Not too long ago, filmmaker Chris Deaux thought it too odd to believe: Could there really be a abandoned movie set evolved into a small community out on the fringe of the Mojave Desert? Could a photogenic Western stomping grounds established 60 years ago by Hollywood cowboys still exist as a dusty, creaking oasis two hours outside Los Angeles? This place called Pioneertown–is this for real?
Indeed it is, Deaux and his camera soon discovered.

All quiet on the Western front: Pioneertown as seen in Chris Deaux’s documentary The Last Western (Photo: DeauxBoy Productions)
“It just sounded like something more out of the Twilight Zone,” said Deaux, whose Pioneertown portrait, The Last Western, premiered last spring at South by Southwest and screens tonight at Makor. “Real western façades, old saloons, a jail–all that stuff left over from the ’40s and ’50s that people had actually moved into and settled as this functioning town of sorts. I drove out there for the first time a few years ago, and that’s pretty much what I found. The people who live there fit the bill: Non-conformist, escapist, very colorful and very passionate about their sense of freedom and the American West.”
Deaux paused. “With quotation marks around ‘American West,’ ” he added.
Shot over several months on Deaux’s days off from his his full-time television gig, The Last Western works to reconcile the conventions of old Hollywood with the contemporary notion of community. The filmmaker reveals the drug-and-gang infestation that accompanied Pioneertown’s eventual disuse, a development mirroring the demise of the movie industry’s romance with the Western. You can probably see where this is going: Revisionism follows, with Pioneertown sheltering a new generation of outsiders and their own 21st-century refractions of the Wild West’s tastes and mores.
“One of the dilemmas and beauties of the film is that there are two stories,” Deaux told me. “There’s the history of the town, which is completely odd and unique in itself. We could have made a whole film just focusing on the town and its history, with the people being secondary. And then on the other hand you’ve got the people; there are so many interesting characters that there’s no way to make it just about the town. So it ended up being a very strong mix. A pretty strong chacter profile and a very strong historical piece about the town–blended together.”
But the adaptability of a joint like, say, Pappy and Harriet’s Pioneertown Palace to modern times (musical acts including Robert Plant and Shelby Lynne have played shows there since a group of young business partners from New York took the place over) contrasts wildly with the town’s stubbornly antiquarian standards. “They’re part of San Bernardino County, but they don’t have any electric board or anything,” Deaux said. “They have their own ZIP code. They’re a complete anomaly. San Bernardino County doesn’t know what to do with them. They don’t meet any modern-day codes. The houses aren’t set back from the street properly, there are no sidewalks, no streetlights–anything that a typical town has, it doesn’t.”
Particularly the encroaching specter of its own obsolescence. The town comprises a mostly older population, and Deaux said the tourist appeal is limited; a few residents’ gunfighting shows are more a hobby than a marketplace. Deaux emphasizes a turn toward “commercial preservation,” but notes that you cannot necessarily buy a postcard there.
And of late, with wildfires engulfing huge swaths of San Bernardino County and threatening the tiny entirety of Pioneertown (at least 30 homes have burned there so far), The Last Western has assumed a bittersweet timeliness. “They’ve been talking about Pioneertown on the news like it’s Disneyland–without any real explanation of what Pioneertown is,” Deaux said, adding that many of the townspeople worked with firefighters to protect the area’s most historic buildings. “It’s just part of the vernacular. ‘Pioneertown this, Pioneertown that.’ People have called me from all over the country to say Pioneertown is burning. It was just very odd. They talk about it mostly like they’re talking about it in the film: It’s the place Gene Autry built.”
Meanwhile, The Last Western supplies the extra dimension as it searches for an audience. Deaux anticipates a television distribution deal rather than a theatrical release for his 65-minute film, which makes tonight’s Makor screening even more of a treat. Deaux will be on hand to discuss the film afterward, and IndiePix will host a reception to follow. And because this technically is not a godforsaken-Los Angeles film, your attendance has The Reeler’s full blessing. And encouragement, for that matter.

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