Motion-Picture Mappaemundi: On Location Cartography in California

This paper examines the phenomenon of film location maps in California. These unusual maps, popular in the 1930s and associated with Paramount Studios, presented those locations within California that could plausibly substitute for another world location onscreen (e.g., the Sierra Nevada mountain range could stand in for the Alps as a background in a film). In this article, I analyze a sequence of these maps, arguing that the global juxtapositions and cinematic superimpositions that they create were only possible within a specific historical context, namely (1) the formalization of the role of the location manager as that profession evolved within the studio system and location shooting in California; (2) a particular form of place-based tourist marketing for California that claimed a global variety of geographies within the state; (3) the importance of the idea of place to Paramount Studios in these years, and how this related to a contemporaneous boom in California place-naming; and (4) the simultaneous rise of pictorial maps, a kind of cartography that joined illustration and caricature.