A spot for his new TV show, debuting in November, was filmed at Saugus’ famous Mystery Mesa. It’s hilarious:
The Deadwrite blog has some history about the Mesa:
Mystery Mesa is the name of the spot, and Kimi and I were lucky enough to get a tour of it recently. It’s not very well known outside of the ranks of Hollywood’s location managers, but in fact, it’s one of the most used filming sites in the entire Santa Clarita Valley.
The Mesa was once the site of Christian tent revivals in the 1920s. It later became a filming spot for the likes of William S. Hart in the silent Western days and has literally been seen hundreds of times over the years on screen.
It was here that Steven Spielberg filmed the conclusion of his memorable thriller Duel in 1971, where the killer truck drives off the same cliff as in the O’Brien clip (the cliff is only 120-feet tall, by the way). Spielberg came back here in 2005 to film several scenes from War of the Worlds. It was later used as the desert airport in The Aviator, and around the same time it doubled for ancient Egypt inThe Scorpion King. More recently, the mesa became the island of Iwo Jima in the South Pacific for Clint Eastwood’s Letters From Iwo Jima. Next year, the Mesa will show up on the big screen again in Kenneth Branagh’s fantasy Thor, which stars Natalie Portman.
Back in 2007, an anti-war activist group held a photo shoot on the Mesa. Their plan was to have protesters lay down on the ground as if they were dead, then photograph them as a visual representation of the number of Americans who had died in Iraq up to that point. I covered the event then and it was my first trip up to the Mesa.
The Mesa certainly is a flexible spot for filmmakers and producers. I’m glad it was never developed. If you haven’t been there, you owe it to yourself to at least drive through Vasquez Canyon and check out the interesting geology in the area. It’s like nowhere else in the SCV.
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