Editor’s note: This story is part of a series devoted to the history of Plumas County.
In honor of the Oscars earlier this month, we’re taking a closer look at four of the movies filmed in and around Plumas County. Though none were Oscar contenders, they are each, in their own way, iconic, with scenes of outdoor adventure, scenic wilderness, timber and ranching, and the small-town charm that are in many ways emblematic of our region.
‘White Water Summer,’ 1987
If you lived in Plumas County in the ’80s, playing seven degrees of Kevin Bacon may be easier than you think. This teen outdoor adventure film stars everyone’s favorite hobbit, Sean Astin. Astin’s Alan is a brainy New York City teen forced to spend six weeks roughing it in the Sierra with a group of other teens including Matt Adler of “Teen Wolf” fame as Chris and K.C. Martell (“E.T.”) as George. Kevin Bacon plays their overly intense wilderness instructor, Vic.
Though the movie was filmed in many different locations, including New Zealand, the opening credits feature establishing shots of the group traveling up the Feather River Canyon in a vintage Volkswagen bus. The campers then make a stop at the Cromberg Union 76 before heading out into the wilderness, where they swim and fish at what looks very much like Indian Falls. Later, the boys hike and briefly rock climb in the Sierra Buttes near Sardine Lake.
That vintage Volkswagen used in the film had previously belonged to Gayle Franzen of Quincy. Franzen originally came from Southern California where much of her family worked in the movie industry, including her cousin Bob Roe, who was the first assistant director on “White Water Summer.” Franzen herself was hired to sign up and photograph extras for the film.
The eldest of her three daughters, Amy, was 13 at the time — close to the age of the young stars — and the family spent a lot of time on set, and visiting with the cast and crew at the condo in Graeagle where they were staying. Amy also helped out by babysitting Bacon’s black lab puppy.
“The kids had such a good time and it was really fun,” she said. She recalled going to watch the filming at Sardine Lake, where they had caterers. “The kids were jazzed that they got to eat all the food.”
Other locations included Bucks Lake, Johnsville and the Plumas-Sierra County Fairgrounds, where, Franzen recalled, the sequence in which Bacon’s Vic teaches the boys to catch fish with their bare hands was filmed.
‘A Cry in the Wild,’ 1990
In “A Cry in the Wild,” Plumas National Forest stands in for the Yukon. Adapted from Gary Paulsen’s Newbery Award-winning novel “Hatchet,” the film follows 13-year-old Brian (Jared Rushton) as he struggles to survive after his plane crashes in the remote Canadian wilderness. His only asset? A small hatchet, given to him by his mother. (You may recognize Rushton as Tom Hanks’ best friend in “Big,” the neighbor in “Honey, I Shrunk the Kids” and one of Becky’s boyfriends on “Roseanne.”)
The movie opens in the interior of the Sportsmen’s Den in East Quincy, where Brian (sporting an impressive mullet) and his mother (Pamela Sue Martin, best known as Nancy Drew in the ’70s TV series) purchase a jacket for his upcoming trip to visit his father at a remote Canadian oilfield. They exit into the exterior of the Plumas Pines Shopping Center in Quincy, where Brian’s mother surprises him with the hatchet against the backdrop of the old Sprouse-Reitz (now Rite Aid).
From there, mother and son head to the Nervino Airport in Beckwourth, and Brian boards the plane that will strand him in the wild after the pilot, Ned Beatty (“Deliverance,” “Rudy”), suffers a midair heart attack, leaving Brian to crash land into Upper Sardine Lake.
The plane crash sequence was actually performed by local pilot Johnny Moore, the owner of Sugarpine Aviators, and Herschel Beail, who owned and operated Quincy Body Shop, and is also a professional pilot and mechanic. Moore tells the story in his book “I Must Fly!”
Beail, standing in for Rushton, was able to wear a mullet wig, but Moore, standing in for Beatty, had his real hair styled for filming. He wrote, “The hairdresser shaved the top of my head and then put my hair up in curlers,” which had to stay in for 24 hours. “The only trouble was that I had a Forest Service recon flight in the meantime and riding along was Mary Colombe, the <forest> supervisor. She was quite amused when I offered my explanation.”
In order to simulate the crash, Moore explains, “it was necessary to break over a higher ridge at Young America Lake with full flaps and near stall speed … then bank steeply to the right and left in order to lose lift.”
“In order to drop down to Sardine Lake’s surface, I rolled over almost inverted and retracted the flaps and as we began the free fall, I slowly began increasing the power on the heat-sensitive turbocharged engine while rolling back to wings level.” They had to repeat the stunt “seven or eight times.”
In a flashback scene filmed at Gansner Park in Quincy, Rushton’s character reflects on his parents’ painful divorce.
Kyle Hardee, of Quincy, watched part of the filming as a third grader at Plumas Christian School. He recalled, “My whole class met Jared Rushton and watched the filming of the park flashback scenes at Gansner Park. … It was interesting to watch how many times they filmed a single scene, each time with small changes. We watched a scene where Jared is playing Frisbee in Gansner Park and chases a Frisbee into the trees. He kept having to move the branches in just the right way to get the lighting right and his face in the frame correctly.”
‘Guns of the Timberland,’ 1960
“Guns of the Timberland” is very loosely based on the 1955 Louis L’Amour bestseller of almost the same name — “Guns of the Timberlands” (with an s at the end). The film, starring Alan Ladd, Gilbert Roland and Jeanne Crain, and written and produced by Aaron Spelling, walks an interesting line between western spectacle and 1960s teen movie. There are classic elements — scenes of horse breaking and hillsides, a cheerful brawl in the middle of the town’s only street — but the film also has the distinction of being teen crooner Frankie Avalon’s screen debut, managing to wedge in two hit singles.
The movie opens with Jim Hadley (Ladd) and his second-in-command (Roland) with their crew of lumberjacks rolling across the Clio Trestle in an open railroad car singing a catchy little tune with the chorus “Timber, timber, I cry / If a tree don’t fall on me I’ll live till I die.” One lyric runs, “The life of a logger’s a dangerous life / but oh what a way to be rid of your wife!
“It was a beautiful old train,” recalled Quincy resident Chesley Pence, who was present for much of the filming.
The timber crew arrives at the old Blairsden Railroad Depot (which no longer exists) ready to begin work, but find that they are unwelcome. The small ranching community is decidedly adverse to clearcutting, since, as rancher Laura Riley (Crain) explains, “The first rain will wash away all the topsoil. No topsoil, no grass; no grass, no cattle … You’ll ruin every rancher in this valley.”
Filming took place around Blairsden, Maybe, Graeagle and Vinton, and locals will have no trouble recognizing the green valleys and rocky hillsides of eastern Plumas. Longtime residents may also recognize the beautiful old bar from the Capitol Club Saloon (now Plumas Arts).
Pence joined the Plumas County Sheriff’s Office at the age of 21, and he was stationed in Portola. As the only deputy in the eastern part of the county, he often assisted with traffic control and security.
He recalled that Gilbert Roland was “a real nice guy” and Jeanne Crain was “just a down-to-earth person.” Ladd was “altogether different” — he didn’t associate with the local people, wore lift shoes about 4 inches high, and was usually “about half drunk.”
In one memorable incident, Ladd falls from a horse. In the scene, the ranchers, led by Crain’s Laura Riley, fall trees across the road as Ladd and the loggers attempt to access the hillside through her ranch. Ladd was supposed to ride past as charges were set off to imitate the crash of the tree, but his horse froze at the sound and Ladd fell forward over the horse’s head. He had the wind knocked out of him, but kept going. The sequence was shot on a road wrapping around a ranch right across from the old Vinton schoolhouse.
At another point in the movie, Frankie Avalon performs a song while driving his wagon along a county road. The scene was filmed near Graeagle, with cottonwoods in the background. During the take, Pence received a call about an assault, and had to leave suddenly, sirens blaring. He apologized to the director for the interruption the next day, but was assured that there was no inconvenience — Avalon kept right on singing, and they planned to dub the music anyway.
Alan Ladd had a habit of collecting souvenir law enforcement badges from all the locations where he filmed. Accordingly, Sheriff Abernethy ordered one for him, but it hadn’t arrived by the time of the presentation at Last Chance Canyon, near Chilcoot. Instead, Abernethy borrowed Pence’s badge for the photo, holding his thumb over the name. You can still see the photo on display in the entryway of the sheriff’s office in East Quincy.
‘Pink Cadillac,’ 1989
“Pink Cadillac” was the last and least commercially successful of Clint Eastwood’s ’80s action comedies. Eastwood stars as Tommy Nowak, a skip tracer with a range of disguises that include rodeo clown, morning radio shock jock and Reno lounge lizard.
Bernadette Peters plays Lou Ann, a young mother facing charges relating to counterfeit money belonging to her ne’er-do-well husband, Roy, and his gang of white supremacist meth addicts, called Birthright. After she makes bail, Lou Ann liberates her husband’s prized pink 1959 Cadillac Coupe de Ville, unaware that her spouse has stashed his crew’s nest egg in the roof compartment. She takes off for Reno, where her sister is caring for her infant daughter, with Eastwood’s Tommy in hot pursuit. When Roy kidnaps the baby and takes her to Birthright’s backwoods compound, Lou Ann and Tommy team up to get the child back. (Fun fact: a young Jim Carrey also makes a brief appearance as a lounge comedian in Reno whose talents Peters’ character does not appreciate.)
Throughout the film, the titular pink Cadillac roars through the greater Plumas County region. Settings include downtown Sacramento, the Prattville Drive-in, the Reno strip, the Hideaway Hotel in Greenville (where Room 4 doubles as the “Hawaiian room”), the Taylorsville Tavern, highways 70 and 89 and, memorably, Humbug Road, an old stage road leading to Chico.
Scenes of the villain’s camp were filmed at Forest Lodge in Greenville. The site was used as a summer resort from the 1920s through the 1960s, but by the 1980s, it had become the family home of the Wattenburgs.
Clint Eastwood was a friend of the family, having met Bill Wattenburg at a celebrity tennis tournament in the 1970s. In one scene, the gang holds a shooting practice in a large flat clearing that was actually the tennis court for the old lodge.
Daughter Kira Wattenburg King, of Greenville, was in college at the time, but visited during the filming, and even had a role as an extra in the car wash scene. She recalled how “friendly and wonderful the bad guys were.” Particularly Danish actor and bodybuilder Sven was “just an adorable human,” who used to carry the kids who would come to the set around on his arms.
“The most profound thing was seeing all the different sites of Greenville and Plumas County generally. The view of Lassen <Peak> as they drive away … was really fun to see in a movie,” King said. “I thought it was really neat how they used local people in many of the scenes and really engaged the community.”
Honorable mentions
Of course, these four films are far from the only ones to feature Plumas County locations and scenery. The Feather River Canyon appears in “Top Gun: Maverick” (2022); Chilcoot’s Last Chance Tavern was used in the movie “Kingpin” (1996) with Woody Harrelson and Randy Quaid; and “Diamonds” (1999), starring Kirk Douglas and Dan Ackroyd, includes scenes filmed in front of Wiggin’s Trading Post in Chilcoot.
Do you have stories of these or other Plumas County movies? Let us know at [email protected].
