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How the California forest that was Endor in 'Return of the Jedi' was obliterated (2022)
- smcin 3y agoBelated 2022 article, just stumbled over this one. The forest was in Del Norte County, the northwestern tip of California; also Humboldt County. Many people wrongly think it was filmed in Muir Woods, Marin County (close to ILM), which the filmmakers initially requested, but were rejected mainly due to the pyrotechnics. The Del Norte forest was clear-cut right after the film shoot was over, except you can visit the grove where the speeder chase scene was shot. Protected in perpetuity within a state park in Humboldt County are the remaining shreds of Endor. The Film Commission highlighted the area in its “Map of the Movies” for a self-guided tour through the two northern counties. [https://hdnfc.org/sites/default/files/2021-06/map-of-the-movies_0.pdf https://hdnfc.org/sites/default/files/2021-06/map-of-the-mov...]
- smcin 3y ago(That maps shows that film location and many others, almost all right off Highway 101: E.T. (1982), Outbreak (1995), The Tree of Life (2011), The Majestic (2001), After Earth (2013), the canoe chase scene from Last of The Mohicans (1936)...
- UncleEntity 3y agoOutbreak... I remember seeing that in the theater it was filmed in when I was going to Humboldt State.
- bombcar 3y ago> pyrotechnics Exactly why it was chosen; a forest already scheduled to be clear-cut and the loggers didn't think you could do any serious harm to the wood, so why not go wild? It's just like how some famous destructive bar fight scenes or other building-destroying scenes are just filmed in a building scheduled to be demolished anyway.
- smcin 3y agoYes, Muir Woods rejected them, they're a National Monument under the NPS, and rarely allow commercial filming anyway, and the article says they freaked out at the request for pyrotechnics. Whereas the Del Norte forest was land privately owned by Miller-Rellim Redwood Company, and already had a timber harvesting plan/permit. Like when Kubrick filmed the urban Huế scenes in 'Full Metal Jacket' (1987) at London's Beckton Gas Works, which was scheduled to be demolished. [https://www.latlong.net/location/full-metal-jacket-locations-906 https://www.latlong.net/location/full-metal-jacket-locations...]
- lukan 3y agoInteresting, but yes, thinking about it, the movie did not contain any jungle scene. Except from a helicopter? But I thought also some other scenes are quite tropical. All staged? Impressive.
- bragr 3y agoFull Metal Jacket was entirely filmed in England. That scene was filmed in Norfolk Broads in eastern England.
- BuildTheRobots 3y agoI'm always amused by the joke "Of course Kubrick faked the moon landing, but being a perfectionist was only willing to film on location", when in reality he was nothing of the sort. A lot of his filming locations were within an hours travel from home. I suppose it makes sense, even without the 3 month break, FMJ would have been 11 months of filming. The most immersion breaking part of Dr Strangelove for me is always the outside shot of the ground assault on the "American" base which architecturally is so obviously British it snaps me out of the film each time.
- bombcar 3y agoThere’s a scene in Smokey and the Bandit filmed in California and it’s entirely recognizable for natives of the area - and horribly immersion breaking.
- araes 3y agoNot being from California, those are way further away than I thought from the article. Sounded like, "Muir Wood said no, so we walked down the road a bit." Google Maps says more like ~270 miles: https://www.google.com/maps/search/Del+Norte+forest/@39.8350351,-122.2885433,667225m/data=!3m1!1e3?entry=ttu https://www.google.com/maps/search/Del+Norte+forest/@39.8350... Distance measurement gets lost on the link, yet Del Norte is almost Oregon, and Muir Woods is San Fran. Also, while there's definitely clearcutting in the area, such as: https://www.google.com/maps/search/Del+Norte+forest/@41.5564608,-124.0087497,761m/data=!3m1!1e3?entry=ttu https://www.google.com/maps/search/Del+Norte+forest/@41.5564... A lot seems like areas where they just didn't/don't even bother replanting. 40 years after 1983, it would probably be a pretty decent size redwood forest again. For maybe ... a $1 a tree? (based on some of those NGOs. Heck, hire an NGO to do it.)
- smcin 3y agoUmm the SFGate article was sloppy about everything, that's specifically why I wrote "Del Norte County, the northwestern tip of California; also Humboldt County." Not Muir Woods, Marin County (close to ILM), the county just north of SF, over the Golden Gate Bridge. If you know that California is big (1040 miles from north to south), then the northwestern tip of California is going to be a long way north of Marin and SF.
- justrealist 3y ago> Had somebody been able to foresee the popularity and success of ‘Star Wars,’ it would have been crazy not to save the grove where Endor was made and use it as a tourist venue,” This was the third movie. Star Wars was already extremely popular by the time this as filmed.
- basil-rash 3y agoThe author overestimates the public’s willingness to go to humboldt. It’s a far-too-long drive from absolutely everywhere.
- smcin 3y agoHey that's nasty, it's nice road-trip material, redwoods, coast, historical towns; Mendocino to the south, and Oregon to the north. Some people live there by choice. You know you've been in SV too long when your first association for 'sequoia' is 'VC' or 'portfolio' not 'tree' or 'forest'.
- dieselgate 3y agoFor sure. That drive (or bike) on 101 is priceless. Good attractions, that I remember, are the glass beach and Samoa cookhouse. Met someone a few weeks ago and found out today he went to Humboldt for college - came up while exchanging phone numbers and I have a 707 Edit: way better driving north from the Bay Area on hwy 101 than south towards SoCal on 5
- basil-rash 3y agoCertainly nobody chooses to live there for the tourists! And it’s a fine place; I’ve just driven Seattle-LA on every path imaginable more times than I can count. It happens to be right around the point where you’re really far from absolutely everything, and it all looks the same.
- yareal 3y agoWait, what? People travel to see things all the time. The original Star Wars sets in Tunisia, hobbiton in New Zealand, the evil dead house in Tennessee, or even Petra because of Indiana Jones. I guarantee you it would be a tourist attraction today if it still existed. Also, Humboldt is not really that far from anywhere and is a lovely journey through some incredible forests.
- deepfriedchokes 3y agoWhat a waste, turning a forest into decks!
- bamboozled 3y agoAustralia, ancient precious rain forests turned into bark chips
- Cyberdog 3y agoAnd lumber for other parts of houses as well, and wooden furniture, and paper products. And since trees in managed forests are grown denser than they grow naturally, a thicker, more carbon-capturing forest was planted in its place.
- akira2501 3y agoTrees grow back. Decks are nice. Wood sourced and used in the same state is good practice.
- NewJazz 3y agoIs it used in the same state? How much gets exported overseas? Continuous clear cutting is bound to dry out the soil eventually.
- throwup238 3y agoWood is cheap and the fuel to move it is expensive. No one in Europe is buying American Douglas Fir or Pine.
- jjtheblunt 3y agoAre American Ikea products not scandinavian pine?
- ferongr 3y agoNo, they're cheap Chinese honeycomb paper and low density particle board.
- Cyberdog 3y agoIf it was a commercially-managed forest, it's a bit dramatic to say it was "obliterated" any more than a cornfield gets "obliterated" when the corn is harvested in the fall. Tree seedlings would have been planted in the field soon after the wood was harvested. The days of lumberjacks going into virgin forests to harvest wood in that area are over - it's all either national parks or other protected forests which might get thinned for fire management reasons but never clear-cut, or managed forests that periodically get harvested and replanted, just like corn and wheat. (Source: I grew up in Humboldt County and still have family there.)
- Teever 3y agoThe difference between this and a cornfield is that from the looks of the pictures these trees weren't planted by people. These trees took far longer to grow than a corn crop, far longer than a human lives. It's sad that they're gone.
- Cyberdog 3y agoI suppose if you had a fondness for that particular arrangement of trees, yes, it's sad they're gone. But there are other forests in that area which look practically identical to what you saw in the movie, believe me, just waiting to be hiked through and camped under. Some of them are literally in city parks. I remember the day that my dad told me that tourists actually came to Humboldt to see the trees. Boring old trees? Really? Having grown up among them I didn't understand how unusual they were yet.
- danparsonson 3y agoWell that's a bit like saying that if you have one forest already then you don't need another one; I personally think it's OK to treat each configuration as having value.
- Cyberdog 3y agoThey all have value in the environmental sense, but in terms of hiking and camping and sightseeing, it's pretty hard to tell one forest from another once you're among the trees. (Maybe there's an idiom along those lines.)
- renewiltord 3y agoAt the end, the author quotes someone saying that if it was a known Star Wars location they could preserve it. So if you’re a lumber company, you should price a movie shoot the same as you would the entire value of that land over time since if you let someone do something on it, they will aggressively try to remove your property rights from it. So be very careful with these things. It’s very similar to the NYC squatters rights thing. If you let someone have a little they’ll take everything. So sometimes you just have to either prevent them or you have to act fast (here by cutting right after to remove the value of your land from them).
- ant6n 3y agoThe argument is that the company could have preserved their forest because it would’ve been more profitable to keep it. That old growth or near old growth forest of red woods shouldn’t be harvested at all is a separate issue, has little to do with Star Wars, except that Star Wars vi was shot in such a forest.
- smcin 3y ago> they will aggressively try to remove your property rights from it.... similar to the NYC squatters rights thing. I think that's bad-faith reading of the quote from one arborist, not the CA Governor or Treasurer or Dept Director of Parks and Recreation. The way I read the article is that it was implied the state should have considered buying out the owner of the forest (or at least part of it) with state money and convert it to a park. I don't know whether that would have been economically viable and I don't understand people discussing here how forestry policy on redwoods changed after that, but it would be good to see numbers on all this, even if the answer was no. FYI Lucasfilm shot the Endor scenes in Del Norte in Apr-May 1982, a year before release of RotJ. So, another huge errorbar would be estimating the film's popularity (if there's a deadline on the property being destroyed, as in this case). 99.999% of movies aren't memorable or profitable like the Star Wars trilogy, so they add no value. Also, this stuff isn't predictable at shooting time before the film's release. Compare e.g. 'The Matrix Reloaded' (2003) car-chase scenes were filmed in Oakland, but aren't that popular. But also the Boston Public Garden Bench from "Good Will Hunting", a low-budget $10m film by two young guys people had never heard of [0], or the prison location from 'The Shawshank Redemption' (the closed Ohio State Reformatory in Mansfield, OH). [0]: https://www.livethemovies.com/home/the-boston-public-garden-bench-from-good-will-hunting https://www.livethemovies.com/home/the-boston-public-garden-...
- Gunax 3y agoThis seems odd: > Had somebody been able to foresee the popularity and success of ‘Star Wars,’ it would have been crazy not to save the grove where Endor was made and use it as a tourist venue. This was not the first Star Wars movie. This was the followup to the most successful sequel ever made at that point, which was itself a sequel to the highest grossing film ever. So successful it was famously given a pseudonymous title to acoid attention from fans. How could you not expect it to be remembered?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- hypertexthero 3y ago> That is why we live like heathens > Stealing from the trees of Eden https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1eZZBZLNpNU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1eZZBZLNpNU
- pfdietz 3y agoThe bigger concern to me about redwoods is Sudden Oak Death syndrome, an oomycete related to the organism that caused the great potato famine in the 19th century, that affects a wide variety of trees but in California is particularly damaging to three tree species, one of which is Coast Redwood. It's been spreading inexorably in a slow motion ecological disaster. It's also been detected in several eastern US states, and is causing damage to larch in the UK.