Movie Ranch Heads Off Into Sunset After 85 Years as a Production Site

That’s a wrap for “Motorcycle Cheerleading Mamas.”

And as the whirring movie cameras shut down Sunday, Chatsworth’s Iverson Movie Location Ranch, whose craggy rock formations also graced such films as “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre” and “The Grapes of Wrath,” shut down with them.

The property’s 85-year career, enduring from silent films through talkies and TV, began in 1912, when a film about Amazons was made here.

After decades of playing host to Hollywood, the 30-acre ranch has been sold to a Los Angeles couple, who plan to use it as a private residence.

“It was a tough decision to sell,” said Bob Sherman, an Iverson heir who has lived on the ranch since childhood. “I wrestled with it for over five years.”

In its Hollywood heyday, the Iverson ranch served as a backdrop for more than 2,000 film and television productions, among them such classics as “Stagecoach,” “Death Valley Days” and “The Lone Ranger.”

Directors from D.W. Griffith and Cecil B. DeMille to John Ford have set their films against the sweeping views of the original 2,000-acre ranch nestled in the foothills of the Santa Susana Mountains near the Ronald Reagan Freeway and Topanga Canyon Boulevard.

On Sunday, Sherman finished a nine-day shoot of the ranch’s last movie, a low-budget flick that he is directing called “Motorcycle Cheerleading Mamas.”

Sherman, who bought the ranch in 1980 from his uncle, Joe Iverson, is expected to close the sale on the ranch’s last 30 acres early next month.

Originally, the former potato farm straddled both sides of Topanga Canyon Boulevard, but as interest in Western dramas faded in the 1950s, Sherman said, his uncle sold off parcels for freeway construction and residential developments, and in the 1970s donated about 800 acres to the Santa Monica Mountain Conservancy.

Although the ranch has sentimental value, Sherman said, its commercial value has dwindled. There isn’t enough space at the ranch for a sound studio, parking or other movie industry amenities for it to be competitive with other filmmaking locations, he said.

“I am geographically landlocked here,” Sherman said. “I can’t expand the business the way I want to. The only way to grow is to go somewhere else.”

Sherman said he hopes to set up production facilities in Jaco Beach, Costa Rica, once the sale goes through.

Even with the pending sale of a piece of Americana, the mood on the set of “Motorcycle Cheerleading Mamas” was upbeat.

The film--an “Ed Wood-style spoof of motorcycle movies of the 1950s and 1960s,” said producer Mark Headley--features Martin Sheen’s brother Joe Estevez, Robert Mitchum’s son Chris Mitchum and “Grizzly Adams” star Dan Haggerty.

In the movie’s final scenes, several actresses and one actor, all clad in skimpy, skin-tight cheerleading outfits, tried to rescue two cheerleading friends from the clutches of a psychotic film director.

Still, they all knew the final shoot not only ended the film, but an era.

“Being out here makes me think about all of the people who went before me,” said actress Cheri Rae between takes. “I realize that once a movie is in the can, it is there forever for generations to enjoy.”