The William Fox Motion Pictures Studio originally stood at Sunset Boulevard and Western Avenue. In 1928, they moved to what is now Century City, onto land that had earlier been the personal ranch of Western film star Tom Mix. Fox merged with Twentieth Century Pictures in 1935 to become Twentieth Century-Fox. The old Sunset and Western studio had been unused for a while, but Fox reactivated it for the My Friend Flicka series, as it was their first television series, and they wanted to put a lot into it. All the interior scenes for My Friend Flicka were shot on the sound stages there, and this is where the mythical town of Coulee Springs was located for the scenes that took place in the town. This is where Johnny Washbrook and other child actors received their schooling each day too. The school was located in the writers building, which was a long narrow building where the writers worked on the scripts. The classroom itself had two rows of school desks, five to a row. They were the old-style wooden desks as shown in the photograph below (which many children who grew up during that era still had in their schools across the nation). Instead of pictures of Presidents on the wall, though, there were framed photographs of famous actors and actresses, like Shirley Temple, who had previously attended their school classes there as children or teens. The teachers were kept informed when scenes were coming up that included children, as a teacher would have to accompany the child or children on the sets to look after their welfare.
|
The Sunset and Western studio lot is now the site of a Food 4 Less market and the post-production studios of Color By Deluxe. The current (Century City) Twentieth Century-Fox Studios that are left, shown in the aerial shot above, are located at 10201 W. Pico Boulevard, just south of Santa Monica Boulevard near Avenue of the Stars.
Most of the current Fox Studio's back lot was sold off when the present Century City was first developed, and some of the studio's facilities were relocated elsewhere to make room for the shopping center. However, a good part of the old Fox Studios has survived and still remains busy making motion picture and television productions.
The studio is now owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation, which also owns the Fox Television Network. Despite a fire which ravaged the back lot a few years ago, the studio even still retains some of the historic sets from long ago. |
The entire Goose Bar Ranch was built by 20th Century-Fox carpenters on the Fox Movie Ranch, and included the entrance, the corral, fencing, etc.—just as you see in the My Friend Flicka episodes. The ranch house itself was a façade (with complete front and sides and partial roof, but no back and nothing inside), but the barn was complete.
Located near Malibu, in Calabasas, the land for the Fox Movie Ranch was purchased by 20th Century-Fox Studios in 1946. Besides being the major film location for their first TV series, My Friend Flicka, Fox also used the area as location for dozens of major motion pictures. Motion pictures they filmed there include The Defiant Ones with Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier, Sand Pebbles with Steve McQueen, Viva Zapata starring Anthony Quinn and Marlon Brando, Doctor Doolittle with Rex Harrison, and Elvis Presley’s Love Me Tender. In the movie Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, do your recall the memorable scene where Paul Newman and Robert Redford jump off the cliff together? That famous scene was filmed there. It was also the location for three Tarzan films and the original Planet of the Apes starring Charlton Heston. You can still see "Mr. Blandings Dream House" from the Cary Grant and Myrna Loy movie there. The house used in the film, remodeled and a bit more bland than Blandings original, is now used as a park administration building. A major portion of the Fox property, along with ranch property belonging to Bob Hope and Ronald Reagan, was purchased by the State of California and opened to the public in 1976 as Malibu Creek State Park.
The huge park is in the middle of the Santa Monica Mountains, and is comprised of more than 10,000 acres of rugged and varied terrain, all within the largest metropolitan area on the west coast. It contains over thirty miles of hiking trails. The entrance is located at 1925 Las Virgenes Road in Calabasas, about 25 miles west from Los Angeles’ city center. The park is still occasionally used for filming. If you are a nature-lover (and who isn’t?) and you would like to spend a day hiking around the land where My Friend Flicka was filmed, wear study footwear, take a friend (and water) and watch out for the poison oak and rattlesnakes (stay away from them and they won’t bother you). The scenery is magnificent, and it will be a hike you will always remember.
|
