The Alabama Hills are a popular filming location for television and movie productions, especially Westerns set in an archetypical "rugged" environment. Since the early 1920s, 150 movies and about a dozen television shows have been filmed here, including Tom Mix films, Hopalong Cassidy films, The Gene Autry Show, and The Lone Ranger. Classics such as "Gunga Din" (Cary Grant, Douglas Fairbanks JR), "Beau Geste" (Gary Cooper), "Springfield Rifle" ,"The Violent Men" (1955 film), "Bad Day at Black Rock" (Spencer Tracy, 1955), the Budd Boetticher/Randolph Scott "Ranown" westerns, "How the West Was Won".
More recent productions such as "Tremors" and "Joshua Tree", were filmed at "movie ranch" sites known as Movie Flats and Movie Flat Road.
In "Gladiator", actor Russell Crowe rides a horse in front of the Alabamas, with Mount Whitney in the background, for a scene presumably set in Spain. Star Trek Generations was filmed here in addition to Overton, Nevada and Paramount Studios. This range was one of the filming locations for Disney's Dinosaur. More recently, many parts of the films "Iron Man" and "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen" were filmed here.