Paramount Ranch, historic set destroyed in Woolsey Fire, to be rebuilt

A fundraising campaign was launched Friday to rebuild the Western Town film set at Paramount Ranch where decades of Hollywood history were destroyed by the Woolsey Fire. 

The film set south of Agoura Hills in Los Angeles County is in the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area, which is part of the National Park Service. The set consisted of a series of buildings, but only the train station and a church built for HBO’s “Westworld” remained standing after the flames tore through. 

The Woolsey Fire started Nov. 8 near the Rocketdyne facility south of Simi Valley.  

At a news conference Friday on the scorched set, Sara Horner, board president of the nonprofit Santa Monica Mountains Fund, said it’s time for Hollywood to give back and show some financial support.

She announced the creation of “The Paramount Project,” as the nonprofit has nicknamed it, that is aimed at restoring a piece of the film industry’s culture and the natural beauty that surrounds it. 

“This place represents the film industry’s history in Los Angeles as well as the natural environment here in one of the most important areas of biodiversity on the planet,” Horner said. 

Paramount Pictures purchased the 2,700-acre ranch in 1927. The current ranch is 765 acres. Although it changed ownership several times between 1957 and 1980, production continued. The National Park Service bought a portion of Paramount’s original property in 1980, according to the agency’s website. 

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More than 300 films, television shows and commercials have been filmed at the ranch, which is on the National Register of Historic Places.

Western Town was created in the 1950s for television shows such as “The Cisco Kid.” More recently, in the 1990s, it was the backdrop for “Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman,” according to the National Park Service.

About 88 percent of the land within the national park boundary has burned, and within that area sit Western Town and Paramount Ranch. 

David Szymanski, superintendent of the national recreation area, said the ranch stood for two essential human things that will help motivate the recovery process. 

“The first is story. Story in a simplest form is gossip, but in the form that we’ve come to love, it’s the movie magic,” Szymanski said at the news conference. “And we hope to be able to tell the next story of this place in very short order. ... We would like to get Paramount Ranch rebuilt in the next 24 months.” 

In the meantime, the hope is to get a temporary film set in place so the park can get much-needed revenue from location fees. Those fees also pay for the National Park Service employees who manage the area during filming, said Kate Kuykendall, a spokeswoman for the recreation area. 

For the permanent set, measures will be taken to make it more fire-resistant. The utility infrastructure also needs upgrading, which was already planned, because it dates back to when Paramount owned the property, Szymanski said. 

He said the ranch is also about play. It draws with 400,000 visitors a year and is the site of public and private events such as the Topanga Banjo and Fiddle Festival, as well as an annual party to look at stars and many weddings. 

Although walls of flame and towering columns of smoke were gone, firefighters continue to expand containment lines around the scorched area. Fire commanders said the 153-square-mile (396-square-kilometer) burn area was 78 percent surrounded.

The count of destroyed structures reached 713. Another 201 structures were damaged.

Los Angeles County sheriff's detectives were investigating three deaths. Two adults were found in a gutted car last week, and the remains of a person were found Wednesday in the rubble of a home that had burned to the ground.

At the Paramount Ranch, structures that served as barns, hotels, saloons and barbershops for decades of movies and TV shows are gone. Workers will salvage what they can and then work to rebuild.

The site began as a set for Paramount Pictures in the 1920s and was taken over by the National Park Service in 1980. It got a major restoration in 1985, with the park service trying to maintain as much as it could from the original buildings. Corrugated tin roofs on many of them still dated to the 1920s. Now those roofs lie burned and twisted on the ground like pieces of a crashed plane.

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The park employs a number of youths from underprivileged communities in Ventura and Los Angeles counties, looking to cultivate future leaders. The plan is to continue the program but on a smaller scale, Szymanski said. 

A number of issues need to be addressed before the park can open, including the condition of hiking trails, downed power lines and debris left over in Western Town that needs some kind of barrier to close it off. 

Some archaeological work may be done within the burned piles because there may be some items worth keeping that date back to when Paramount owned the ranch, Szymanski said.

The ranch also intersects with land overseen by California State Parks, so both agencies will have to work together to ensure all areas open when it’s safe for visitors to return. 

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