The Adventures of Robin Hood | One-Mile Recreation Area, Bidwell Park — where the trucks unloaded Sherwood Forest

On 26 September 1937 the Warner Bros. convoy came up the Sacramento Valley and turned into the flat, shaded western end of Bidwell Park. Chico had been chosen for a practical reason: its valley oaks and sycamores would read as Nottinghamshire in three-strip Technicolor, a process the studio committed to only three months before cameras rolled, after the picture had already been planned in black and white. Lower Park became the staging ground. Equipment came off the trucks here, and a temporary tent city went up under the trees to feed, dress and hold several hundred people.

Walk it today and the first thing you meet is Sycamore Pool — five hundred feet of Big Chico Creek held behind a low dam, cemented and finished out by the WPA in the same decade the film was made, tile depth markers set every few feet along the wall. The creek still runs through it. The city closes the dam from Memorial Day to Labor Day and puts lifeguards on the deck, which makes this one of the few public swimming pools in California with a current.

The lawns beyond the pool are where the ordinary business of the production happened. Chico people were hired as extras for the caravan scenes, and there are photographs of them on break, sitting in costume eating box lunches. Nothing here is marked. No plaque, no sign, no arrow.

Come in October when the sycamores turn and the creek drops to a walking depth. That is the light the crew was working in.

Photo: Wikimedia Commons.