Lone Pine Film Festival

The Lone Pine Film Festival is an annual film festival held in Lone Pine, California, which celebrates the hundreds of films and television episodes that used Lone Pine, the Alabama Hills, and the nearby Sierra Nevada mountain range as film locations. Since the early years of filmmaking, directors and their production units have used the Lone Pine area to represent the iconic American West. Since The Roundup (1920), the first documented film produced in the area, Lone Pine has played host to hundreds of the industry's best known directors and actors, among them directors William Wyler, John Ford, George Stevens, and William Wellman, and actors John Wayne, Gene Autry, Roy Rogers, Bing Crosby, and Barbara Stanwyck. The festival at Lone Pine was held for the first time in 1990, then called the Sierra Film Festival. In 2019, the festival celebrated its thirtieth anniversary. Held annually over the Indigenous Peoples' Day weekend, the Lone Pine Film Festival is one of the most important Western film festivals in the United States. The festival is the only film fan gathering in the world which is held on location where the movies were shot.

History

The Lone Pine area was first used as a film location in 1920, when a movie production company came to the Alabama Hills to make the silent film The Round-Up. Other companies soon discovered the scenic location, and in the coming decades, over 400 films, 100 television episodes, and countless commercials used Lone Pine and the Alabama Hills as a film location. Some of the notable films shot here in the 1920s and 1930s include Riders of the Purple Sage (1925) with Tom Mix, The Enchanted Hill (1926) with Jack Holt, Somewhere in Sonora (1927) with Ken Maynard, Blue Steel (1934) with John Wayne, Hop-Along Cassidy (1935) with William Boyd, The Charge of the Light Brigade (1936) with Errol Flynn, Oh, Susanna!