When the heavy in the opening scenes of Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood crashes through a saloon-porch roof in the parody TV western within the film, Bounty Law, he’s actually crashing through western history—and Tarantino’s. Half a century ago, the saloon belonged to Gunsmoke’s madam, Miss Kitty. And in Tarantino’s 2012 film, Django Unchained, actor Christoph Waltz blew away a sheriff in a memorable scene outside the saloon.
Tarantino shuns CGI, so to re-create late-1960s Los Angeles for Once Upon a Time, he rounded up almost 2,000 classic cars and built period-correct facades for sections of Hollywood and Sunset Boulevards. For Bounty Law and Django, he didn’t need to re-create a thing. The Melody Ranch Motion Picture Studio’s western main street, in the Santa Clarita neighborhood of Newhall, about 30 miles north of Hollywood, is where Anthony Quinn shot his way through Man from Del Rio in 1956 and where John Wayne trotted in on a white horse in 1934’s Blue Steel.
“This town really started in the Old West, complete with all the usual characters that you might see in a western movie,” says Dr. Alan Pollack, president of the Santa Clarita Valley Historical Society. “Cowboys, Native Americans, range wars and gunfights, stagecoaches and saloons.” Later in Newhall’s history,
