How the Iverson Movie Ranch found its way into a 1998 music video by Neil Finn

Click on the image above to watch the video on YouTube

This 1998 video for the song "She Will Have Her Way," by New Zealand rocker Neil Finn, is a parody of the old "rampaging enormous women" movies, including the 1959 Lou Costello comedy/sci-fi movie "The 30 Foot Bride of Candy Rock," much of which was filmed on the Iverson Movie Ranch.

"Candy Rock" was itself a parody of the much more famous sci-fi movie "Attack of the 50 Foot Woman," which came out the previous year. "50 Foot Woman" was not shot on the Iverson Ranch.

Neil Finn and his 30- to 50-foot girlfriend, in the music video "She Will Have Her Way"

Neil Finn is known for fronting the bands Split Enz and Crowded House, along with his solo career. This solo video includes footage from both "30 Foot Bride" and "50 Foot Woman," cleverly blending original clips from both films with new footage featuring Finn and his own 30-foot (or 50-foot) girlfriend.

Best of all, for those of us who may be obsessed with the Iverson Movie Ranch, the video creates "new" footage shot on the ranch by superimposing Finn and his video girlfriend over scenes originally filmed on the ranch in the 1950s. The barn seen here no longer exists — it has been borrowed from "30 Foot Bride," with Finn's modern-day video vixen seen running in front of it using composite imaging.

Here's a shot I really like from the video, which is lifted straight from the movie. It shows a truck hauling the wrapped-up "30 Foot Bride" past a distinctive formation I call Rock Island, which was located in the Iverson Gorge and had high-profile appearances in John Wayne's "Fighting Seabees" (1944) and many other productions. The shot is flipped horizontally, for whatever reasons. (For more about flipping shots, click here.)

This is how the above shot "should" look — and how it would have looked if it hadn't been flipped in production. But it appears in its flipped configuration in both the movie, "30 Foot Bride of Candy Rock," and the music video, Neil Finn's "She Will Have Her Way." The big cluster of boulders seen in the shot, Rock Island, was mostly buried during grading for condominium development, but the rocks are all still there. Only about the top one-third remains above ground, but that fraction of the formation is visible and can be seen near the Cal West Townhomes swimming pool area along Redmesa Road.

The barn featured in "30 Foot Bride" and in the music video is the Fury Barn, which was part of a ranch set built for the TV show "Fury" that got a lot of use in movies and TV shows in the late '50s and throughout the '60s. The barn and the rest of the set were destroyed in the big 1970 Clampitt Fire, also known as the Newhall/Malibu fire.

An intimate moment featuring Neil and his giant girlfriend creates a reasonable facsimile of the interior of the Fury Barn for the video. I don't know how they got the shot, but I presume it's either a studio set or else filmed in some real barn that's still around today.

As a footnote to the "30 Foot Bride"/"50 Foot Woman" story, a 1993 HBO TV movie remake of "Attack of the 50 Foot Woman," with essentially the same title ("Ft." replaces "Foot"), featuring Daryl Hannah in the title role, is widely thought to include footage shot at one of the estates on the former Upper Iverson, long after the days when the place was a working movie ranch. However, I did a little homework and was able to track down the estate used in the movie, and while it was close to Iverson — just a few doors away — technically it was on property that was once part of the neighboring Brandeis Ranch, and not the Iverson Ranch.

 

"War of the Colossal Beast" composite shot, filmed partly on the Iverson Ranch

The "rampaging enormous men" movies are another part of this story. Probably the best-known entry in this subgenre is "The Amazing Colossal Man" (1957), which pretty much started the whole oversized people phenomenon of the Cold War era. "Colossal Man" was not filmed on the Iverson Ranch — the location work was almost entirely done in Arizona and Nevada, including some iconic shots you may recall of the big guy taking out his hostility on some large neon figures on the Vegas Strip. But "Colossal Man" had a lesser-known sequel, "War of the Colossal Beast" (1958), that not only is a terrific Iverson Movie Ranch production but also is part of an extremely select group of movies to set foot on the iconic Chatsworth rock formation Stoney Point.

Stoney Point in Chatsworth, as seen in "War of the Colossal Beast"

Stoney Point often appears in the background in movies shot on the Iverson Movie Ranch, but "War of the Colossal Beast" includes footage actually shot at the site.