I don't recall if I mentioned this or not, but a few weeks ago I was out taking a picture of a live oak which grows a couple of blocks from my house when a woman came jogging out of the adjacent property and stopped to comment on the tree. She said that it was the oak which was used in the movie Gone With the Wind. I had long heard the rumor that all of the few scenes of that movie which were shot on location were done in Butte County, and that one of the locations was an apple orchard on Pentz road. I had wondered if the orchard was the one at the end of my block. (In the 1930's, there were still several orchards along Pentz road, and it might have been any of them.) My mother has a videotape of the movie, but I haven't had the patience to watch it and see if any of the locations bear a strong resemblance to this area.
It does seem plausible that some of the movie may have been shot here, as Butte County was familiar to Hollywood producers, and had been where most of the 1938 version of The Adventures of Robin Hood had been filmed, so the look of the place would have been fresh in the mind of the location scouts for GWTW. Tonight, I went hunting for information on the web, but, aside from local web sites (such as this one) that mention it, I couldn't find anything. I did run across a question on a message board from someone who was also looking for information about shooting locations used in that movie, but none of the answers the question had received were helpful. I'm thinking that I might e-mail the original poster and ask if he's had any luck tracking down information, and tell him about the local legend. The posted last August, though, and I don't know if the address in it is still good. The Internet could be so useful, if it weren't so chaotic.
Anyway, I've got a couple of pictures of the oak, and I intend to post them in
found_objects eventually. (I'll link to it here when I do, for those who may be interested.) I wish that I had gotten the picture from the right angle (the one which appears at the end of the movie) before those new houses were built over the last two years. The most recent of them is right in the shot, blocking the view up the rise at the top of which Tara was matted in.Off to upload some pictures, now.