Paramount Ranch: Cultural Landscape Inventory, Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area

National Park Service

Paramount Ranch is a rural historic landscape in the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area, which encompasses 765 acres, comprising the most representative, surviving portion of the approximately 2,400-acre former Paramount Studios Movie Ranch (“Paramount Ranch”). Paramount Pictures, the well-known film studios located in Los Angeles, owned and developed the property between 1927 and 1943 for use as a movie ranch. Movie ranches were properties leased or owned by film studios located outside of urban Los Angeles that provided specific advantages for filming a wide variety of movies, including landscape diversity and an absence of power lines and urban noise that were constraints of the typical urban studio lot. Paramount Ranch once included much of the undeveloped and mountainous terrain that surrounds it, but today these lands predominantly lie outside the park boundaries. However, located within park boundaries are the former ranch operations area, the sites of historic film locations, much of the historic road system, and views to the adjacent hills. The landscape characteristics of Paramount Ranch that retain integrity include natural systems and features, spatial organization, land use, topography, circulation, and buildings and structures. The natural setting of the ranch, which is comprised of natural systems and features, is the primary landscape characteristic that made the site valuable to the film industry as a location to produce motion pictures. The ranch’s diverse natural features and landscape qualities allowed for a wide range of locales to be represented on-screen, while site modifications, including grading for building and road construction, allowed for the operational activities necessary to support on-site film production. These landscape characteristics continue to evoke the setting and feeling of the historic period and contribute to the site’s significance as one of the best-preserved examples of a movie ranch as developed by the motion picture industry in Southern California during the studio era. In August 2021, Rich Freitas (Historical Landscape Architect), Vida Germano (Cultural Landscapes Program Manager), and Stephen Lorber (Historical Landscape Architect Intern) of the NPS regional office, completed an update to the CLI that built upon previous work by Cortney Cain Gjesfjeld (Historical Landscape Architect) and Vida Germano in 2017. As a result of this effort, the landscape description, chronology, physical history, analysis and evaluation--as well as several other database fields--were updated. New site plans were also prepared showing 2021 existing conditions at Paramount Ranch. Additional research should be undertaken in a future revision to deepen the context of the motion picture industry in Southern California and document the development of movie ranches as an endemic landscape typology.

Paramount Ranch: Cultural Landscape Inventory, Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area

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