Historic Hollywood Sites Destroyed as Woolsey Fire Burns

As the Woolsey Fire raged through Southern California over the weekend, destroying homes, wildlife and roads, it also tore open a more existential wound, consuming several pieces of Hollywood history and turning a geography of cinematic lore to cinder and ash.

“This is an incredible loss that we haven’t even begun to put our head around yet,” said Cari Beauchamp, a Hollywood historian and resident scholar of Mary Pickford Foundation, which promotes film archival and restoration projects.

The trees, and landscape of places like the Paramount Ranch in Agoura Hills, or the vast mountainscape of the M*A*S*H TV set, nestled deep within the Malibu Creek State Park, were as much a part of Hollywood history as the most iconic scenes shot in a studio lot, if not more so. Both were badly damaged in the fire.

“Those incredible oak trees were hundreds of years old,” says Beauchamp, who has spent years chronicling the ways, both subtle and dramatic, in which the landscape and architecture of Southern California have wound their way into our entertainment. “Any film made between 1927 and 1953 in which there’s a Wells Fargo buggy going by, well, those trees are going to be in the background. You could see how they’d be so attractive. And the chaparral! That loss pains me as much as any set destruction.”

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Photo Credit: welcomia / Shutterstock.com