Piru, California

The small town of Piru was founded over 100 years ago as a Christian agrarian utopia, in the orange groves of the Santa Clara River Valley, down the road from the home of Ramona (the legendary character of a romantic novel that captured the imagination of the public and helped the turn of the century boosters of Los Angeles paint an idyllic picture of their homeland - and real estate). In this picturesque valley, the legend was perhaps closer to reality than anywhere else, and even the Newhalls of the Newhall Land and Farming Company, the developers of nearby mega-master planned Valencia, and one of the largest property owners in Southern California, lived in Piru until recently (in a gingerbread Victorian house above town, which is now unoccupied, used only as a filming and event location). Populated by generations of Hispanic fruit-pickers, Piru remains a town from another time, for the time being. Because of its generic small town look, and the fact that nearly all the storefronts are vacant, and owned by a few people, downtown has become a major film location. When productions come to town, art directors and set dressers go to work preparing the town to look as they need it, putting in a barber shop, locksmith, sheriff station - all the components of a small town for the required place and period, sometimes even stocking the shelves of the empty stores. When they are done, the boards go back on the windows, and Piru returns to its anonymous-looking self. In Cobra, a 1980's Sylvester Stallone vehicle, Piru is the foundry town of San Remos. In a 1990's miniseries about the life of Tina Turner it was Athens, Georgia, circa 1955.