California: moments from Tom Cruise's Oblivion

California: moments from Tom Cruise's Oblivion

Lying in tall grass studded with yellow flowers beside a tranquil lake, Tom Cruise pulls a baseball cap over his face and murmurs dreamily: "I wanted to spend the rest of my life here." Of course, this being Cruise's latest science-fiction film, Oblivion, the idyllic scene is quickly shattered. Earlier this month, my three children were standing on the spot where Cruise was lying – next to one of the smallest lakes in the June Lake Loop, a 16-mile stretch dotted with large expanses of water that follows an old glacial canyon in the Sierra Nevada in eastern California. The mountains fringing the lake were capped with snow. The grass beneath our feet was icy, not verdant, and no flowers had broken through yet. The only sign that this remote spot had been the scene of intense Hollywood action was a piece of paper pinned to a tree, showing a weathered photograph of the wooden cabin Cruise built in his role as one of the last men on nuclear-devastated Earth in the year 2077: "Lake with floating camera platform is on left," it read. "Cruise's lean-to homestead is on right, covered with plastic sheeting against the snooping paparazzi." In the movie, Cruise builds the cabin single-handedly. "In fact, it took about six weeks for a crew of 12 to 15 men to build it," Ralph Lockhart, the personable owner of the lake, told me. He was hoping the cabin would stay – but it was demolished the moment filming had finished. "Liability issues," he said with a sigh. But no one could stop him renaming the lake, which pre-Cruise was known as Black's Pond. Now it is called Lake Oblivion.


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