How It All Began

Manawatu Times, Volume 63, Issue 302, 21 December 1938, Page 11

How It All Began

THE WARNER BROTHERS (Concluding instalment). For production of motion picture?, under the guidance of Jack L. W arner, the big Warner Studios are located in a valley in the Hollywood Hills, five miles from Hollywood Boulevard. Tho studios aro said to bo the most beautifully laid out and landscaped of any in the Cinema capital. The many Spanish type buildings rest ou a ninety acre tract. Six buildings on the frontage hold the Administration offices. There are seventy-live buildings on the tract devoted to the production of pictures. On tho “lot” are fifty-six bungalow dressing rooms for stars. These are complete apartments where tho stars may live during the production of their pictures. In addition, there aro fifty portable dressing rooms which are brought on tho stages and placed closo by the “sets” in production for tho convenience of the players. The “food question” is something else again. Conveniently located on tho studio grounds is a huge building housing three separate dining rooms and u vast kitcheu which can supply service for 2,000 people within two hours. Most interesting is the blue room dining room. This is where the stars, featured players and directors, and so on, eat. There is also a restaurant for studio executives, production managers, and so on, and many of tho studio conferences in regard to productions in worx take place in this dining room. Then there is the vast cafeteria which serves several hundred people, and even more when they are served in shifts. This is where the chorus girls and dancers soothe their ravenous appetites, and also where the stage hands, carpenters, camera crews, and technical men eat. An occasional star pops in also for a “quick” lunch. Ono of the really fascinating locations at the studio is the * ‘ back lot. ’• This covers an area of seventy acres, and presents an amazing series of intersecting streets representing American and foreign cities. One stands fascinated on a French street, then turns a corner and is on a Mexican plaza, then a Viennese street, a Chinese street, a street in Leningrad, and so on. America is represented by a small town street, a public square with a park; a “western” street where cowjboys often dash on their horses; a 'Philadelphia street flanked by red brick colonial houses, a San Francisco street; a New York “brownstone” street; a section of Fifth Avenue with the smart shops and a replica of S*. Thomas Church. In this modern American section there are also the fronts of theatres, apartment houses, hotels, boarding houses, drug stores, banks, newspaper buildings, a courthouse, police stations, saloons, railroad ami bus depots, not to forget a “Purple Hen Cafe. ” The “back lot” also has on solid ground a reproduction of an American battleship, an old square rigged ship, such as was used in. “Captain Blood,” railroad platforms and sheds where “practical” trains actually move a short distance on tracks, and numerous other amazing but useful structures. In addition to the “back lot,” there is a 3GO acre ranch, a picturesque strip of hills at Calabasas which is used for the production of outdoor dramas*. Photographed here are woodland and forest scenes such as aro used in “Robin Hood,” and he-man outdoor “westerns,” and other pictures exploiting the brawn of the outdoor man. When the studio becomes nautical, there is considerable activity around the six acre artificial lake. Here wine* machines can stir up a frightfully heavy sea, and here Lord Nelson once fought the Battle of Trafalgar. Here also Captain Blood fought off the pirates. Other heroes of history and fiction have fought like everything aboard their crafts while the wind machine made the wind whistle through the masts and ratlines. Tho artificial lake also artificial around part of its frontage and often wears “false whiskers,” allegorically speaking. On its shores rose Livorno and tho Casa de Boonyfeather which will be remembered In •‘Anthony Adverse.” Hero also is a section of New York waterfront, of Shanghai, of San Francisco, and—well, whatever sort of a waterfront the script calls foik This, then, is a sketchy picture of

the Warner Brothers and the vast plant which has risen since those day 3 about thirty-six years ago when an undertaker’s smile froze on his face when he learned that his ninety-nine chairs were not to be used at a handsome funeral but were to be used as orchestra seats in a little nickelodeon which was proudly; christened the “Bijou” Theatre.