A 400-Acre Movie Ranch Outside Los Angeles Is Listed for $35 Million

When Frank Vacek arrived at Sable Ranch in the 1970s, with its chaparral-covered hills bounded by the mountains of the Angeles National Forest, he instantly saw a California dream.

Mr. Vacek, who with his wife had fled the Nazis in Czechoslovakia three decades earlier, rewrote his fortunes by opening a successful camera shop in downtown Los Angeles in the 1950s. But 30 miles north at Sable Ranch, where cattle grazed amid oak trees, he pictured an even grander second act for his life. He bought the ranch and the property next to it and built an Old West movie set on its land, bringing Hollywood — with its gun shows, cowboys and insatiable appetite for entertainment — to his doorstep.

Half a century later, Sable Ranch, in Santa Clarita, has served as movie set for productions including “Robin Hood: Men in Tights,” “American Horror Story” and “Oppenheimer.” Its 400 acres have stood in for so many cinematic backdrops that they have morphed into Hollywood iconography. And now, for $35 million, the ranch is hitting the market.

“The amount of history that is here, and the amount of movies and TV shows and commercials that have been made here, really is phenomenal,” said Derek Hunt, the owner of Sable Ranch. Mr. Hunt is Mr. Vacek’s grandson; he grew up on the property and formally inherited it in 2020. In 2008, Mr. Hunt began rallying the City of Santa Clarita to create the Movie Ranch Overlay Zone, a special designation for feature-film and television production that streamlines permitting and lowers costs.

The Movie Ranch Overlay Zone was set up in 2011. Sable Ranch sits within it as well as within the Thirty Mile Zone, also known as the TMZ, a sector within 30 miles of downtown Los Angeles where the labor costs for film crews are lower.