The tiny town of Lone Pine, Calif., is the site of some of the most spectacular filming locations around, and each year in October the town honors its place in movie history by hosting one of the country's top film festivals.
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This year we'll be taking a deeper dive into the Lone Pine Film Festival than ever before, as we've been invited to lead a couple of fun movie and TV tours out in the historic and beautiful Alabama Hills.
One of our tours will focus on the 1944 Robert Mitchum-Anne Jeffreys Western "Nevada," a Zane Grey saga that filmed all over the Alabamas.
The tour will take us to the most important filming locations for "Nevada," where we can take a good hard look at exactly where every key movie rock is located — and marvel at the fact that almost nothing has changed.
One of the great things about Lone Pine and the Alabama Hills is that all the movie rocks are still there. The place is just far enough off the beaten path that it has escaped the kind of development pressure that destroyed many of California's other historic filming locations.
Our other tour will be a departure from the Lone Pine Film Festival's traditional focus on Westerns. Dubbed "TV Sci-Fi and Beyond," this tour will take us to shooting locations for the TV shows "The Twilight Zone," "Star Trek: Voyager" and "The Time Tunnel," along with the movie "Tremors."
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Here's a sample of the rocks we'll find and the matches we'll be making. On a recent visit to the Alabama Hills, I tracked down this location where three terrified people raced to escape a giant man-eating worm in "Tremors."
The tour schedule for the 2024 Lone Pine Film Festival was recently finalized, and details on how to sign up are now posted HERE, on the festival's website.
Festival tours usually sell out quickly, so if you're interested, I recommend you sign up right away. We'll be doing two "Nevada" tours, on Friday, Oct. 11, and Sunday, Oct. 13.
We will also have two installments of the "TV Sci-Fi and Beyond" tour, on Friday, Oct. 11, and Saturday, Oct. 12. Among the highlights will be an up close and personal look at the ridge where the delivery van met its fate in the 1961 "Twilight Zone" episode "The Rip Van Winkle Caper." Parts of the van may still be there!
If you're wondering why a town in the Eastern Sierra country of California has a filming location called the "Alabama Hills," it has nothing to do with the state of Alabama. You can click here for more of that story — and more shots of the stunning Alabama Hills.
