Why we love old movie locations — especially the Iverson Movie Ranch

For an introduction to this blog and to the growing interest in historic filming locations such as the Iverson Movie Ranch — the most widely filmed outdoor location in movie and TV history — please read the site's introductory post, found here.
• Your feedback is appreciated — please leave comments on any of the posts.
• To find specific rock features or look up movie titles, TV shows, actors and production people, see the "LABELS" section — the long alphabetical listing on the right side of the page, below.
• To join the MAILING LIST, send me an email at iversonfilmranch@aol.com and let me know you'd like to sign up.
• I've also begun a YouTube channel for Iverson Movie Ranch clips and other movie location videos, which you can get to by clicking here.
• Readers can email the webmaster at iversonfilmranch@aol.com
.

Tuesday, August 11, 2009

What caused cowboy star Roy Rogers to "flip"?


"Ride in the Death Wagon" — episode of "The Roy Rogers Show," aired April 6, 1952

Sometimes what you see isn't what you get. This shot of Roy Rogers riding Trigger on the Upper Iverson, taken from a 1952 episode of "The Roy Rogers Show," is in fact printed backward. That is, left is right and right is left, like a mirror image. That's the way they ran this scene in the episode, because they wanted to have Roy riding from left to right, or west to east. It would have cost money to have a crew go out and shoot him riding, and they already had some perfectly good footage of him riding in the other direction, so they just flipped it and used the same footage twice.

Same episode, same cowboy ... opposite direction

Here's another shot from the same episode of the show, in which Roy is shown properly oriented, in virtually the same spot. You can see from the road going up the hill in the background that they didn't bother to shoot Roy riding in both directions, they just flipped the whole shot and ran the same footage twice. Flipping the shot was just one of the tricks used to stretch the budget, and in the days before DVD, Blu-ray, mp4 — heck, even before VHS — before we had freeze-frame and slow-motion, before viewers were able to take a close look at those backgrounds — and before people like me became obsessed with every little detail of the Iverson Movie Ranch — they could get away with it.

Click here to see another example of flipping the shot, from the TV show "Adventures of Kit Carson."

No comments: