I had driven through Malibu, California over a decade ago. It looked just like I had seen on TV, with the base of a mountain on one side of the road, right at the edge, while across the two-lane Pacific Coast Highway were homes, also very close to the road. On the houses’ other side, sand and the azure blue ocean. In those homes, the rich and the famous.
When I began planning my husband and my California adventure at the beginning of this year, the Palisades Fire had just occurred. It may come off as morbid curiosity, but I was interested to see the area firsthand.
As we drove closer to Malibu’s city limits, I could smell smoke. My first thought was that I was imagining it, given what I know. But then Mister Rain, who has a terrible sense of smell, noticed it too.
There were a few restaurants I had put on our itinerary but the timing of our arrival into Malibu was off for a meal. Other than those eateries, as well as the PCH running parallel to the coast, the only other place on my agenda was Point Dume, the filming location of many movies and television shows.
At the end of the classic 1968 film, the original Planet of the Apes, starring Charlton Heston, his character, George Taylor, rides a horse along the shoreline. Astride the horse behind him, the requisite beauty, scantily clad as one is after having battled nefarious apes with human capabilities as well as their own.
Taylor brings the horse to a stop, looking up at something we, the viewer, cannot see. Dismounting, he sinks to his knees, cursing “they” who “finally did it.” He has come to the realization that he has not been on another planet but instead a post-apocalyptic Earth the entire time, where apes have evolved and taken over, leaving human civilization destroyed. We are then shown what he is seeing: the top half of the Statue of Liberty in the sand, badly decayed, tilting to her left.
Point Dume portrayed Dr. Evil’s Volcano Island in Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me.
The pilot episode of I Dream of Jeannie had Point Dume posing as the deserted South Pacific island where astronaut Tony Nelson’s capsule washed ashore and he released Jeannie from the bottle.
In the Iron Man movie series, Tony Stark’s massive mansion was set on Point Dume at the edge of a cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean, although the mansion was created as a 3D model and digitally placed on the cliff in post-production.
We returned to the PCH, heading south, but it wasn’t long after Point Dume that we arrived at a checkpoint, where vehicles were asked to show their resident passes in order to be permitted to continue on. The rest of us were diverted inland, over canyon roads I had heard of most of my adult life. And we found ourselves in the town of Calabasas, home to many celebrities and the Kardashians. We picked the PCH back up in Santa Monica.
It was disappointing that we were unable to drive through the entirety of Malibu, but, of course, the great shame is the reason we couldn’t, the devastation the horrific fires had caused.
I wonder what George Taylor would think about this particular Earth?
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