Movie ranch
ranch that is used for filming purposes
A movie ranch is a ranch that is at least partially dedicated for use as a set in the creation and production of motion pictures and television shows. These were developed in the United States in southern California, because of the climate.
Movie ranches were developed in the 1920s for location shooting in Southern California to support the making of popular Western films. Finding it difficult to recreate the topography of the Old West on sound stages and studio backlots, the Hollywood studios went to the rustic valleys, canyons and foothills of Southern California for filming locations. Other large-scale productions, such as war films, also needed large, undeveloped settings for outdoor scenes, such as battles.
History
To achieve greater scope, productions conducted location shooting in distant parts of California, Arizona, and Nevada. Initially production staff were required to cover their own travel expenses, resulting in disputes between workers and the studios. The studios agreed to pay union workers extra if they worked out of town.
To solve this problem, many movie studios purchased large tracts of undeveloped rural land, in many cases existing ranches, that were located closer to Hollywood. The ranches were often located just within the 30-mile (48 km) studio zone, specifically in the Simi Hills in the western San Fernando Valley, the Santa Monica Mountains, and the Santa Clarita area of the Greater Los Angeles Area.
“Movie ranch” enters the record as ranch that is used for filming purposes. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Movie, ranch and used can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 18, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1748732. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Movie ranch” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.