A public headland trail and beach below a private residential peninsula.
What Point Dume looks like
Point Dume is a headland at the north end of Santa Monica Bay, a sandstone bluff that drops in cliffs to the water. George Vancouver named it in 1793 for a friend, the missionary Francisco Dumetz. He misspelled Dumetz as Dume on his map, and the spelling was never fixed.
Behind and above the headland, about a square mile of private streets holds roughly four hundred homes built mostly after World War Two, also part of what people mean by Point Dume. A few have a locked gate to their own beach, like . California State Parks says there is no parking on those streets. The only public land here is the , 34 acres reached from a cul-de-sac on or by climbing up from .
A trail runs from that cul-de-sac over an old dune to a boardwalk and two overlooks, with Catalina Island visible on a clear day. Below, curves northwest toward .
Gray whales pass offshore from December into April. The rocks past the main cove have tidepools with crabs, urchins and mussels. The point also has a few easy, single pitch climbing routes, often used to bring beginners up on top rope.
Films shot in Point Dume
Point Dume's cliffs and beach have appeared in three very different productions.
Planet of the Apes, 1968
The same rocks are where the original Planet of the Apes staged its ending, in 1968. Charlton Heston's Taylor finds the ruined Statue of Liberty on a cove east of the main beach, a spot a Malibu real estate guide calls . The desert scenes earlier in the film were shot separately, in Arizona.
The Iron Man films, 2008 to 2013
Tony Stark's mansion in the three Iron Man films is a CGI building added to real plates of this same clifftop. Every interior was shot on a soundstage far from Malibu. The first film used Playa Vista Studios. The third used a lot in Wilmington, North Carolina. Iron Man 3 gives the house a fictional address on screen, 10880 Malibu Point.
The Big Lebowski, 1998
In The Big Lebowski, the Dude is summoned to a bonfire party on this beach to meet the pornographer Jackie Treehorn. Treehorn's house afterward, up in the hills, is a different house. It is the real Sheats-Goldstein Residence in Beverly Crest, about thirty miles away.
What Point Dume can double for
Point Dume can stand in for a future Earth beach in the original Planet of the Apes and Tony Stark's mansion in the Iron Man films, added afterward by visual effects.
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