Restoration Sought for Old Movie Ranch : Corriganville: Chaparral-covered hills on Simi Valley’s east edge provided backdrop for thousands of film and TV shows.

It’s been several decades since Lassie came home. No horse thief dangles from the hanging tree. The Lone Ranger hasn’t raced through the oak groves on Simi Valley’s eastern edge since a brush fire ravaged his town.

Corriganville Ranch, once the backdrop for more than 3,500 movies and television shows and the first Southern California theme park, is little more than a few concrete slabs today.

Cowboys in white hats do not chase cowboys in black hats up and down the 190 acres of chaparral-covered hills. But the craggy terrain, which one week could be dressed as a dusty, western hillside and the next as an African jungle, still boasts striking rock formations and large groves of trees. And Western film buffs want to rebuild this sliver of Hollywood in Ventura County.

Not one, but two nonprofit groups are scrambling to raise $5 million to restore the studio location to the tourist attraction it was when the late cowboy actor Ray “Crash” Corrigan ran it from 1949 to 1965.

Retired stuntmen and actors gathered Saturday for a fund-raiser at the ranch to entertain crowds with staged gunfights, a jail, pony rides and live country-western bands.

The Corriganville Cowboy Reunion and Indian Rendezvous will continue today from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. At noon, 50 entertainers will ride through the ranch’s Smith Road gates on horseback and conclude the day with a patriotic, musical finale.

Corrigan purchased 2,000 acres next to Santa Susana Pass in 1937 and made his home there. As inexpensive Westerns flooded the movie market, film crews built dozens of sets on the ranch, leaving a mini-town in their wake. In 1949, Corrigan turned it into a public amusement park.

“We were standing around one day and Crash said, ‘We ought to do something to entertain these people.’ And I said ‘OK, let’s rob the bank,’ ” said Bob Ward, a retired stuntman and the ranch’s original rodeo announcer. “That led to an every Saturday, Sunday and holiday event.”

The ranch was the forerunner of Southern California’s famous amusement parks, Ward said. “It was there before Disneyland, before Universal Studios, Knott’s Berry Farm. . . . “

For 16 years, a re-enactment of the shootout at O.K. Corral drew as many as 20,000 people on weekends, with crowds clamoring to watch gunfights and rodeos, ride the stagecoach or boat on the lake.

Saturday, Ventura County residents applauded the same shootout and ogled the actors.

“I know Corriganville practically as good as you do,” Dorothy Rushing, 57, told actor Jim Brown, who starred in the “Rin Tin Tin” series as he autographed a paper for her.

Many of the former stuntmen had returned to the ranch for the first time since their shows ended in the 1950s.

Other fair-goers spoke of their favorite movies filmed on the ranch, including “The Adventures of Robin Hood,” “Billy the Kid” and “Fort Apache,” starring John Wayne, Henry Fonda and Shirley Temple.

Part of Corriganville’s charm as a shooting location was that the sets were more than just fronts, some of the stuntmen said. Real structures stood behind the cafe.

“We’d go in there and sit down and have a cool one and tell Western stories and lies to each other,” Ward reminisced. “It was something that should have never ended.”

In 1965, Bob Hope bought the property from Corrigan and closed it to the public a year later. Fires in 1970 and 1979 swept through the Western town, leaving only concrete slabs and a few walls of the old stables.

Hope later sold hundreds of acres to Griffin Homes, which in 1988 struck a deal with Simi Valley officials to return about 190 acres of the land for a public park in exchange for fee waivers and $1 million. Since then, the land has been owned by the Rancho Simi Open Space Conservation Agency under a joint-powers agreement with the Simi Valley City Council and the Rancho Simi Recreation and Park District.

Steve Gillum, who worked as a stunt artist at the ranch as a child and went on to perform in Western shows for Universal Studios, founded the first fund-raising organization for Corriganville in 1988. Marjorie Heeg, a native of New York interested in historical preservation, formed a second group in July after a disagreement with the first group’s board of directors.

Both groups hope to raise money to restore the town’s Main Street buildings and construct a museum with film memorabilia and a showing room for Western movies and TV shows.

City and park district officials have plans to put in picnic areas and equestrian and hiking trails. Gillum also wants officials to coordinate the activities of the two fund-raising groups.

“The dream is to get Corriganville rebuilt,” said Heeg, who organized this weekend’s reunion. “Corriganville is such an integral part of our history right here in Simi Valley. It’s a part of American history, film history. I really feel that the Western must be revived.”