Southern California's Mojave Desert in San Bernardino County, California. The town started as a live-in Old West motion picture set on a movie ranch, built in the 1940s. The movie set was designed to also provide a place for the actors to live, while having their homes used as part of the movie set. A number of Westerns and early television shows were filmed in Pioneertown, including The Cisco Kid and Edgar Buchanan's Judge Roy Bean. Roy Rogers, Dick Curtis, and Russell Hayden were among the original developers and investors, and Gene Autry frequently filmed his show at the six-lane Pioneer Bowl bowling alley. The sets have been retained as a tourist attraction which remained open as of April 2019. RKO Encino Ranch The RKO Pictures Encino Ranch consisted of located on the outskirts of the City of Encino, California, in the San Fernando Valley, near Los Angeles River and west of Sepulveda Basin Recreation Area on Burbank Boulevard. RKO Radio Pictures purchased this property as a location to film their epic motion picture Cimarron (1931), (winner of four Academy Awards for Best Picture, Best Writing, Best Art Direction, and Best Make-Up). Art Director Max Ree won his Oscar for creative design of the very first theme sets constructed on the movie ranch which consisted of a complete western town and a three block modern main street built as the Oklahoma (fictional) town of Osage. In addition to Cimarron scenery, RKO continued to create a vast array of diverse sets for their ever-expanding movie ranch that included a New York avenue, brownstone street, English row houses, slum district, small town square, residential neighborhood, three working train depots, mansion estate, New England farm, western ranch, a mammoth medieval City of Paris, European marketplace, Russian village, Yukon mining camp, ocean tank with sky backdrop, Moorish casbah, Mexican outpost, Sahara Desert fort, plaster mountain range diorama, and a football field sized United States map on which Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers danced across in The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle (1939). Also available were scene docks, carpentry shop, prop storage, greenhouse, and three fully equipped soundstages with an average of 11,000 square feet each. A short list of classic movies that contain scenes shot on the RKO Pictures Encino Ranch include: What Price Hollywood? (1932), King Kong (1933), Of Human Bondage (1934), Becky Sharp (1935), Walking on Air (1936), Stage Door (1937),