It's A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World

Scenes Shot at the Rancho Conejo Airport

Newbury Park, California

And Elsewhere in California

 Paul Ford, second from right, and Jesse White, radio operator, right.
Other two are Eddie Ryder, control tower staffer, and Carl Reiner, controller.

The 1963 movie, "It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World," includes several scenes showing Mickey Rooney and Buddy Hackett chartering a twin-engine plane, a Beechcraft D-18, and flying it to an airport loudly identified by the man in the control tower (Carl Reiner) as Rancho Conejo Airport. Buddy Hackett ends up flying the plane after the pilot (Jim Backus, best known as Thurston Howell in Gilligan's Island) gets drunk and is knocked unconscious. Col. Wilberforce (Paul Ford) is brought in to give Hackett flying instruction over the radio. Jesse White, radio tower operator, says, "Why don't we just shoot 'em down and be through with it."

 Almost all these airport scenes were, indeed, filmed at the no-longer-existing Rancho Conejo Airport in Newbury Park, California, now a part of the city of Thousand Oaks. Click on the photos below to compare scenes from the movie with the current topography. Lower parts of pictures are from the movie; upper parts are photos taken in Newbury Park (or elsewhere) in 2003 (and later). Click on the wide panoramic photo below to see the Newbury Park skyline. (To enlarge the panoramic photo in Internet Explorer you may need to go to Tools, Internet Options, Advanced, Multimedia, and turn off the Enable Automatic Image Resizing.)

The Rancho Conejo Airport, which was described by the Los Angeles Times as the "The finest executive aircraft facility on the West Coast," was in operation for about five years, beginning in 1960. In the mid-1990s developers raised the ground level several feet and the entire airport area was covered by a gated community of homes.

While the dramatic movie flight ends in Newbury Park, other airports appear earlier. Rooney and Hackett board the plane at an airport surrounded by what look like fir trees, but may be desert trees, such as Tamarisk, that are common in the Palm Springs area. The plane definitely lifts off from the Palm Springs Airport, but that does not mean the pre-flight footage was shot there. The Internet Movie Database (repeated on Amazon) says the plane later flies through a roadside billboard at the Chino Airport, but that is incorrect. The billboard was actually near the Orange County airport, now know as the John Wayne Airport. And the plane flies through an open-ended hanger at the Santa Rosa Airport in northern California.  If you have photos or information about any of this, please contact me.

For information about the final end of the Beechcraft D-18 used in the movie, and about the location where the plane flew through the sign: Click here

Click to Enlarge

Non-Newbury Park Flying Locations

Location

It appears that this may be different airport from the one where the plane flies through the open-ended hangar below.

Newbury Park Locations

Location

Treetop Hill, on far right in lower picture, is located near Lynn Road and Gainsborough Road, east of airport. The oak tree on top has grown larger since 1963.

Other Places Near Newbury Park

Long Beach Locations

Published Locations and Schedule

In 1963, when IAMMMMW was produced, a press booklet was printed to promote the film and to be sold to premier viewers. The first few weeks of production, the booklet says, were spent in Palm Springs where the temperature was 115 degrees in the shade most days. The booklet continues:

"While the company headquartered and spent the nights at the posh Riviera and Biltmore Hotels in the heart of Palm Springs -- where they did have air-conditioning, swimming pools and tall iced things -- it ranged over thousands of square miles in the Coachella and adjacent desert valleys for its shooting sites. Near Cathedral City, Jimmy Durante "died" in a meteorlike crash when his car leaped off a mountainside into a hole lined with volcanic effluvia. In Palm Desert, Jonathan Winters, Arnold Stang and Marvin Kaplan destroyed a gas station in a free-for-all fight of Olympian proportions. In 29 Palms, Caesar, Miss Adams and Ben Blue soared off, from a dustpile airport, in a 1916 model bi-plane [According to Ed Solter, it was a 1918 Scout, owned by Tallmantz]. In Yucca Valley, Berle, Miss Merman, Miss Provine and Terry-Thomas engaged in day-long foot and auto chases. And in an area so isolated and sun-blotched that it has no name, Phil Silvers was trapped in an abandoned mine."

The list continues on the next two pages:

"For the next ten weeks, Kramer spun his "World" through a series of day locations in nearby beach and San Fernando Valley areas, interspersed with occasional short sessions on the studio sound stages. Switching from outdoors to indoors was a schedule juggling necessitated by the need to complete work with certain stars so they could report for Fall commitments...."

"The company's cavalcade of personnel, equipment and personalities shot their way through Long Beach, Oxnard, Santa Monica, Malibu, San Pedro, Palos Verdes, Thousand Oaks, Camarillo, Santa Rosa, Tustin and Santa Ana. In most of the cities the main streets were the sites of filming, in some the airports. In Palos Verdes, however, a most remarkable set was constructed, a 2-acre park which looked as if it had been there forever. Before Kramer's  crafty construction specialists arrived it had been a dreary, shale-covered promontory overlooking the Pacific. When the cameras rolled it was a grassy dell of flowers, shrubbery and 70 towering, full-grown sago and fan palms. The transformation cost $40,000; the view of Catalina Island, 20 miles across the water, came free. Two weeks were spent here, then the company returned to the studio for the final setting in which all the stars would work together, the orthopoedic ward of a police hospital."

There was one other distant location in which only Phil Silvers performed -- the town of Kernville, 200 miles away and deep in a canyon of the High Sierra. Here Silvers drove his car across what he thought would be a ford in the rushing Kern River. It wasn't. The car and the actor went straight down. It was a very funny scene. Nobody knew, until after standby frogmen had pulled him to shore, that Silvers is probably the only male adult resident of Beverly Hills who can't swim."

"'Kramer Park' -- a backlot square block at Revue Studios and a surrounding complex of streets and buildings -- saw the last ten days of production. It was a meticulously planned chaos involving, each day, 2,000 extras, 200 bit players, a phalanx of stuntmen, snorting special effects machinery, fire engines, police cars, cranes, derricks, pile drivers and tornado-producing wind-machines which blew hundreds of thousands of pieces of funny-money over the monumental scramble. Men fell from buildings and fire ladders onto power lines, into palm tree tops, through pedestrian bridges into lily ponds, onto picnic tables and into the arms of statues."

"At 3:30 p.m., December 6, Spencer Tracy was hurled through the door of a pet shop in the square and as he lay battered on the floor a half-dozen dogs, startled and curious, licked his face. It was the final scene."

"The World had been created."

"It has required 166 shooting days, during a period of seven-and-a-half months, and 636,000 feet of exposed Technicolor film. It had required millions of dollars."