Hollywood Outtakes: California Oil Wells

For most of the first half of the twentieth century, the coast of southern California was oil country. Forests of oil derricks lined the shore north and south of Los Angeles. These film clips give a bit of an idea of what it looked like--oil rigs side-by-side with beach houses. While some of the oil fields were starting to go dry in the 1960’s, the thing that really finished off the California oil business was the 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill. The largest spill at the time, it was the result of a blowout on an offshore oil platform, and dumped some 80,000 to 100,000 barrels of crude into the Pacific Ocean. A good deal of it ended up on the beaches. The incident got national news coverage and provided impetus for the Clean Water Act and the formation of the EPA. While the derricks are gone, I’ve read that you can still see small pumps here and there, still extracting crude. I can’t tell you much about the song OIL! that I put on the soundtrack. I can’t tell you thing about the writer