HIGH COUNTRY.



It’s no coincidence that both Hot Creek and Horseshoe Lake have been reinvented by recent earthquake activity. When we stopped at a ranger station in Mammoth Lakes, we learned that the entire Mammoth Lakes region was formed by extreme geological activity roughly 760,000 years ago. Though you’d never know it from the ground, the valley to the east of Mammoth Mountain is one of the largest calderas on earth. Known as Long Valley, it was formed by a volcanic eruption so massive that it blanketed most of the western United States in ash and debris. Some of the debris traveled as far away as eastern Nebraska.

One of the most distinctive byproducts of the eruption is Mono Lake, which has been called “the Dead Sea of the West.” Mono Lake isn’t dead; actually, it’s teeming with microbial life… but because of the high salinity of the water (three times that of the ocean), it spelled death for early settlers in the area. The lake probably also got a bad reputation among pioneers because of its otherworldly appearance. Mark Twain visited Mono Lake in the 1860s, and he wasn’t impressed. In his memoir “Roughing It,” he writes:

“Mono Lake lies in a lifeless, treeless, hideous desert, eight thousand feet above the level of the sea, and is guarded by mountains two thousand feet higher, whose summits are always clothed in clouds. This solemn, silent, sail-less sea -- this lonely tenant of the loneliest spot on earth -- is little graced with the picturesque. It is an unpretending expanse of grayish water, about a hundred miles in circumference, with two islands in its centre, mere upheavals of rent and scorched and blistered lava, snowed over with gray banks and drifts of pumice-stone and ashes, the winding sheet of the dead volcano, whose vast crater the lake has seized upon and occupied.”





Twain is exaggerating (he was, after all, primarily a fiction writer) – I offer the above proof that Mono Lake can be quite picturesque. I will admit, however, that the beauty of Mono Lake is haunting. All along the south shores of the lake, we stumbled across the carcasses of dozens of dead birds… which certainly suggests that the lake is not meant to support higher life forms. On the other hand, a few weeks ago, a NASA researcher claimed to have discovered an arsenic-eating form of “alien” bacteria in Mono Lake. I can’t imagine a better setting for this “discovery.”

In Hollywood’s alternate movie universe, Mono Lake stands in as the Old West’s version of Hell. It was on these the southern shores that Clint Eastwood built the infernal town of Lago – which he literally painted red – in the 1973 film HIGH PLAINS DRIFTER. That film, a horror-western hybrid, stands as proof that the passage of time pushed the western genre to increasingly savage extremes, until there was nothing left. The buildings of Lago are long gone, but you’ll forgive me if I can’t look out across the eerie waters of Mono Lake without hearing Dee Barton’s ominous score and wondering if the whole thing is a mirage.



Next stop: THE GHOST TOWN OF BODIE.