In California's backcountry, seeking movie backdrops
Every year, thousands of film fans become location scouts of sorts as they search for scenes shot in the Alabama Hills, a badlands that has appeared in more than 700 movie and TV productions.
By Louis Sahagun
Photography and video by Mark Boster
Reporting from Lone Pine, Calif.
As howling winds tore through the eastern Sierra, Dan Gillespie and his wife Carol trudged along a narrow gravel path, their eyes alternating between photos they carried and the contours of a cove guarded by granite walls.
At one point, Carol held up a photograph of a campfire scene in "Django Unchained," which is set in the South just before the Civil War. She moved the photo to the left, then to the right. She squinted, then broke into a smile. Pointing to a nearby rock, she said that actor Jamie Foxx "stood right there."
The Gillespies and three other people on this outing were location scouts of sorts — and they had just found their prize.
Like thousands of other film buffs and historians who flock here every year, they found the location of a movie scene shot in the Alabama Hills, a high-desert badlands of gullies, canyons and outcroppings at the foot of Mt. Whitney that has appeared in more than 700 movie and television productions.
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