Filming Revenues Soar at Corriganville

Business has boomed this year at Corriganville Park, the former filming location for western movies such as “How the West Was Won” and television series.

And park officials hope that trend will continue with an increasingly aggressive marketing campaign.

Filming revenue generated by productions shot at the park for the first six months of 1999 has exceeded the total of the past three years combined, according to a Rancho Simi Open Space Conservation Agency report. The agency handles issues affecting Corriganville Park.

The report states the Rancho Simi Recreation and Park District has raised nearly $12,000 so far this year, compared with nearly $8,000 for all of 1998 and nothing in 1996 and 1997 when the park went unused by camera crews.

Park district spokesman Rick Johnson attributes Hollywood’s renewed interest in Corriganville to the agency’s recent efforts to market the park as a cheap, convenient and versatile filming location.

“We’re more aggressively promoting the use of Corriganville as a viable location for Southern California production studios,” he said. “They have lots of different kinds of scenery to portray different parts of the world, and it’s paying off. The campaign is already starting to draw in more production revenue.”

Johnson said the park most recently served as Biblical-era Judea for a History Channel documentary on Jesus Christ.

Production crews are charged $500 a day to film at Corriganville--an amount the open-space agency is considering increasing--with additional fees to cover parking, use of the Camp Rotary shelter and park ranger services.

In addition, camera crews must pay a $500 cleaning deposit to cover any damage done to the park during filming. The deposit is refunded if Corriganville is returned to its original state.

Although the district hasn’t set a goal for how many productions it wants to host or how much revenue it would like filming to raise for its general fund, Johnson said he would like to see the agency raise $50,000 a year in filming revenue and build from there.