Castle Rock once towered fifty feet above the beach just a little way east of Topanga Beach. This natural monument and its companions, “Haystack Rock” and the “Family Group” were much loved local landmarks, and a destination for tourists, picnickers, and film crews. There are hundreds of snapshots and postcards of Castle Rock and its beach, and this area appeared in numerous films during the early years of the film industry.
Castle Beach, across the highway from the Getty Villa and Sunset Mesa, keeps the name of the landmark alive, but Castle Rock is gone, blasted in 1945 to make way for a wider coast highway, and flattened further in 1972, when the last remains of the once towering rock formation were bulldozed and paved over.
D.W. Griffith is the first known filmmaker to use the Castle Rock formations as a location, but he wasn’t the last. His colleague, Keystone studio creator Mack Sennett, filmed here often during the silent era.
In 1915, Sennett joined forces with D.W. Griffith, and Thomas Ince, whose nearby studio ranch Inceville, in Santa Ynez Canyon was the first of its kind. The trio formed a distribution company called Triangle Films. Ince was mostly finished with Inceville and moved to his new Culver City studio that year, but Sennett made good use of the ranch, producing a number of films that were shot there, and nearby. Like Griffith, he was drawn to the beach.
Sennett’s 1915 short comedy A Lover’s Lost Control was directed by and starred Syd Chaplin, Charlie Chaplin’s older brother. The film takes the viewer on a wild ride down West Channel Road, along the coast, and concludes with a splash near the Long Wharf, with the Topanga mountains in the background.
A year later, Fatty and Mabel Adrift (1916), starring Mabel Normand, Fatty Arbuckle, and Luke the dog, filmed at Castle Rock. The film features a series of pratfalls in and around the smaller rocks, a mad chase up the beach towards Topanga, and a beach cottage that starts out next to the Castle Rock and ends up afloat. Luke, an American Staffordshire terrier who belonged to Arbuckle’s wife Minta, is the real star of the show. He saves the day, but misses out on screen credit—he’s misidentified as another Keystone canine actor, a great Dane named Teddy the Keystone Dog.
In 1917, Charlie Chaplin escapes from a pair of bumbling cops at Castle Rock in a series of bold maneuvers in The Adventurer. This film also features a chase down the stretch of the coast route near Topanga, and a cameo appearance by the Abbot Kinney Pleasure Pier.
The always wonderful comedienne Louise Fazenda steals the show in Hearts and Flowers in 1919, with Ford Sterling, Phyllis Haver, Billy Armstrong. Castle Beach also has a starring role, offering audiences a good look at what this stretch of coast looked like at the time.
Castle Beach is also the backdrop for a key scene in the 1931 film Dirigible, a bleak Antarctic adventure drama starring Fay Wray and Jack Holt. This was a big budget gamble for Columbia Pictures and director Frank Capra—it cost $650,000, a lot of money for the time. However, the action scenes, not the beach interlude, were the expensive part.
One of the big attractions of Castle Beach was that it offered dramatic scenery at an easy-to-access and close-to-town location.
The rock’s last movie industry appearance was in 1945, shortly before the landmark was destroyed. A young actress named Norma Jean posed here for a photo shoot, before she was catapulted to fame as Marilyn Monroe.
In June of 1945, road crews dynamited the top of the tower during a road widening project. The rest was demolished in the 1970s. Formations like Castle Rock and nearby Arch Rock—located just east of Topanga—were in the way of development, and early targets for removal. Arch Rock didn’t survive to the film era. The arch, which spanned the coast road, and sometimes necessitated unharnessing the horses and pushing the coach or wagon through the opening with manpower instead of horse power, collapsed in 1906. It remains unclear if this was the result of powerful waves, or an impatient May Knight Rindge, the owner of the Malibu Rancho who had recently begun to build her own railroad along the coast, and who may have wanted easier access for her work crews.
Either way, the wave action and coastal erosion that creates promontories like Castle Rock and Arch Rock, would eventually have caused them to collapse on their own. This stretch of coast continues to erode, placing the highway at increased risk.
There’s a parking lot atop the former site of Castle Rock, and stairs leading down to the beach, where there are still some remnants of the smaller rock formations, but the best way to visit this former landmark is in old movies, where the past lives on against all odds, preserved on film.
Thanks for another fine historical piece, Suzanne! I’ve studied dozens of photos of Castle Rock and the highway at that point and it seems to me the highway is about the same width as it was before the rock was destroyed. We’ve always been told that the destruction of the iconic landmark was necessary to widen the highway but before and after photos don’t seem to show that. Just comparing the third and fourth photos in this article makes the highway width seem about the same. There must be surveys in records somewhere that record the before and after widths of the highway at Castle Rock, which I’d certainly like to see. I try to look at the photos with an objective but I do admit to a bias. I was born shortly after Castle Rock was destroyed but always heard from my older brother and sister as well as my parents how dramatic the rock looked with the ocean behind it. BTW, I think you meant say Castle Rock was just a short distance “east” of Topanga Beach.
Thank you, Roger! If they still exist, those surveys are very likely at the Caltrans archive in Sacramento, although the original builders of Pacific Coast Highway appear to be gone at it with more enthusiasm than engineering. The Huntington Library has a bunch of unpublished photos that support the idea that the road never really did impinge on the rock. Those photos show that the road was cut into the toe of the cliff, opposite the rock formation. I suspect they may have been more concerned about the pinnacle toppling over onto the roadway, or else they just dynamited it in the name of “progress,” because they could.