Cinema in the Parks

This is a very brief retrospective of movie music from films made in national parks, at national monuments, battlefields, recreation areas, scenic river ways — all those gorgeous places under the jurisdiction of the National Park Service.

The Service is the reason behind this hour of music because 2016 is their centennial year. It was on August 25, 1916, that President Woodrow Wilson signed the Service into existence by way of the Organic Act, making it part of the Department of the Interior.

The genesis of the parks themselves (what filmmaker Ken Burns called "America's best idea") technically happened a bit earlier than the Service. There was a Congressional Act signed by President Lincoln in 1864 that gave oversight of the Yosemite Valley and Mariposa Grove to the state of California "to be held for public use, resort, and recreation, and shall be inalienable for all time." The National Park System of the United States is now made up for 400 areas and more than 84 million acres.

The history of movie making in Hollywood shares a similar timeline with the history of National Parks. They were experimenting with moving pictures as early as the mid-19th century. By the 1920s, Hollywood and movies were basically synonymous.

When moviemakers needed to recreate jurassic forests, dangerous deserts, the Old West, or lost planets, they didn't need to look any further than the national parks for locations.

Hundreds of films have been made in the National Parks Service system, and you'll be hearing just a tiny sampling from cinema in the parks.

Playlist

Bernard Herrmann: Journey to the Center of the Earth
Jerome Moross: The Big Country
John Williams: Star Wars
Jerry Goldsmith: Star Trek V: The Final Frontier
Bernard Herrmann: Vertigo
Bernard Herrmann: North by Northwest
John Williams: Close Encounters of the Third Kind
John Berry: Dances with Wolves
Alan Silvestri: Forrest Gump
John Williams: Raiders of the Lost Ark
Alfred Newman: How the West Was Won