In the original film adaptation of “Planet of the Apes,” a
space capsule crashes into a lake. The
astronauts awaken to realize that their capsule is sinking. Taylor, played by Charlton Heston, glances at
the chronometer. When they reach the
shore, he tells his fellow astronaut Landon, “Two thousand years have passed
since we left Earth. Time has wiped away
everything you’ve ever known.”
Still, Landon can’t help but plant a tiny American flag on
the shore of this new world.
In visiting Malibu Creek State Park, I had hoped to discover
where Ape City had once stood alongside Century Lake. Constructed out of steel and Styrofoam, Ape
City proved durable enough to use in the sequel, “Beneath the Planet of the
Apes.” Its architectural style, based
upon a village carved out of a mountain in Turkey, seemed strikingly modern,
yet also naturalistic. I knew that it no
longer stood in the park, but had hoped to find where it once stood.
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| Where's the waterfall? |
As dry grass, picnic tables, and the occasional public
restroom have sprung up in the rocky soil beside the upper parking lot, no
trace remains of the cornfield through which the apes chase the astronauts
and primitive humans. Sadly, the same
can be said for Ape City. Century Lake
is lake in name only. Aside from the area
where we happened upon the small film crew (in “Filmmaking in Malibu Creek
State Park”), the “lake” is nothing more than a thin, green snake that
serpentines along for a quarter-mile or so.
In the 1968 film, water tumbles down off the cliffs and into the rock
pools, which look more clear and full than on our visit. So perhaps Century Lake was larger back then
too.
As we turned off the dirt road toward the lake where the
film crew worked, we saw a man standing beside a water truck. Later, on our way out, he sat inside the cab,
evidently waiting in case the crew needed more water than the bottles on their
food table would have provided. After
more online research at Omega Planet (see link in previous post), my wife suggested that Ape City might
have stood where the man waited inside his water truck. It’s just a guess, as time has wiped away so
much in the subsequent decades, but it seems as good a guess to me as any.
Remembering how Taylor laughs at Landon’s simple act, I
can’t help wonder what the park will look like two thousand years from
now.
In researching this post, I got out the Blu-ray edition of
“Planet of the Apes” that my wife bought me last year for Christmas. The player went clunk, and refused to
recognize the disk. My wife, the
technical wizard of our family, is researching the issue. While our older DVD offers an adequate
viewing of the movie, the Blu-ray version not only includes a wonderful revamp
of the movie, but also a documentary on the production. Hopefully, she can rectify the problem. Otherwise, in addition to Ape City, it would
seem that time has wiped away the movie, the documentary, and everything else on
the Blu-ray disk.
Dragon Dave
