Pioneertown: The California town built as a movie set with a permanent population of over 400
California is the heart of the entertainment industry, where visiting the state often feels like being on a movie set, and in some cases, that is literally true.
Despite the advances that have been made with special effects and green screens, films are always going to look better when they are shot on actual sets and real locations. Beyond the fact that the actors have something tangible to act with, it improves the tactility and authenticity of a film if the audience can see the history of the location in use. Given that California is where most major studios are based and conduct their business, it makes sense that there are many films shot in the state.
There are even instances in which California itself becomes a character that is thematically important to the film’s story, but more often than not, it is used out of convenience.
It was shortly after the success of John Ford’s masterpiece Stagecoach in 1939 that Hollywood realised that it was sitting on a gold mine when it came to the western genre. Although there had been big-screen westerns since The Great Train Robbery in 1908, Ford showed that gunslinger, cowboy, and adventure films could be made cheaply on real sets. It was only logical that the industry would want to centre its resources on creating western sets that could be used multiple times, and that was how the idea for Pioneertown was conceived.
In 1946, Hollywood investors came together to build an Old West set in East Los Angeles that embodied an actual town from the 1880s. Although it featured a town square and storefronts that could be used for exterior shots, Pioneertown had also recreated saloons, bars, stables, and other shops and buildings that had their interiors completed.
This offered a perfect opportunity for multiple studios to use Pioneertown to double as various small towns in different western films over the course of this Golden Age for the industry. In the ‘40s and ‘50s alone, Pioneertown was seen in over 50 different films and television shows.
It eventually opened up as a tourist location for movie buffs to enter and discover where some of their favourite titles were shot. In order to complete the realism, actors in character often wander the streets, and there are still mock gunfights held as part of the show.
Given that Pioneertown was used so frequently in so many different productions, it waned in popularity because it had become so familiar. That being said, the town had only spiked in tourism because of its reputation, and was still used to film music videos for artists like Ice Cube and Cyndi Lauper. Nonetheless, it has still been used in a more tongue-in-cheek way for dark comedies like Seven Psychopaths and Ingrid Goes West.
The notion of a town constructed purely to serve as a set has become an idea that has inspired original stories in other media. Pioneertown is also paid homage to in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, in which Leonardo DiCaprio’s Rick Dalton is in a functional town while filming an episode of the western series Bounty Law. HBO’s science fiction series Westworld even took the idea to the extreme by creating the fictional town of Sweetwater, in which the western characters are all portrayed by lifelike robots known as “hosts”.
