A playground for the stars, a favorite film and TV location, a short drive to top California vineyards and home to industryites of today and yesterday: There's a strong bond between Santa Barbara and Hollywood.
It's a relationship begun in the earliest days of California filmmaking when Allan Dwan's Flying A Studio set up shop on Mission Street in 1912.
The Santa Barbara Intl. Film Festival cements that Hollywood connection by unspooling a month prior to the Academy Awards and four days after the nominations are announced.
Fest director Roger Durling gets credit for re-positioning the event and bringing out top Hollywood names in force. Jeff Barbakow, former chairman and CEO of MGM, now prexy of the film fest's board, explains: "What's really interesting here is that we get an awful lot of Academy Award nominees -- we had 24 last year, and it does make this festival much different than others."
A bonus for Oscar strategists and distribs: More than 200 Academy members live in the area.
The coastal town's visual appeal is apparent; marks of urban blight, like strip malls and billboards, are not in sight. Stringent building codes preserve the consistent low-rise, Spanish Revival architecture. Numerous development restrictions also help account for the $1 million median price of a single-family home.
Proximity to Los Angeles means showrunners, directors and producers can still take meetings down south and return by dinner. Helmers Andrew Davis, Ivan Reitman and Robert Zemeckis plus thesps Jeff Bridges, Rob Lowe and John Cleese are prominent residents.
Moviegoing still entails a trip downtown to State Street, without an industry watering hole in sight (although thesp Kevin Costner is a backer of local eatery Epiphany).
"Best place I've ever lived," declares thesp-scribe Tab Hunter, who has been coming to Montecito since the 1950s. "It's small townish -- you can be as social or private as you want to be."
Consisting predominantly of walled estates an acre or larger, Montecito is to Santa Barbara as Bel-Air is to Los Angeles.
"Montecito was ravaged elegance in the '50s -- old money from the East Coast and Midwest," Hunter recalls. "Hollywood has always loved it as an escape."
High-profile types -- Oprah Winfrey tops that list -- can dine at local eateries (like Mollies), hang out at the Four Seasons Biltmore's famed Coral Casino (now undergoing renovation) or even get married and honeymoon (at Rosewood Resorts' San Ysidro Ranch) -- all without fear of being stalked by paparazzi or being outed on Defamer.com.
"They don't get bothered here; people don't make a fuss," says Shannon Brooks, director of communications at Santa Barbara's conference & visitors bureau and also film commission. Per Brooks, the paparazzi are not a daily presence and only come in for "the big names."
Additionally, it's not a media hub, although the county's film credits are numerous. They range from 1914's "The Perils of Pauline" to 1923's "The Ten Commandments" from Cecil B. DeMille to the new "Alpha Dog." Most recently, Quentin Tarantino/Robert Rodriguez's "Grindhouse" and Disney's next "Pirates of the Caribbean" installment lensed in the scenery-rich north end of the county.
Quick getaways remain the main attraction. Controlled access means thesps can chill out in relative peace at posh resorts: Jennifer Aniston (Four Seasons Biltmore), Jude Law (Bacara), plus J.Lo and Marc Anthony (San Ysidro Ranch).
Weddings are a tradition, too, at the S.Y. Ranch, from Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier's 1940 nuptials to Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin's in 2003.
"There's a certain mystique to Santa Barbara," points out film historian Harry Medved, co-author of "Hollywood Escapes." "You can go there for writing, riding or drinking; it's a closed community in some respects, and it's not too far to be a drag but far enough away to be rather exclusive."
There's also a long tradition of showbizzers involved in Santa Barbara hospitality. Charlie Chaplin helped found the Montecito Inn; Ronald Colman transformed a citrus ranch into a rustic hideaway. The San Ysidro Ranch is now owned by toy magnate Ty Warner and recently completed a $120 million renovation so industryites can continue to relax on Pratesi linens in the ranch's exclusive casitas.
TV's Daniel Boone, Fess Parker, turned his Santa Ynez ranch, bought in the mid-1950s, into vineyards. His winery's convivial tasting room makes a memorable appearance in "Sideways." Parker's empire includes an inn and spa in Los Olivos as well as sprawling Double Tree Resort across from the beach on Santa Barbara's oceanfront. Soon, Parker will break ground on a new high-end seaside inn, pending the city's notoriously glacially paced approval process.
Fleetwood Mac's drummer Mick Fleetwood has also been involved in the county's wine biz by creating his own cuvee.
Many showbiz wine hounds make the annual springtime trek to Santa Barbara's Wine Cask's crowded wine futures' tasting.
More than 100 Santa Barbara County wines are poured by the region's winemakers, among them the county's homegrown superstars such as Sea Smoke's Kris Curran, Cold Heaven's Morgan Clendenen and Frank Ostini of Hitching Post.
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