It’s somehow comforting to note the timeless backdrop in this 86 year-old Rita Hayworth photo, which was probably snapped on one of the upper Malibu beaches (El Matador, La Piedra, El Pescador). Because this location — trust me — looked and sounded exactly the same a thousand years earlier. Or 10,000.
Just ask the vacationing Roman elites who stood upon the beaches of Capri during the reign of Tiberius. Or ask Charlton Heston’s Taylor, the time-stranded astronaut in Planet of the Apes (‘68) — when his spacecraft splashed into a large body of water he thought the date was 11.25.3978, and the seaside location he rode upon at the very end of Franklin Schaffner’s film didn’t seem to argue with this.
