Sunday, June 8, 2014

June 7 Juan Bautistia de Anza National Historic Trail - Griffith Park Los Angeles

We then cut over to the famous Griffith Park section of Los Angeles, to stop by the 
Ranger Station to get a stamp for the De Anza Trail.   There are probably 25 or more stops in California for this trail and we'll be getting to lots of them on the trip... A revisit for this trail.  



Some information on Griffith Park:

Griffith Park is a large municipal park at the eastern end of the Santa Monica Mountains in the Los Feliz neighborhood of Los Angeles, California. The park covers 4,310 acres of land, making it one of the largest urban parks in North America.

Griffith Park was the busiest destination in Los Angeles for on-location filming in 2011, with 346 production days, according to a FilmL.A. survey. Projects included the TV shows Criminal Minds and The Closer.[9]
With its wide variety of scenes and close proximity to Hollywood and Burbank, many different production crews have found new ways and angles to film the same spots and make them look different. One would be hard pressed to find a spot in Griffith Park which has not been filmed or taped.

The Griffith Observatory, which sits atop the southern slope of Mount Hollywood, was featured prominently in the 1955 classic Rebel Without a Cause. A bronze bust of the film's star James Dean is on the grounds just outside the dome. Other movies filmed here include The Terminator (1984), Disney's The Rocketeer (1991), Stephen Sommer's 2004 film Van HelsingThe Majestic (2001), and Yes Man (2008). The area of the park around the Observatory also appears as a location in the role-playing video game Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines, which is set in Los Angeles.
Griffith Park has many other locations familiar to moviegoers. It was used as a location in the first two Back to the Future movies. In the first movie (released in 1985) it was used for Marty McFly's starting point when accelerating to 88 mph (142 km/h) in the film's climax, and in the second movie (released in 1989) it was used for the "River Road Tunnel" scene when Marty was trying to get the almanac back from Biff Tannen. The same tunnel was used as the entrance to Toontown in Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988). The park was also featured in the Robert Altman movie Short Cuts (1993).
A sampling of television shows filmed here includes the Nickelodeon show Salute Your Shorts and an episode of Remington Steele in which Laura Holt is trying to evade the police. The park was also the location for Adam Lambert's music video for his single, "If I Had You". Griffith Park and Griffith Observatory are significant in the Star Trek: Voyager episode "Future's End" (originally aired November 6, 1996). The crew are thrown into the past and Griffith Observatory discovers Voyager. The tunnel was also used in the 1960s spy television series Mission: Impossible.
In John Rechy's novel City of Night and non-fiction book The Sexual Outlaw, Griffith Park is the scene of gay pick-ups and public sex as well as numerous gay bashings and violence from the LAPD in the 1960s and 1970s. It is the scene of similar activities in several novels by James Ellroy.

Bronson Canyon, aka Bronson Caves, is a popular location for motion picture and television filming, especially of western and science fiction low-budget films, including Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956). The site was also used as the location for the climactic scene in John Ford's classic 1956 western, The Searchers. The scene includes John Wayne cornering his niece, Debbie (Natalie Wood), in one of the caves with the apparent intent of killing her. He relents at the last moment, however and, in the film's most famous shot, picks her up in his arms and turns to carry her back home. Many fans of the film are startled by the revelation that this scene was actually filmed in urban Los Angeles, probably due to how well the shot is integrated into the rest of the picture's location scenery. The craggy site of an old quarry, a tunnel in this canyon was also used as the entrance to the Batcave in the opening sequence of the 1960s Batman television series, and in numerous other shows. The natural "cave" walls are preserved by the many layers of paint used to make them look like rock

No comments:

Post a Comment