Home on the Range:

Heading down Topanga Canyon Boulevard off the Ronald Reagan Freeway, Steve Latshaw knows he’s almost home when he spots the mobile home park on his right. That’s where the old western town set used to be, he invariably finds himself thinking.

Turning onto Santa Susana Pass Road, Latshaw envisions a pack of Harleys roaring down the curving two-lane country road as they did in countless ‘60s biker movies. Hanging another right up Redmesa Drive, there’s a rocky cliff on his left--the spot where an Indian war party watched a wagon train travel up the canyon in 1941’s “They Died With Their Boots On” starring Errol Flynn, Latshaw thinks to himself.

A bit farther up the hill, just before entering his condominium complex, Latshaw sees the most famous rock formation in TV history: the very same boulder Clayton Moore races up to before rearing up Silver in the opening credits of “The Lone Ranger.” Looking at it, you can almost hear the adrenaline-pumping “William Tell Overture” swelling in the background. Latshaw does. “I go through the same thoughts every single day,” he says. “It’s like a dream world.”

Each year, thousands of tourists come to Los Angeles in hopes of encountering a piece of movie history. But Latshaw and his fellow residents at the California West condominiums in Chatsworth live smack-dab in the middle of it.

The 290-unit condo complex is on part of the old Iverson movie location ranch where, beginning in 1912, scenes from more than 2,000 movies and television shows were filmed.

Corriganville, another popular movie location ranch in nearby Simi Valley, is now a regional park with hiking trails. Homes recently were built on what once was the parking lot that served visitors after actor-owner Ray “Crash” Corrigan opened the ranch to the public on weekends in 1949.

But there’s nothing quite like California West, a sprawling complex of two-story units. Where else is it possible to take out your garbage and see, only a few yards away, a boulder archway through which William S. Hart, Gene Autry, Lash LaRue, “Wild Bill” Elliott and countless other movie cowboys rode? Or walk your dog through the “cave” used in Disney’s “Zorro” TV series of the late ‘50s?

Or sit on your front porch and see, only 60 feet away, the very spot where a youthfully thin John Wayne stopped the Lordsburg-bound stage in “Stagecoach” and Alan Ladd was later stopped by a Japanese patrol in “China”?

Potato farmer Joe Iverson sold off portions of his original 2,000-acre ranch over the years for construction of the 118 freeway in the late ‘60s and for residential developments. The so-called Upper Iverson on the north side of the freeway, which featured an expansive flat area that was ideal for movie chase scenes, is now a gated community with multimillion-dollar mansions. And about 800 acres of the old ranch--those boasting the most unique rock formations--were donated to the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy in the 1970s. The California West complex went up in the late ‘80s.

“I am literally living in the middle of one of the busiest [former] film locations in the world,” said Latshaw, “and it’s a very strange feeling to look out and see this stuff. The Lone Ranger rock and ‘chase road’ are directly in front of my front door.”

Not everyone at California West is as movie savvy as Latshaw, 40, a screenwriter who has been in love with the movies in general and B-westerns and serials in particular since he was a kid in Decatur, Ill., in the early ‘70s.

*

In fact, not everyone who moves into California West is even aware that they’re living on hallowed movie ground. “It took about two months before we found out through a friend of mine,” said Megan Gorney, 27, who has lived in California West for two years. “I find it intriguing that all this history is still right here where I live.”

Quite literally, in her case: Her condo unit is on the very spot where the eponymous stagecoach in the John Ford classic arrives at the burned-out relay station just before the film’s famous Indian chase sequence.

Gorney, an elementary schoolteacher, wasn’t aware of that until Latshaw showed her a behind-the-scenes publicity photo he had discovered in an old Life magazine. He pinpointed the location by matching the boulders in the picture with those just beyond the guest parking spaces next to Gorney’s unit.

Gorney is no western movie fan, but her father is. He’s coming out soon for a visit from Pennsylvania and, she said, “he’s going to love it.”

Latshaw, his wife, Pat--she’s accounting manager for back-lot billing at Sony Pictures--and their 14-year-old son, Ryan, moved to California West from Burbank two years ago.

The former low-budget Florida filmmaker assumed the rocky landscape he had seen in so many movies and movie books as a boy in Decatur would provide inspiration for his screenwriting. Instead, he often finds himself leaving his desk and roaming around the rocks.

“I spend every moment I can just looking for new rocks,” he said. “I’ll find a production still or see a film and say, ‘I’ve got to go out and find this same rock.’ I just wander constantly.”

Last summer, he identified a group of large boulders not far from the “Lone Ranger rock” as the site of the mine in “Zorro’s Black Whip,” a 1944 serial starring Linda Sterling as a female Zorro. He even found cement and chicken-wire remnants from the faux mine-entrance set.

Pat, his wife of 18 years, frequently accompanies him on his walking tours. “I find it very fascinating,” she said, “but there is no way I could match his enthusiasm.”

“That,” her husband wryly noted, “is very diplomatically put.”

Indeed, Latshaw even named the family’s 2-year-old bull terrier after the title character in “Perils of Nyoka,” whom he describes as a female Indiana Jones.

He said he suggested the name Nyoka as a joke, but his wife and son liked it. “Now,” he concedes with a laugh, “it seems sadly obsessive.”

To inform other residents about the movies that were shot in their backyard, Latshaw and three other members of the condo complex’s landscape committee are planning a barbecue for residents in September at which they’ll screen an episode of “The Lone Ranger,” which ran from 1949-1957, and a Hopalong Cassidy picture that were filmed at Iverson.

They also plan to install movie photo markers next to a handful of rock formations inside the condo complex, and Latshaw intends to talk to the Santa Monica Mountain Conservancy about doing the same in part of the conservancy area.

On a recent walking tour of the area, the couple slipped between the massive boulders that form what is known as the “Zorro cave,” so named after the “Zorro’s Fighting Legion” serial and the “Zorro” TV series episodes that were filmed there. The formation is just off the driveway, not far from their unit.

*

Some trails are on private property that go past the old Iverson ranch house. The small, single-story house, now empty and heavily vandalized, overlooks Topanga Canyon Boulevard and the Santa Susana Pass Road. Down the trail is a mobile home park where the old western town, used in countless films, once stood. Stopping at an enormous boulder, he pulled out a production still that showed the same rock and a V-shaped tree in a scene from the 1951 serial “Don Daredevil Rides Again.”

Nearby was a boulder with two smaller rocks cemented on top. Iverson, Latshaw explained, was not above enhancing some of the rocks on his property to make them more interesting to the movie folks he charged to film there. The area was used frequently by Republic Pictures, which specialized in B-westerns.

*

Back on the condo grounds, Latshaw stopped at a large boulder where a scene from a Gene Autry movie, “The Big Show,” was filmed, then he headed toward the condo pool. A couple of months ago, he said, he was sitting there reading when he glanced up at the rock formation six feet from the pool and thought, “I just saw a truck blown up next to that rock last night in the serial ‘Government Agents vs. Phantom Legion,’ made in 1950.

“I thought to myself, ‘The poor guys that had to make movies out here in the heat and the dust in the middle of the high summer would never dream somebody like me 50 years later would be sitting at a pool at that exact location.”

Past the condo units and onto the conservancy land, Latshaw pointed out where the “Fighting Seabees” had marched, and where Errol Flynn knocked Anthony Quinn off his horse in “They Died With Their Boots On.”

And then it was on to the Iverson ranch’s most filmed landmark: The Garden of the Gods, a series of spectacular boulders that includes one known variously as the Sphinx rock and the Indian-head rock.

Not everyone, however, appreciates the Hollywood history here.

Over the past six months, an increasing number of gang members and others have been coming into the conservancy area after dark. There’s been drinking and partying, and illegal cooking fires have been set, Latshaw said. But two months ago, residents began what Pat Latshaw calls “our vigilante effort,” after boulders on the trail leading up from Redmesa Drive to the Garden of the Gods were tagged.

“That got us mad and we got organized,” she said. “We’re very protective of this.”

Armed with high-powered flashlights and walkie-talkies, a handful of residents have been taking turns patrolling the area at night. “Working with the park rangers and the police,” Latshaw said, “we managed to get 17 arrests over the past two weeks.”

Fifty years after black-hatted heavies regularly rode the trails and roamed the rocks, the old Iverson movie location ranch still has its bad guys.

*

Dennis McLellan can be reached at [email protected].