A primer on the Iverson Movie Ranch

Rendezvous at Boulder Pass - Hollywood's Fantasyland is a primer on the Iverson Movie Ranch

By Jerry England, Echo Press

Dated: 2010

Photographs, movie stills, lobby cards, and screenshots capture the Iverson Ranch as it looks today and as it appeared during half a century of movie-making between 1912 and the late 1970s.

In the San Fernando Valley's backyard, there remains a fantasyland that was forever made famous by Hollywood…

A place where Superman once captured the evil Luthor in his hidden Stoney Point cave, where Batman wrestled a criminal on top of a speeding locomotive, where Tarzan the Ape Man found an ancient elephant graveyard, and where John Wayne's fighting Seabees pushed a Japanese tank off the same cliff that Nyoka used to escape Vultura’s killer ape.

The place is Boulder Pass. It was the jungles of India and Africa, the sands of the Sahara, the Khyber Pass between Pakistan and Afghanistan, the plains of Montana, and the High Sierras and the Rocky Mountains all rolled into one. It was the scene of stagecoach holdups, posses chasing outlaws on owlhoot (outlaw) trails, Indians attacking white settlers in remote cabins, flying rocket men, and unearthly spaceship landings. It was a land for make-believe. It could be anything a Hollywood director fancied.

Boulder Pass is a fictitious name borrowed from an old B-Western movie. The real place is the Santa Susana Pass in Chatsworth, California. For nearly three-quarters of a century, the Santa Susana Pass was home to the granddaddy of all movie location ranches--the Iverson Movie Ranch.

To learn more about Jerry England and his books visit http://www.cowboyup.com/

Jerry England is a western movie historian and author who has researched and written about filming locations in the San Fernando Valley. Rendezvous at Boulder Pass - Hollywood's Fantasyland is his second book about the area.

In 2008 he published Reel Cowboys of the Santa Susanas.

See Jerry's YouTube video Writing Rendezous at Boulder Pass at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-V30xQLg2Ls