of Oak Creek Road and Placerita Canyon Road. The property was leased by the newly independent Monogram Pictures, and renamed as 'Monogram Ranch' in 1937. Gene Autry, actor, western singer, and producer, purchased the 'Monogram Ranch' property from the Hickson heirs in 1953. He renamed the property 'Melody Ranch' after his 1940 film of the same name, and his following Sunday afternoon CBS radio show (1940–1956) and . A brushfire swept through 'Monogram Ranch' in August 1962, destroying most of the original standing western sets. The devastated landscape was useful for productions such as Combat!. A large Spanish hacienda, and a complete adobe village survived on the northeast section of the ranch. In 1990, after the death of his horse 'Champion,' which Autry had kept in retirement there, the actor put the remaining ranch up for sale. It was purchased by Renaud and Andre Veluzat to be developed as an active movie ranch for location shooting. The Veluzats have a complex of sound stages, western sets, prop shop, and the backlots. They call it the 'Melody Ranch Motion Picture Studio' and 'Melody Ranch Studios.' The ranch has a museum open year-round. One weekend a year the entire ranch is open to the public during the Cowboy Poetry & Music Festival, held at the end of April. The Melody Ranch Studio was used in 2012 for filming some scenes for Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained. The owners in 2019 were Renaud and Andre Veluzat. Paramount Movie Ranch In 1927, Paramount Studios purchased a ranch on Medea Creek in the Santa Monica Mountains near Agoura Hills, between Malibu and the Conejo Valley. The studio built numerous large-scale sets on the ranch, including a huge replica of early San Francisco, an Old West town, and a Welsh mining village (built by 20th Century Fox for (1941) How Green Was My Valley, and later redressed (with coal mine tipple removed) as a French village for use in (1943) The Song of Bernadette, and again used for (1949) The Inspector General). Western town sets posed as Tombstone, Arizona, and Dodge City, Kansas, as well as Tom Sawyer's Missouri, 13th-century China, and many other locales and eras around the world. It is now Paramount Ranch Park in the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area. The National Park Service took over a section of the lot in 1980 and restored the sets, working from old black and white