American Sniper|Paramount Ranch — Aim Small, Miss Small

The instruction is four words long and it never leaves you: aim small, miss small. Chris Kyle lies prone in dry grass, breathing down to nothing between heartbeats, and the hills behind him are the color of old straw. Clint Eastwood shot that SEAL sniper-school sequence not at Coronado but here, at Paramount Ranch in the Santa Monica Mountains, about twenty-five miles west of downtown Los Angeles.

Paramount Pictures bought roughly 2,700 acres of the old Rancho Las Virgenes in 1927 because the studio wanted every landscape in America within an hour's drive of Melrose Avenue. The oak savanna could pass for Missouri, Wales, colonial Massachusetts or, in 2014, a Southern California firing range. The National Park Service took the ranch over in 1980, and it has been free and open to the public ever since as part of Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area.

The Woolsey Fire came through on 9 November 2018 and took Western Town, the false-fronted street that had stood in for a century of frontier pictures. The land did not go. The valley oaks came back, the trails reopened, and rebuilding has proceeded piece by piece.

Go early, before the marine layer burns off. Walk out into the open meadow past the parking lot and lie down in the grass for a minute — the ground is harder than it looks on camera, the seed heads catch in your collar, and the ridgeline is close enough that you understand exactly what a shooter would be looking at. Photo: representative Southern California oak grassland.