Five blockbuster films shot in the High Desert in the past 20 years (2024)
The rugged beauty of the High Desert has been used as a backdrop by Hollywood and independent filmmakers since the silent days of celluloid, when "The Original Screen Cowboy" William S. Hart used Victorville to represent the Wild West in "Sand" (1920), "White Oak" (1921) and "Wild Bill Hickok" (1923).
Since then, scores of movies — not justWesterns — have usedthe Victor Valley and Barstow as stand-ins for desolate locales. The area's cinematic tradition can't be encapsulated by a single short list of movies, so the Daily Press took a look at a sliver of that rich and dusty historyand came up with five of the most notable blockbusters shot in the High Desert within the last 20 years. Some of the scenes are easily recognizable, but others may surprise even the most ardent movie buff:
In part two of Quentin Tarantino’s ultra-violent tribute to spaghetti Westerns and 1970s martial arts films, Uma Thurman’s dirt-covered heroine punches her way out of a grave before walking out of a cemetery and into a cafe where she politely orders a glass of water. That lonely cafe is Emma Jean's Holland Burger Cafe at 17143 North D Street in Victorville. No cemetery actually exists across the street from the restaurant, which has been a Victorville staple since 1947. Additionally, Tarantino didn’t roam too far from Victorville to film the infamous “Black Mamba” snake scenes. The exterior shots of the travel trailer used in that sequence were shot in Mule Canyon near Calico, about 14 miles outside Barstow.
Director Steven Soderbergh and megastar Julia Roberts put Hinkley on the cinematic map with the stranger-than-fiction true story of the eponymous character's struggle for small-town justice. PG&E began contaminating Hinkley’s groundwater with the cancer-causing chemical Chromium-6 in 1952, which resulted in a multi-million dollar settlement in 1996. A financial and critical success upon its release, the movie used filming locations in Barstow and on sections of the I-15 freeway. It led to Academy Award nominations for Best Picture, Best Original Screenplay, Best Director, Best Actor and Best Actress; however, Roberts was the only person involved to walk away with the coveted statuette.
3. Contact(1997)
Robert Zemeckis’ $90-million sci-fi think piece was filmed in various places all over the world, but a key scene depicting the remote Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array radio astronomy observatory outside Socorro, New Mexico was actually filmed at Southern California Logistics Airport in Victorville. Hundreds of High Desert locals were employed as extras to portray a raucous bunch of extraterrestrial advocates hoping for an alien sighting. Judging by the sheer number of people filmed, you’re bound to know someone who was dancing atop a Winnebago circa 1996.
4. The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift(2006)
The crew for the third film in the blockbuster "Fast and the Furious" franchise turned an under-construction housing tract in Victorville into the setting for Tokyo Drift's first race sequence. Stunt drivers drifted a souped-up Chevrolet Monte Carlo and a Dodge Viper SRT10 around unpaved roads, crashed them into porta-potties and even raced the Monte Carlo through the framing of a partially built home. Sadly, neither car survived the race as the confines of the construction site proved too difficult to navigate. Creators of the franchise referenced the High Desert in another "Furious" film: First introduced in "2 Fast 2 Furious," Tyrese Gibson's character, Roman Pearce, hails from Barstow and is first seen at the Barstow Speedway (which doesn't actually exist). Upon leaving the desert town with Paul Walker's character, Roman says, "Man, I'm not going back to Barstow" — a proclamation to which he stayed true.
5. Breakdown(1997)
A breakout film for director Jonathan Mostow, “Breakdown” starred Kurt Russell as a man in search of his missing wife. Several locations in Old Town Victorville were used during filming, including a boarded-up building on 7th Street near C Street that was transformed into a bank and a telephone booth on the corner of 7th and B streets. A truck stop in the community of Lenwood, which is just south of Barstow on the I-15 freeway, was also used for filming. Mostow went on to direct “Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines” (2003), which references Victorville by name but apparently didn't use the city as a filming location; Lancaster, Palmdale and Acton were used for various desert scenes.
Racing scene in The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift
Nestled in the heart of Victorville lies Tigertail Street & Ferndale Road - a neighborhood that embodies the perfect combination of suburban charm and convenience.
Racing scene in The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift
Nestled in the heart of Victorville lies Tigertail Street & Ferndale Road - a neighborhood that embodies the perfect combination of suburban charm and convenience.
Other forms: blockbusters. A blockbuster is a Hollywood movie that's made with a large budget and big stars. A true blockbuster is extremely popular and brings in a lot of money. Typically, a blockbuster is a fabulous summer movie that audiences line up to see the first weekend it's released.
The garage in the movie is fictional but the rest of the house is real. Then he went looking for Toretto's market which is called Bob's Market in real life and is located at 1000 Elysian Park Avenue in, Los Angeles. The photo with Toretto's name is, of course, Photoshopped.
Though the parking garage where Dom and Deckard Shaw (Jason Statham) go head to head at the end of Furious 7 is located in Atlanta, as are many of the movie's final race locations, the tower that provides the signal for Ramsey (Nathalie Emmanuel) to run the hack on the God's Eye program is located at the top of the ...
Steven Spielberg's (USA) Jaws (USA, 1975) is considered the first summer blockbuster. Not only did people queue up around the block to see the movie, it became the first film to earn $100 million at the box office.
Our local store closed in 2010 — the year Blockbuster corporate filed for bankruptcy protection — and less than a decade later, almost all of Blockbuster's some 9,000 stores had followed suit. These days, there's only one Blockbuster left on Earth. It's in Bend, Ore., about 820 miles from my home in Los Angeles.
Giants Movie Gallery and Blockbuster, driven by physical rental stores, began struggling to compete with streaming and mailing platforms. Both were driven into bankruptcy because they failed to adapt quickly enough.
Citizen Kane (1941), starring and directed by Orson Welles, has topped several international polls, including five consecutive decades at number 1 in the British Film Institute's Sight and Sound decennial poll of critics.
It is extremely hard to empathize with Peggy when she seems to keep making bad decisions over and over again. She could be so much cooler, but maybe the addiction issue is what they wanted to showcase. But overall, it's clever, cute, and the story's compelling enough to keep me watching.
Horror in the High Desert is a found footage-style movie that blurs fact and fiction, drawing inspiration from the real-life disappearance of Kenny Veach. Kenny Veach, an avid hiker, claimed to have found a strange cave in the Nevada desert shaped like an "M," but couldn't enter due to intense vibrations.
The man tracks Gary in the desert while the young man tries to remain hidden. The twisted cat-and-mouse game is caught on camera, with Gary counting on his equipment to stay alive. Unfortunately, the man eventually finds Gary but Gary's body is never found.
Principal photography began in August 2005 and lasted until that November, with filming locations including Los Angeles and Tokyo, making Tokyo Drift the first film in the franchise to feature an international filming location.
Victorville is the seat of Victor Valley College, a community college founded in 1961. The settlement was founded in 1885 as a station on the Santa Fe Railway line. Originally named Victor for Jacob N. Victor, a railway official, the city changed its name in 1901 to avoid confusion with the town of Victor, Colorado.
Shibuya Crossing is often featured in films and television shows which take place in Tokyo, such as Lost in Translation, The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift, Alice in Borderland, and Resident Evil: Afterlife, as well as on domestic and international news broadcasts.
Summary. Tokyo Drift was filmed in Tokyo without permits due to strict regulations on filming in the city. Director Justin Lin used guerrilla filming tactics to capture scenes in Shibuya, resulting in an arrest.
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