Destruction and mayhem can be yours for $7.5 million
By Jennifer Karmon, Yahoo Homes
At first glance -- and second, and third -- the $7.5 million asking price for this property seems absurd.
Look through the pictures and you'll see little but destruction: roads pocked with apparent bomb craters. Heavily shelled buildings. Blasted cars and helicopter fragments.
Then there's the empty Army camp. An abandoned diner. An airplane hangar. A decades-old gas station. A mysterious cave.
What is this place?
Turns out it's a "movie ranch" called Blue Cloud, less than 30 miles from Hollywood studios in Saugus, California. And if it triggers a sense of deja vu for you, that could be because scenes from two "Iron Man" movies (1 and 3) were shot here, and "Zero Dark Thirty," and "National Security" with Martin Lawrence -- even HBO's "True Blood" and NBC's now-canceled "Chuck."
Blue Cloud Movie Ranch spans about 100 acres. Military settings are its specialty: Its Afghanistan town "is so real the U.S. military uses it for training purposes," according to a 2011 Los Angeles Times article on area movie ranches.
Owner Rene Veluzat, who comes from a movie-ranching family, told the Times that Blue Cloud generated $1 million in 2010 revenue and booked 70 shows. Renaud and Andre Veluzat, his brothers, own two other ranches nearby: one popular for its western-town setting, picked by Quentin Tarantino for "Django Unchained," and the other known for its Spanish town.
Click here to see a video of Blue Cloud Movie Ranch on Yahoo Homes' Spaces blog.
More weird and unique spaces on Yahoo Homes:
• Astounding hand-carved caves are the work of one driven man (pictured at right)
• A see-through bathroom for when nature really calls
• Russia's upside-down house
• House made with grocery bags and tin cans
