3:10 to Yuma|Bronson Canyon — Where the Night Pickups Came Home

Not every frame is New Mexico. American Cinematographer notes that a few night exteriors were picked up back in Los Angeles at Bronson Canyon, shot inside city limits after the unit came home from the high desert.

The canyon is a quarry. The Union Rock Company worked it from 1903 to 1928, cutting crushed stone for the street beds of a city that was doubling every decade, until the crews had driven a short tunnel clean through the hillside with two mouths opening on the far side. The company left. Griffith Park absorbed the hole. Since then it has been the Batcave of the 1966 television series, the alien cave of more B pictures than anyone has counted, and a reliable stand-in for anywhere that needs rock and no horizon.

Access is free. Park along Canyon Drive where the pavement ends above Franklin Avenue, then walk about five minutes up a fire road to the quarry floor. The main tunnel is short enough that daylight shows at both ends, and on most weekends someone is in there with a camera.

Stand in the mouth facing out. The frame holds nothing but decomposed granite and chaparral — no city, no century. Then turn around and walk the ridge behind you, and the Hollywood sign is right there, ten minutes off: a hundred years of pretending this quarry is somewhere else, with the town that needed the pretending in plain sight over the hill.

Photo: Wikimedia Commons.