Talking pictures : how they are made, how to appreciate them (c. 1937)

Talking Pictures be used for locations because of a motor road. Likewise, the old Spanish Providencia Ranch, two miles from the nearest studio and only twelve from the farthest, provided scenes in The Covered Wagon, Blood and Sand, and many other old pictures. It is seldom used today for transcontinental airplanes pass over it. Sandy dunes like those of the Sahara Desert may be found in several places, near Oxnard and Barstow, California, near Yuma, Arizona, and two hundred miles north, at Guadalupe, California. In Guadalupe, where the sand piles in great hills over an area ten miles long and six miles wide, was placed fifteen years ago what still remains the "record" location of all times. For two weeks, at an average cost of forty thousand dollars a day, twenty-five hundred men and women and three thousand animals were encamped, working before a towering reproduction of Rameses, an ancient Egyptian city, for scenes in The Ten Commandments. Catalina Island, twenty-eight miles off the coast, has doubled for the South Seas innumerable times. One of its blue coves has played the part of the Sea of Galilee. Beautiful willow trees around a city reservoir, high in the hills, make it ideal for eastern park scenes. One town, near San Francisco, does a good business doubling for New England. Producers willingly travel four hundred miles to reach it, because it is one of the few spots in all California which does not have palm, orange, lemon, banana, or eucalyptus trees. Originally built by a group of non-conforming Massachusetts farmers, anything savoring of California's native Spanish heritage has been kept from it. [ 188]