MOVIES : Location, Location, Location : Think you’ve seen this scenery before, pardner? No surprise--Lone Pine’s seen 300 films shot here. Its film festival revisits those glory days.

Ask not what the world can do for you, says the self-sufficient Lone Pine Film Festival, show everyone what you’ve done for the world.

While the standard festival looks outward, offering itself as a place where movies from everywhere can find a home, the folks here turn that formula on its head, inviting visitors to celebrate what this tiny Eastern Sierra town three hours from Los Angeles has contributed to the universe of film.

In what has been called the most focused movie event in the world, the Lone Pine Film Festival, whose sixth edition took place two weekends ago, concentrates exclusively on motion pictures shot right here in the incomparable Alabama Hills. Even wanna-bes that were lensed just 60 miles away in Bishop are righteously excluded.

Named after a noble tree that keeled over in a storm more than 100 years ago, Lone Pine is known today as the gateway to Mt. Whitney, attracting so many European tourists that Jake’s Saloon on Main Street has to have signs in three languages informing visitors of the state’s liquor laws.

Isolated though it is (nearby Kirkwood advertises itself as the place where visitors “Rub Shoulders With No One”), Lone Pine is connected to several strands of California history. Located in the heart of the Owens Valley, its water supply was raided decades ago by Los Angeles in an action that still rankles the local population, and the Manzanar War Relocation Center, where Japanese Americans were interned during World War II, is just up the road.

But as far as festival-goers are concerned, Lone Pine is celebrated for the at least 300 movies that were shot here over a 75-year period, ranging from to-be-expected efforts like “Bad Day at Black Rock” and “High Sierra,” which featured Humphrey Bogart careening down Whitney Portal Road, to more surprising titles.

Because of their unusual topography, the Alabama Hills have stood in for everything from the Andes in the John Wayne-starring “Tycoon” to the wilds of Tibet in the recent “The Shadow” and even another universe in “Star Trek V.” Most memorably, director George Stevens and company spent three months here shooting the classic “Gunga Din,” in areas that look so much like the hill country of India’s Northwest Frontier that Indian friends of star Douglas Fairbanks Jr. insisted they knew exactly where on the subcontinent it had been filmed.

More recently, commercials and videos have monopolized the landscape, with companies coming from as far away as Germany, Finland and Japan and celebrities such as Michael Jordan (for Gatorade) and Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings (for Pizza Hut) getting comfortable in the scenery.

Mostly, however, they shot Westerns in Lone Pine. And though some prestige items such as “How the West Was Won” and parts of the Mel Gibson-starring “Maverick” were lensed here, more often it was the sturdy and unpretentious B-Westerns that used the site, with cowboys such as Tom Mix, Hoot Gibson, Ken Maynard and Tim Holt heeding the call to saddle up.

Both Robert Mitchum and Roy Rogers had their first starring roles in Lone Pine, Gene Autry filmed 16 pictures here, and William Boyd did likewise with 32 Hopalong Cassidy epics. Budd Boetticher shot several of his elegiac 1960s Westerns such as “The Tall T” and “Ride Lonesome” in the area, and it was the site of John Wayne’s last filmed appearance, a 1978 commercial for Great Western Savings & Loan.

Given all of this, it’s inevitable that the Lone Pine festival has a distinctly Western flavor to it. This year it saluted Gene Autry, “America’s Favorite Cowboy,” and had as the grand marshal of its Sunday afternoon parade 88-year-old Pierce Lyden, a quintessential bad guy in black hat and pencil mustache who appeared in literally hundreds of B-Westerns and first worked in Lone Pine back in 1937.

More than knowing their B-Westerns backward and forward, festival-goers also know how to dress the part. Hardly anyone ventures into town without donning elaborate Western gear, and it’s not unusual to hear the surprisingly delicate jingle of spurs on Main Street. Visitors come in such numbers they just about double Lone Pine’s usual population of 2,000 and so strain the hotel room situation for miles around that Dave Holland, the festival’s affable director says: “Where I’m at now is I need a bigger town.”

For some attendees, Lone Pine provides the opportunity to do some serious dressing up. Joe “Hoppy” Sullivan, a district sales manager from Cicero, Ind., spent years studying still photographs of Hopalong Cassidy with a magnifying glass and wears a beautiful costume that reflects that concern. And Ermal Williamson of Van Nuys is nothing less than a professional John Wayne impersonator who has even performed weddings as the Duke.

Bemused at being the focus of this kind of attention, the residents of Lone Pine easily get into the spirit and make the festival a citywide event. Local businesses allow their windows to be painted with portraits of cowboy heroes and make room for photographs of Saturday matinee stars next to signs that read “Yes We Have Steer Manure.” Both the VFW and the American Legion throw pancake breakfasts, the Lions Club provides a “Western Deep-Pit BBQ” and everyone lines Main Street for Sunday’s hometown parade, complete with fire engines, dogs with bandannas and the Inyo County Board of Supervisors.

Though the 20-plus Lone Pine movies (highlighted this year by Gene Autry’s “Trail to San Antone”) shown in 16mm in the local high school auditorium are always a draw, the festival has other, equally folksy attractions. Veteran stuntman Loren James, who doubled for Steve McQueen for 22 years, shows his action reel, a panel discussion allows visitors to question visiting stars such as Peggy Stewart, “Queen of the Republic Westerns,” and a dealers area encourages purchase of hundreds of Western videos and such oddities as an edible reproduction of Hopalong Cassidy’s belt buckle in either milk or dark chocolate.

Mostly, however, what draws festival-goers is exactly the same thing that brought all those movie companies to Lone Pine in the first place--the chance to wander around one of California’s least known and most extraordinary natural phenomena, the Alabama Hills.

Even after viewing them repeatedly on film, the sight of these enormous, grandiose boulders, stretched out in bewildering groupings like giant gumdrops randomly sprinkled over the landscape by a playful higher power, is breathtaking to experience in person. There is something completely otherworldly about these weathered granite rocks, once erroneously thought to be “the oldest hills in the world” and named by Southern Civil War sympathizers after a Confederate battleship. They seem to almost huddle together for companionship, as if they were once alive on another planet, or at the very least housed an alien, unknowable civilization.

The first Hollywood production to find its way up here was a 1920 Fatty Arbuckle film called “The Roundup.” Film companies kept returning partially because the local citizenry treated everyone like family, even building a hotel called the Dow (still very much in use) for their comfort. But mostly directors returned again and again because of the wide variety of looks the Alabama Hills provided. Director Boetticher, a visitor so often “I should have been elected mayor long ago,” spoke for his colleagues when he told a BBC interviewer, “The great thing about Lone Pine is that you don’t need to go anywhere else. It looks like they built these mountains for the movies.”

Equally enthusiastic about the locale are fans like the gentleman who flew in from Brazil one year and took a $300 cab ride directly from Los Angeles International Airport to the festival. Or people like Ian Whitcomb, author and entertainer and host of his own radio show on KPCC-FM, who’d watched Lone Pine movies as a boy in Britain and thought “maybe all of America looks like this.”

Unable to track down the location once he came to the United States, Whitcomb stumbled on Lone Pine on a drive back from Mammoth and “suddenly realized I was in my dream, I was in the America I’d always wanted to be in but never found. In fact, the whole of the dream the rest of the world got of America was contained in the Alabama Hills.”

And since the hills are owned by the federal government and administered by the Department of Interior’s Bureau of Land Management, they have the advantage of looking just as they did when the filming took place. “Everything else has been mutilated,” says Mike Johnson, a B-Western fan who works for Lloyds of London in Toronto. “This location remains exactly as it was 60 years ago.” Or, as festival director Dave Holland likes to say, the hills are “a living museum.”

Holland, a gregarious, still boyish man of 60, is a former publicist and journalist who enjoys saying things like “I’ll try not to blow smoke in your ear” and “There’s no law against being friendly.” He took over the festival, which was founded by Lone Pine resident Kerry Powell, in its second year. And because he is a self-described “location freak” who has been exploring the Alabama Hills for 30 years, he was instrumental in giving the event its unique character.

Location freaks, explains Holland, are people who “want to stand where their heroes stood, who think it’s exciting to take a photo from a film and say, ‘By God, that’s the same rock. Do you realize what happened here?’ It sounds naive to want to relive a myth, but that’s what it is.”

For Holland, what that means first of all is keeping his eye on the scenery, not the plot, when he watches a movie. Then, with the help of stills, he’s indefatigably walked around the Alabamas, off and on for years with particular photos, looking at the lines and contours of the rocks and hoping to match the picture to the location.

Having documented his findings in a book called, not surprisingly, “On Location in Lone Pine,” and in a video that is just out this year, Holland was the driving force in setting up a range of tours of the Alabamas (there now are six different ones to choose from) that are the festival’s most popular aspect. And at each stop on every tour, visitors get to see stills from the relevant movies attached to a pedestal that is planted exactly where the original movie camera stood.

Going on tour with Holland is, thanks to the man’s contagious enthusiasm, invariably an energizing experience. As he stomps around the sagebrush, saying, “Look at that!” while he points out the small piles of rocks that anchored the famous “Gunga Din” suspension bridge and locales like the cucumber-shaped Gene Autry rock, used in everything from Autry’s “Boots and Saddle” to “The Lives of a Bengal Lancer,” it is easy to feel with him when he says happily, “This is hallowed ground.”

I f there is anybody besides Hol land who epitomizes the spirit of Lone Pine it is parade grand marshal Pierce Lyden, clear-eyed and good-humored at 88, who talks with grace and bemusement about his life both in and out of pictures.

“I was born and raised in a sod house on a ranch in Western Nebraska with no fences, no telephone, no electricity,” Lyden remembers. “My dad bought horses for the cavalry and I was handling cattle and breaking horses by the time I was 11 or 12.”

Determined to act, Lyden left the stage for Hollywood once the talkies came in, and soon found work. “Since I could do my own riding and stunt work, they didn’t have to double me,” he says. “The people who made the B-Westerns, we did a job, we went home and we thought that was the end. We never thought they’d be remembered like they are today.”

Going almost directly from Lone Pine to a Western film festival in London, Pierce Lyden, who never got to wear a white hat, still can’t quite believe all the attention that is being paid to his career. “The old bad man is the grand marshal,” he says, shaking his head and smiling to himself. “They must be getting to the bottom of the barrel.”