Cave Paintings for Film Attacked : Environment: Efforts to clean up fake Indian pictographs on wall of state park cavern are unsuccessful. Site was used for shooting of Oliver Stone movie about rock legend Jim Morrison.

Artists creating an on-location set for Academy Award-winning filmmaker Oliver Stone have defaced a natural limestone cavern in the eastern Mojave Desert, painting its pristine walls with phony Indian pictographs that workers have so far been unable to remove.

Eager to keep movie productions in California, state officials granted Stone permission to shoot a portion of his film on rock legend Jim Morrison of the Doors at Mitchell Caverns Natural Preserve in the Providence Mountains State Recreation Area.

Among the numerous restrictions imposed on the March shoot, however, was a requirement that artists drawing pictographs on the cave walls use a natural powdery substance--described as “native earth” by the film company--that is easily sucked off with a vacuum.

“They demonstrated the process to us on rocks outside the caverns,” said Steven Hansen, chief ranger for the state park system’s Mojave River District. “It appeared to work very satisfactorily, and we had no reason to worry.”

But someone, Hansen said, failed to follow the rules. An artist apparently used water in applying the native earths, causing the black, white and sienna images to seep into the porous limestone.

The film company’s work crews discovered the trouble shortly after the shooting wrapped up, when their efforts to vacuum the cave walls clean were unsuccessful.

State rangers were notified, and they authorized the use of a wire brush on a patch of the wall. That technique removed much of the coloring, but failed to reach the residue that had seeped into the rock’s pores.

In an interview Wednesday, officials with the production acknowledged responsibility for the error and said they have called in specialists to tackle the clean-up project. Art restoration experts associated with the J. Paul Getty Museum in Malibu have been contacted, but they will not be available for consultation until next week.

“This is something we are very concerned with,” said Alex Ho, producer of “The Doors.” The film company, Ho added, “will spare no expense to remove the symbols, but experts are few and far between. We are making every effort to solve this problem.”

State park officials, while unhappy about the episode, predict there will be no lasting damage to the caves--assuming experts can remove the paint without scarring the limestone.

But environmentalists expressed outrage and said the incident underscores their argument that allowing Hollywood into the wilderness is a bad idea.

“This is absolutely criminal,” said Elden Hughes, a desert explorer and Sierra Club leader. “This shows total disrespect for a tremendous and rare resource.”

“Shame on Oliver Stone for letting it happen,” added Jim Dodson, chairman of the Sierra Club’s Southern California Desert Committee.

While concerned about possible permanent harm to the caverns, Dodson said the “larger problem is the state’s willingness to just turn over the parks to the movie-makers.

“You don’t bring in trucks, cameras and crews without causing wear and tear on the land. Filming should be limited to areas more suitable for commercial use.”

Mitchell Caverns, off of Interstate 40 about 35 miles west of Needles, Calif., has been part of the state park system since 1958. Known for the spectacular stalagmite, stalactite and other mineral formations created by a geologic upwelling several million years ago, the caves are the only natural caverns in the state park system and draw about 10,000 visitors annually.

For centuries, they were used by the Chemehuevi Indians for shelter, storage and some ceremonial purposes, and archeologists have found arrowheads, pottery fragments and other items there.

Hansen, whose ranger district includes the area, said Stone applied in February for permission to shoot a scene in the site’s largest cavern, the 150-foot-long Tecopa Cave. In the scene, actor Val Kilmer--portraying a doped-up Morrison--wanders about the cave in a hallucinatory state and meets with a holy man.

The scene calls for Morrison to study Indian pictographs on the cave walls. There were no such symbols in Tecopa Cave, however, so the filmmaker decided to create his own.

“First they experimented with painting on a latex skin and gluing that to the cave wall, but it looked artificial,” Hansen said.

Instead, about 100 stick figures and other Indian symbols--most of them the size of a human hand--were drawn directly on the limestone with a brush.

“We gave this a lot of forethought because we have a lot of respect for the caves, and we thought the native earth would be the ecologically safe way to go,” said Larry Fulton, the film’s art director. “We did not want to use anything . . . that was not environmentally safe.”

Fulton said “a little bit of water” may have been used during the application process, but stressed that “water is not a binder. It evaporates.”

“We don’t know what happened,” he said, “but something was different outside the cave than it was inside the cave. . . . We’re not going to rest until it’s off and everyone is happy.”

While a state ranger periodically checked on the film crew, Hansen said monitoring was not constant.

“Every time we checked the artist, she was using dry powder,” he said. “Apparently she used the water when we weren’t around. I guess she thought it looked better with water mixed in.”