Screenshot for the Week of 15 June 2020: "SABOTEUR" (1942)

Pat Martin and Barry Kane (Priscilla Lane and Robert Cummings) walk toward the office buildings at a mine in Saboteur (1942).

[SPOILER ALERT!] The two characters in this screenshot eventually look through a telescope aimed out a window in one of those buildings and they see Hoover Dam, which puts their location in Nevada or Arizona.  But in fact, this scene was filmed in the Owens Valley in eastern California, and, alas, Hoover Dam isn't visible from there. [END OF SPOILER ALERT!]

The actors are in Keeler, California, walking toward an actual borax mining operation that is still there and in operation more than 80 years later.  In the background we see the eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada.  In between is a dry lake bed, the former Owens Lake.  To the right but out of the frame are the Owens Valley towns of Lone Pine, Independence, Big Pine, and Bishop.  Behind the camera, about 90 miles away, is the town of Furnace Creek in what was then Death Valley National Monument and is now Death Valley National Park.

Owens Lake(dry) and the eastern Sierra Nevada seen from Keeler, California, 10 miles east of the town of Lone Pine.  Photo by Bookman, November 2011.

Toward the end of 1904, three strangers showed up in the Owens Valley.  They found themselves in a modern day Garden of Eden, naturally irrigated by the Owens River watershed, with the river itself emptying into Owens Lake.  It was a burgeoning produce-growing region with the hope of an explosion of demand, once the Santa Fe built the expected railroad spur to San Bernardino, connecting Bishop to the restaurants and grocery stores of Los Angeles.  Owens Valley farmers had every reason to believe that the people of L. A. would make them rich.

Fred Eaton, William Mulholland, and Joseph Lippincott, with malice aforethought, introduced themselves as neophyte ranchers looking to buy property in the area.  In truth, Eaton was the head of the L. A. Department of Water and Power (DWP), Mulholland was its chief engineer, and Lippincott was its land agent.  L. A. was growing, and it didn't have its own natural water supply.  It was a veritable desert.  It was thirsty and getting thirstier.

The three strangers had come to buy property, all right—hundreds of square miles of it, one seller at a time and, usually, one parcel at a time, not telling anyone about the other land purchases as they moved from one transaction to the next.  The DWP representatives wanted "riparian" land, i.e., land that bordered the Owens River.  Ultimately, they were there to snatch the farmers' entire water supply and to do it before anyone caught wind of their scheme. They were going to leave the Owens Valley to dry up and wither economically.  They were going to leave it for dead.

Lippincott orchestrated the DWP chicanery, using smooth-talking Eaton as his front man. Within weeks, DWP had bought most of the land in the Owens Valley.  Six days after Lippincott had finished his work, a syndicate of investors that included Eaton and Mulholland and the publishers of every L. A. newspaper but one paid $50,000 on an option to buy the greater part of another valley, the San Fernando Valley.

It all began when Mulholland devised an ambitious, ingenious plan.  It hinged on a surreptitious DWP land grab, airtight secrecy via a news lockdown, and L. A.'s incorporation of the San Fernando Valley into the City.

Fred Eaton was looking for a new and steady supply of water for L. A. even before the company he owned—the Los Angeles Water Company—became DWP, a public utility.  He and William Mulholland zeroed in on the Owens River and Owens Lake.  Mulholland's survey work had revealed that gravity could take water from the Owens River all the way to the Tehachapi Mountains, at which point pumps could take the water over the Tehachapis to its ultimate destination.

Reservoirs would be needed for water storage, and the San Fernando Valley, though not within the City limits, was the ideal location for the largest one.  The City could annex the Valley, build the reservoirs, purchase all the water rights in the Owens Valley, build a 224-mile-long aqueduct and have it all paid for by voter-approved bonds (the conspirators had a nasty plan for gaining approval).  It would eventually bring manna in the form of water to the lucky future landowners in the Valley.

Even luckier would be those buyers who bought land in the San Fernando Valley while the Valley was still an arid desert, while land prices were low, before the news broke that water was on the way, news that would cause property values to skyrocket.

It was only after this coordinated plan was agreed to by all the conspirators that Eaton dispatched himself and Lippincott to the Owens Valley with the task of buying as much land there as they could.  They were so successful that all the riparian land along the Owens River plus Owens Lake plus the land underneath all the towns and cities in the Owens Valley have been owned by the City of Los Angeles for more than a century.

Construction on the aqueduct began in 1908 and was completed in 1914.  For the next decade, Owens Valley farmers rebelled by periodically blowing up sections of the aqueduct with dynamite.  The City of Los Angeles sent a private militia to guard the length of the aqueduct with shoot-to-kill orders.  The hostile events of this era are known collectively as the California Water Wars.

Some of the elements of this saga contributed to the plot of Chinatown (1974), with Jack Nicholson, Faye Dunaway, and John Huston.

Owens Lake was already dry by the time Hitchcock filmed part of Saboteur there.  In fact, L.A.'s spectacular population growth required it to extend the aqueduct twice, eventually to the feeder streams of Mono Lake, 125 miles north of Owens Lake.  The draining of Mono Lake has been but another chapter in the history of the California Water Wars.

C: Joseph Valentine.  D: Alfred Hitchcock.