Gold is Where You Find It is a 1938 American Western Technicolor film that gives a fictionalized account of a true event — an ecological disaster whose effects are still felt in California today.

Directed by Michael Curtiz and starring George Brent, Olivia de Havilland, and Claude Rains, with a screenplay by Warren Duff and Robert Buckner based on a story by Clements Ripley, the film is set 30 years after the first California Gold Rush, when hydraulic mining sends floods of muddy sludge into the Sacramento Valley, destroying crops and homes, ruining land and water sources and killing people caught in their path.

A new gold strike in California ten years after the American Civil War triggers a bitter feud between farmers and miners using hydraulic mining methods that devastate the wheat farms of the Sacramento Valley.

The real landmark lawsuit was Woodruff v. North Bloomfield Gravel Mining Company, brought in 1882 and settled in 1884.

[3] According to TCM's Brian Cady, "director Michael Curtiz's felicity with the Technicolor camera led Warner Brothers to put him in the director's chair in place of William Keighley for their next Technicolor extravaganza, The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938).