Hand-painted backdrops once created the illusion of space in films, theater, and advertisements. Today, new methods have mostly replaced the use of the traditional backdrop to create a more seamless illusion. Yet backdrops remain as artifacts of our idealized notions of nature. Photographed in and around Los Angeles, and stripped of traditional performers, these ageing Hollywood scenics are recontextualized in the urban landscape. They reveal themselves as objects of illusion and create tension between the notion of photographic truth and the fiction of landscapes.