A Foothills film fixture was among those recognized at Cannes last week.
The sprawling Longview-area John Scott Ranch joined two other Alberta film sites to win the Location of the Year Award at the Global Production Awards in France.
“It’s absolutely fantastic,” Scott said. “We’re absolutely surprised to get it because there’s lots of great sets in North America.”
Albertina Ranches and CL Ranches were the other two Alberta locations honoured. All three are regularly used in A-list productions.
“It's just a great honour to be on the world stage,” Scott said.
The functioning ranch was established by Scott’s grandfather in 1904, home to not just an array of Western buildings for film sets, but also herds of cattle and bison, along with horses.
These work into the film as well, with John Scott Productions offering animal wrangling services to productions nationwide.
“It's partly due to the hard work of Calgary Economic Development,” Scott said, crediting the various groups boosting the film industry in Alberta.
“It's really going to help Alberta and bring a lot of business here. It's just great the film business is coming around in the way that it is.”
Among the laundry list of blockbuster titles to have come through Scott’s gates are HBO’s The Last of Us, which drew the world’s eyes to Alberta, standing in for nearly every type of landscape in the series.
“That picture The Last of Us really put Calgary on the map,” Scott said.
Whoever said ‘a jack of all trades is a master of none’ never met Scott, who aside from being a third-generation rancher and wrangler magnate was one of the originators of Canada’s stunt industry.
In October 2022, he was inducted into the Canadian Stunts Hall of Fame alongside fellow Foothills cowboy Tom Glass for his work to seed the trade north of the border in the 1970s.
