Dave Holland, the longtime director of the Lone Pine Film Festival who helped popularize the event in the eastern Sierra town through his painstaking efforts to find the exact spots where scenes from scores of movies were shot in the nearby hills, has died. He was 70.
An author and western film historian, Holland died of esophageal cancer Monday at his home in Santa Clarita, his family said.
He was instrumental in launching the Lone Pine festival in 1990 and served as its director from 1991 to 1999. He used his Hollywood contacts to line up celebrity guests who had filmed on location in the area, and he played host to panel discussions.
Guests at the annual October event have included Gregory Peck; Douglas Fairbanks Jr.; Clayton Moore, who portrayed the Lone Ranger; and Peggy Stewart, sometimes called the "queen of the Republic westerns."
"Dave was the greatest thing that ever happened to the Lone Pine Film Festival," regular festival guest Loren Janes, a founder of the Stuntmen's Assn. of Motion Pictures, said this week. "He had great enthusiasm for Lone Pine and these films."
The gregarious Holland was at his most enthusiastic leading festival tour bus groups through the spectacular, boulder-laden Alabama Hills, which lie below Mt. Whitney on the eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada about 200 miles north of Los Angeles.
More than 300 movies and countless TV shows and commercials have been filmed there since silent movie comedian Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle came to town to make "The Roundup" in 1920.
Thanks to Holland's tireless research, festival-goers can visit nearly 120 photo markers set exactly where movie cameras once stood to film John Wayne riding down a pass in "Westward Ho" (1935), Cary Grant and Sam Jaffe crossing a suspension bridge in "Gunga Din" (1939) and Tyrone Power awaiting possible death in "King of the Khyber Rifles" (1953).
Holland compiled his Alabama Hills finds in a 1990 pictorial guide, "On Location in Lone Pine." He later revised and updated the book and produced and hosted two Lone Pine location videos.
"It wasn't enough that he'd made these great discoveries about the locations in Lone Pine," film historian Leonard Maltin told The Times. "He wanted to share it with other movie buffs who'd appreciate the excitement of standing on the exact spot where a Tom Mix or Roy Rogers or Hopalong Cassidy had made their films. And his enthusiasm was infectious."
