I like to watch the old show Emergency (on from 72-77) . They show a lot of scenes on dirt roads. Were there a lot of dirt roads back then in LA county? I realize they could have filmed in other counties as well. (I know the county is bigger than just the city of LA)
BTW, it is claimed that this show caused a lot of cities/counties to start up FD paramedic units . Maybe that’s just a bit of an overstatement.
Yeah, it’s a pretty big place. I used to live in the Mojave Desert – and I was still in L.A. County.
I think a lot of the rural filming may have been done in the outer San Fernando Valley or up around Santa Clarita. (I saw a The Rockford Files episode recently that was filmed at the Saugus Speedway.)
I don’t live anywhere near there (I’m within a couple of hours drive of the Atlantic, so I’m almost as far away from there as you can get going east without swimming), but looking on Google maps, you’ve got Los Angeles at the bottom of the county, and Lancaster at the top end of the county, and lots of forest and mountain area in between. The Angeles National Forest, for example, lies mostly within Los Angeles County, and the eastern end of the Las Padres National Forest extends into Los Angeles County west of Lancaster.
You can find lots of recent pictures of dirt roads in both of those areas with a simple Google search, so I would say that not only did they have plenty of dirt roads back in the 70s, but they also still have them today.
ETA: I used to watch that show every week when it originally aired.
Yep, and you don’t even need to be out in the outskirts either. There are plenty of dirt roads right in the Santa Monica Mountains, and plenty of places for hikers to get bitten by snakes, mountain bikers to munch it, and other calamities you tend to associate with the show.
They show a lot of scenes on dirt roads.
My guess would be these are cheaper sets. I suspect as much of the show as possible was shot on back lots and the cheaper unpaved areas of movie locations. Shooting on real roads is going to be avoided whenever possible.
you’ll find lots of unpaved roads in Metro Detroit even today, especially in the wealthier areas.
Shows like Adam-12, Chips, and Emergency filmed a lot on location using freeways that were under construction as “sets”. Having lived in LA all my life I can watch a rerun of these shows and tell you were they were filmed and about what year based on when the freeway they were using was being built.*
So if they were using freeways as sets a dirt fire road is no more difficult or expensive to film on.
*One reason you don’t see this type of show being made now is there is no freeway construction going on in So.Cal now.
One thing we need to remember is that California was not set up like states back East. In olden days, a county was supposed to be only so big that you could get to the county seat on a single day’s ride.
Consider Lancaster County, PA (where the Amish settled.) Its area is 984 square miles. Los Angeles County is more than 4,000 square miles.
Catalina Island is part of LA county. With the exception of the city of Avalon (which covers all of one square mile and has almost no automobiles anyway), all of the roads thereupon are unpaved.
Palmdale and Lancaster are still LA county.
For instance, this is in LA county:
“Dirt Mulholland”
(from the Wiki article), according to which Mulholland Highway is a dirt road for quite a few miles west of the 405, until one gets near Topanga. This unpaved section is officially closed to motor vehicles of all kinds; although I’m not sure if that was the case when I drove its complete length on two separate occasions, many, many years ago. Even then I’d had no inkling that it wasn’t completely paved yet. The second time I made this drive was at night, and that experience was…interesting.
It’s a good thing I checked the facts on this, because I’d been about to post that parts of Mulholland used to be unpaved as recently as the 1980s, having assumed it’d certainly have been paved well before now.
California’s county geography reflects its demographics during early statehood. If you look at a county map, the north central area, where the Gold Rush took place, has many small irregularly shaped counties that are like eastern states’ counties. The southern section of the state, which was thinly populated at the time, has huge counties such as San Bernardino.