George Arliss and the cast and crew of the early Warner Bros. soundie "The Green Goddess" travel deep into the Iverson Gorge

"The Green Goddess" (Warner Bros., 1930)

Some terrific Iverson Movie Ranch footage surfaced in a few clips that turned up on the TCM website from the VERY early Warner Bros. sound movie "The Green Goddess," starring Oscar winner George Arliss.

The movie was completed in 1929 but was held back for a while before its release in February 1930. This was right at the advent of sound in Hollywood, and the studio produced both a silent version and a sound version.

This shot features a column of people marching up the Iverson Gorge, with a fairly large cast assembled for the shoot. You'll notice that the column extends up the hill and off the frame at top left.

It's a hard movie to find all in one piece, but TCM.com features three short clips from "The Green Goddess," all of which contain at least a little Iverson Movie Ranch footage. Click here to get right to the clips.

Tornado's Mine Rocks (Iverson Gorge)

Jerry Condit snapped this shot in the Iverson Gorge in 2014. I call this small rock cluster the Tornado's Mine Rocks because they point to the rocky alcove where Tornado's Mine, named for Zorro's horse, used to stand.

The same cluster of rocks appears in the "Green Goddess" shot, as noted here. Jerry's photo above closely matches this angle, although the movie shot is taken from a little higher.

If you wanted to find that same spot today — and it's on public land, having been preserved as part of the Garden of the Gods Park — you could take the 118 to Topanga and head south.

Turn right at Santa Susana Pass Road, then right on Redmesa Road. You'll probably notice Lone Ranger Rock on the right, which is your cue to park — anywhere on Redmesa, below the condos.

Find your way down into the Gorge and east to the Tornado's Mine Rocks — there are several possible routes. I usually take a direct route down the embankment, cutting across just south of Lone Ranger Rock.

The spot where Lone Ranger Rock is marked on Google Maps is a little off. The actual rock is a short distance south of where Google says it is.

Here's a zoomed-in version of the Google Map so you can read the erroneous labeling of Lone Ranger Rock. It's only off by a little, but it's enough to matter.

Be careful if you go there because that embankment is slippery and the whole Gorge tends to be riddled with rattlesnakes and poison oak. Avoid the condos too, as they're private property.

Getting back to "The Green Goddess" and that shot at the top of this post, it's a not-so-subtle composite that places a fake building in the background, along with a painted version of the "Himalayas."

This image sums up in the most general terms what's going on in the shot.

The rocks, people and trees in the bottom section of the shot are real, and are filmed on the Iverson Ranch. I was able to identify Hawk Rock, which helps pinpoint where the location shoot took place.

The people in the bottom left corner are the same ones marching up the Gorge in the shot with the Tornado's Mine Rocks. That part of the frame is filmed live on location.

"The Green Goddess": Plane crash in the "Himalayas"

A key plot point in the movie involves a plane crash in the Himalayas. The crashed plane was filmed in Iverson's Upper Gorge, with the familiar Hole in the Wall rocks visible in the background.

Same rocks seen in the plane crash shot above

The people who live in the Cal West Townhomes know those rocks well — they're still holding down the Hole in the Wall area at the end of Sierra Pass Place, the first of the driveways into the condos off Redmesa Road.

This shot indicates the specific rocks that are visible in the shot above taken among the condos.

Alice Joyce and H.B. Warner meet "The Raja," played by George Arliss,

in "The Green Goddess"

The crash survivors meet The Raja in a sequence I initially assumed was filmed in the studio. I soon learned that appearances can be deceiving in "The Green Goddess."

The Gorge Arch and a portion of the "Green Goddess" set

The "meeting the Raja" sequence turns out to be filmed on a large set that was built in the Iverson Gorge. This shot, with the Gorge Arch rock formation at top right, pinpoints the location.

"The Silent Man" (1917): The Gorge Arch, 12 years earlier

The arch was already a "veteran movie rock" by the time "The Green Goddess" filmed at the site in 1929. The unusual rock formation's film resume goes back at least to 1917, when it was part of a massive shoot on the Lower Iverson for the William S. Hart movie "The Silent Man."

A portion of the "Green Goddess" set in the Iverson Gorge

The "Green Goddess" set may have been the first major set built on the Iverson Ranch in the sound era. The ranch was about to experience a boom as the arrival of the talkies fueled a surge in film production.

"The Utah Kid" (1930): early set in Iverson's Garden of the Gods

During the same period, a small Western town set stood a short distance to the west, just across the Gorge, in the Garden of the Gods. This set, seen in "The Utah Kid," may have been left over from the silent era.

"The Utah Kid": three adobe buildings beneath the Garden of the Gods behemoths

While the "Green Goddess" and "Utah Kid" sets appear unrelated from a production standpoint, they are linked historically, standing on nearby sections of the Iverson Ranch circa 1929-1930, during the transition to sound.

It was a dynamic time for Hollywood as it braced for the boom that the talkies would bring. I broke down the "Utah Kid" set in a post a couple of years back, which you can read by clicking here.

The 1923 version of "The Green Goddess" — not filmed at Iverson

It's easy to mix up 1930's "The Green Goddess" with Goldwyn's silent version, released in 1923. The 1923 movie also starred George Arliss and Alice Joyce, but appears to have been filmed mainly on the East Coast.

Plane crash scene from the 1923 movie — filmed on an indoor set

The 1923 version of "The Green Goddess" also features the staging of a plane crash — considered spectacular at the time. But a careful look at the background reveals that the scene was created in the studio.

For the period, the production team did a good job of creating a wall of fake rocks. Even so, upon close examination it becomes apparent that these "rocks" are a studio concoction.

Poster for the 1930 Warner Bros. version of "The Green Goddess"

By 1929, when the Warner Bros./Vitaphone/Iverson Movie Ranch version of "The Green Goddess" was filmed, virtually all of the studios had set up headquarters in Southern California.

1930 "Green Goddess" set, Iverson Gorge

Both the Iverson property — still not yet formally known as the "Iverson Movie Ranch" — and the film industry as a whole were poised by 1930 to experience a huge boom, with Hollywood's "Golden Age" just around the corner.