Tag Archives: Walt Disney

Bronson Gate

The Seven Sisters: Movie Studios and Their Backlots

It was never about the movies.

Few people realize this but the movies themselves are only the end result, a byproduct of the factories which created them.  It sounds downright sacrilegious, considering the vast emotional weight we place on our cinematic entertainments but trust me, the most momentous and important thing Hollywood has given the world isn’t a movie at all, any movie, but rather Hollywood itself. That is, Hollywood’s movie studios and our ideas about them.

It’s true, behind the tall walls at Hollywood’s seven studios have been created no less than our very ideas of what we are, where we live and what makes up our world.  And none of this has been accomplished by the movies at all, but rather by the studios, the physical factories which birthed these movies.  Most of our ideas about sociology, history, architecture, and geography were created inside these gates. The movies created there were the only the medium through which these messages were delivered.

MGM

“When I was a kid I took a trip to Los Angeles with my parents and at the time MGM was offering, for a little while, a tour of their studio,” remembers writer Stephen X. Sylvester. “I spent an afternoon there and it changed my life. We went to Disneyland the next day and I was so disappointed. Compared to MGM, Disneyland felt like pale Xerox of a movie studio. Real life felt like a pale Xerox of as movie studio. It still does.”

If one was to place a push-pin in the intersection of Hollywood and Vine on a map of Los Angeles – and then to place additional pins at the historic (if not always original) sites of the seven major film studios, the “Seven Sisters” as they are still referred to, that compose the industry, a jagged triangle would be formed. Furthest afield would be MGM, which was nine miles through dicey LA traffic from Hollywood Blvd. Twentieth Century-Fox would make up the other side of this triangle at seven and a half miles. Warner Bros., to the north, is just over four miles away. Universal, at the base of the Cahuenga Pass, just over three. Paramount and RKO  lie to the south a mile and a half away. Columbia, slightly west at only half a mile from ground zero would complete the physical picture. (Disney, the last sister, rose to prominence as a major as RKO waned)

A visitor to either modern day or historic Hollywood however, would have a hard time doing more that staring through the fences at these studios. True, several of the majors offer, or have offered, public tours of their lots, and one studio, Universal, even has its own amusement park. But Hollywood’s studios have always been closed-off cities with their own rules and folklore.

Movie studio backlots are the sections of a studio which distinguish that studio from any other factory, industrial site or manufacturing center. In the history of the world there has never been another business where entire secret cities have regularly needed to be manufactured and then never used as what they appear to portray. If you want any business tips then visit to Cofe Winchester blogs. Also, click here for best information related to the business. Sets on a studio backlot may need to look like Shanghai at midnight or Dodge City at high noon, but only in the most superficial way possible.  A backlot version of the Grand Hotel need only look like the Grand Hotel – or like an audience’s idea of what the Grand Hotel needs to look like. And in fact, for most of us, that which makes us think we are familiar with the Grand Hotel is probably born not from reality – but from watching films set – but not filmed, at the Grand Hotel.

Sadly, in modern Hollywood a studios’ signature architecture is becoming an endangered species.  Like Route 66, which once spider-webbed across the nation and now survives only in our imagination and in fit and starts, backlots still exist at all the studios, if you look for them, but only in pieces. Even in an a era of computer created virtual backlots modern studios have discovered that it is indeed practical to keep limited standing sets on their properties and, if you have a friend, who can get you a pass to visit, take a public tour, or if you can climb a fence, you can still visit them. The experience is well worthwhile, both alien and achingly familiar. Time does not stand still on a backlot, only in the films and memories which they produce. But if your mood and the sunlight through the smog and the time of day are right while you are there, a modern backlot can feel just like it must have felt in the past.  Just like it can feel in the movies.

Before its too late then, let’s pick up that map of Hollywood again and visit Hollywood’s’ mythical, mysterious studios, not as they were in the movies, but as they physically exist today. And as they once were…

In some ways MGM built the ultimate, prototypical, backlot. Producer Thomas Ince, credited with being the inventor of the modern, factory-styled movie studio – and movie studio backlot – opened the property in Culver City in 1915 in partnership with fellow pioneers D.W. Griffith and Mack Sennett. Corporate wrangling resulted in the lot eventually being acquired by Samuel Goldwyn, and after a 1924 merger, by the newly created MGM. Exterior sets were constructed at the western or “back” part of the studio property as needed.  Someone, probably plant manager J.J. Cohn, started recycling these sets for later pictures when it was discovered that a sign or a title card or another angle could turn a street created to look like one location into something entirely different.  The era of the backlot was born.

MGM’s backlots were divided into 3 properties.  The first and oldest was the real estate on the edge of the original studio property, aka; “Lot One.” Lot One’s backlot was distinguished by a man-made lake which was used regularly into the 1940’s. But many of the surrounding sets were gradually moved across the street to the 40-acre “Lot Two.” Lot Two eventually contained a variety of European and Asian districts, the industry’s largest (7-acre) “New York” Street, and a working railroad with three depots of progressively larger and more modern vintage and culminating in a vast Grand Central Station replica.  The “Small Town” or “Andy Hardy Street” was perhaps the busiest of all backlot sets at all studios, owing to MGM’s many pictures extolling the virtues of rural communities, which it copied, and which copied it, and which still existed all across the United States at the time.

Up the road a few blocks was the even larger (65-acre) “Lot Three” which itself was surrounded by the smaller satellite lots “Four,” Five,” “Six,” and even “Seven.”  Lot Three contained fewer sets than Lot Two, but they were generally larger than those at any other studio. A man-made tropical jungle and lake was infested with real animals and marine life, which apparently couldn’t tell the difference. A tree-line road was so generic that it was used by virtually every film of every historic period that the studio produced.  Most studios could boast of a Western street somewhere on their backlot, but MGM had 3 separate frontier era districts, even though the parent company produced comparatively few Westerns. Adjacent was the famous “St. Louis Street” which most production designers agreed was the ultimate masterpiece of all studio backlots.  The eight houses constructed there by Cedric Gibbons, Lemuel Ayers, and John Martin Smith charmed everyone who visited the location or saw any movie which utilized it. To see this set, everyone agreed, was to experience a feeling of longing for a past which no one alive today, or even in 1944 when it was constructed and when the world was at war, ever really experienced firsthand.  The nostalgic, heightened reality these homes embodied and represented could not have been created, or experienced anywhere but on a backlot.  The set was planned, designed and created to be better than real life.

Universal 1947

Universal Studios in 1947.

Across town and on the other side of our map, Universal Studios held a very early backlot.  Founder Carl Laemmle purchased the land which would become the largest movie studio on earth in 1914 for $3,500.  He took satisfaction in knowing that real history had taken place near his new property in 1846 when Mexico officially ceded the territory of California to the United States right across the street from his office. The grand opening party (Universal’s, not California’s) was held on March 15, 1915.

Universal, despite its size, (various acquisitions and mergers eventually bloated the lot to 415 acres) has the disadvantage of being built on the side of a hill. It is the only Hollywood studio where golf carts have to be gas-powered in order to make it up the steeper grades. Therefore, the backlot has been limited over the decades in size and shape by the natural terrain. Various sets, particularly residential streets, have been built or moved onto the hillsides, but areas representing cities have historically had to be constructed along a flat, narrow band of real estate between the bottom of the hill to the south and the Los AngelesRiver on the north. Lankershim Blvd. on the west and Barham Blvd. to the east provide man-made borders on the other two sides.

The front lot was constructed along Lankershim and consists of 31 soundstages, post-production and technical facilities.  Walking east onto the backlot from there today an explorer immediately finds oneself in a wonderful reconstruction of New York City, which oddly has mountains on one side and a nearly dry, paved river bed on the other. Unfortunately, most of today’s “New York Street” is of a comparatively recent vintage. The original street was lost in an arson fire set by a disgruntled security guard in 1990 (some of which itself burned again in 2008) and what the cameras (and guests on the company’s “studio tours”) actually see is a copy which mimics and in some cases surpasses the original sets.

All of this, of course, begs what eventually must be asked when thinking about backlots.  At which point does a backlot set, always in a constant state of flux, stop being the original structure and become a copy or a new building with an entirely new identity?

While we ponder this question on our tour, this pseudo-historic New York evolves into a small town street with courthouse.  A residential street, apparently designed as part of this same set, was removed in 1981 so that production offices could be constructed.  Some of the houses from this street, familiar from American television series like The Munsters, Leave It to Beaver and Bachelor Father were moved up onto the hillside, where they remain, in truncated form to this day. Part of a castle once stood nearby.

A “Mexican Village” complete with cobblestone streets, corral, and bridge lead, appropriately, into the studio’s (and Hollywood’s) last surviving Western set.  Universal publicists claim that their “6 Points Texas” Western street is the oldest working spot on their backlot and the most filmed spot on the planet, although most of the current structures are actually of relatively recent vintage. But a walk down this weathered, grey strip, and the nearby “Denver Street” with its wooden sidewalks and dirty storefronts, leaves one feeling that this is indeed the real thing: an “actual” Hollywood  location, not a recreation for tourists or a dude ranch pastiche.  And the affection this area inspires is not for the actual Old West, but for Hollywood’s impression of that West, and for the Western itself. So a glance up at the company’s “Black Tower” office complex, which looms over the slat-board facades and casts its shadow over her ersatz frontier streets somehow is not as incongruous as it should be.

Let’s move on. A lake and a smaller pond fronts a New England fishing village.

Farther over are the remnants of a European Street alleged to go back to 1919, although most of the extant streets and structures actually date to All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) and, let’s be honest: nearly all of them are certainly much more recent than that.

The pseudo-Gladiator “Spartacus Square” stands on the extreme east side of the studio’s lower lot. Walking behind this impressive edifice, where the trams full of Hollywood’s happy tourists can’t go, the tired traveler sees not a Roman Senate in progress but crushed cola cans and dirty paper plates left behind by some long-ago craft service staffer.  Yards away, traffic can be heard buzzing by on Barham Boulevard behind the razor wire fence.

Across the street from Universal, and running parallel to the Hollywood Hills is the massive (one often hears the word “sprawling” used) 110-acre complex still occupied by Warner Bros. Warners looks today, at the sunrise of the 21st century, more like a traditional movie studio than any of the other majors, even Universal, where studio construction seems to be dictated by what a tourist expects to see while in Hollywood.  In fact, at Warner Bros., it almost seems as if the studio was built after the clichés were created only in order to live up to them   In any case, the wide streets and orderly rows of soundstages which greet a modern visitor constitute virtually the same view which Humphrey Bogart would have seen when he first drove onto the lot in 1932.

The Warner Bros. lot.

The Warner Bros. lot.

WB 1931

The auto gate on Olive Blvd. (or “Gate 2”) has been used, for decades, as the quintessential movie studio entrance in pictures.  Less ornate, and therefore less identifiable with a specific lot than Paramount’s regal Marathon Ave. entrance, it has shown up both in the studio’s own product - A Star is Born (1954), It’s a Great Feeling (1949), Blazing Saddles (1974) – and rented out as a set to other companies: Universal’s Bowfinger (1999), Disney’s Ed Wood (1994), Columbia’s The Way We Were (1973), etc.  One can cross all the way onto the backlot from this single main artery.

By the late 1940s, this backlot, although comparatively small when measured alongside to the kingdoms at Fox and MGM, must have been astonishing in its variety and scope.  A visitor in, let’s say, 1946, could wander down “Brownstone Street” onto the six blocks of New York Burroughs and find hidden behind the that set’s eastern wall the formidable Stage 21, at one time the world’s largest soundstage, where inside floated two complete ships, each 130 feet long! A railroad shed, with two locomotives, exterior track and a working indoor station sat behind it. Farther along, “Bonneyfeather Street,” a European coastal area would twist would and spiral through a tangle of alleys and morph into a big city “Tenement Street,”complete with fire escapes, streetlights, parking meters, neon signage, and machine gun pockmarks on many of the walls left over from the studio’s gangster dramas.

“Dijon Street,” a mid-eastern/Arabic community, was built in 1930 for a long-lost early version of Kismet and part of this street can be seen as Casablanca in 1943.  “English  Street” runs south for two blocks and terminates at a warehouse/landing strip which stores a small fleet of prop airplanes. On the other side of this hanger can be found a “Viennese Street,” which would be rebuilt into “Madison Avenue” in 1949 for Life with Father and some of which survives today as “French Street.”  An early version of the studio’s current “Midwestern” or “Midvale Street” with residential section, curls behind this thoroughfare and to the east.

Behind this is a “Norwegian  Street” which, with a disarming sense of logic, eventually becomes “Canadian  Street,” a sort of Western town, only with snow. (Oddly the studio would not have a permanent “Western Street” on lot until 1956).  The backlot then curls west and back into itself with a rather upscale “Philadelphia Street” before terminating into what was then Soundstage 20 (and which today is the Media Archive Building).  Taking this 1946 trek would surely leave any exhausted visitor wondering what continent, what world, he was in.

In addition to the mazes and cul-de-sacs of standing sets found on the main lot, Warner, like most of the other studios, kept a ranch facility.  Theirs was a 2500-acre tract in Calabasas.

Columbia 1940

Columbia Studios, 1940.

Columbia Pictures represented the outstanding rags to riches success story among the majors.  The company started out among the most miserly and penny-pinching of the low-rent studios which clustered up, and then withered away and died, in the poverty row district of Hollywood along Sunset and Gower Streets.  Columbia’s early product was indistinguishable from the films being ground out by any her neighbors in this district.  But she did have something all of her fellow unfortunates lacked.  And that was Harry Cohn. Cohn was regarded by his peers with awe, derision, envy, admiration, hatred—just about anything you might want to say about the man, good or bad would probably be accurate.  His penny-pinching ways were much remarked upon in Hollywood, yet in the depths of the Great Depression, Cohn was the only mogul who refused to back an industry-wide measure which would have halved the salaries of anyone making less than $50 a week. Fortunately for his well-maintained reputation, this act of kindness was not widely publicized.

Cohn literally and determinedly pulled and dragged his grubby little company up from the squalor – and in an astonishingly short amount of time, even for such a young industry, managed to anoint her as a major force in the industry, first with profits, then with respectability, and finally with Academy Awards and genuine if  begrudging prestige.

The physical lot he did this on certainly reflects the company’s hand-to-mouth origins.  Cohn’s plant was the smallest, physically, of any of the seven sisters.  Even at its largest it was only a city block deep by half a block wide.  Columbia Studios always looked like a hodgepodge ghetto of squalid little offices and, eventually, 14 over-worked and mostly closet-size soundstages.

Any sort of significant backlot here was nearly impossible; consequently, in 1934 Cohn purchased a ranch facility a half dozen miles away from his chaotic fiefdom up in Burbank. Other movie ranches, Warners, Fox’s, RKO’s, Paramount’s, were usually hundreds, sometimes thousands of acres across, containing terrain suitable for any sort of location.  Cohn’s cut-rate equivalent was a whopping 40 acres (a second 40-acre parcel was quickly sold off). In 1952’s High Noon, it is possible to spot the telephones poles and post war tract houses spiraling across the “Western” landscape during the famous crane shot near the climax.

Cohn’s spread however, did evolve into one of the more interesting satellite backlots.  Perhaps because space was so limited, and budgets so low, many of the facades constructed there saw an inordinate amount of duty over an inordinate number of years.  A single curved block of residential homes, which either had no backs, or which had two fronts so as to be eligible for double duty, started appearing in features from the late ’30s but really reached iconic status from the 1950s onward when Screen Gems, Columbia’s television division (started in 1949) began shooting their domestic-themed sitcoms there.

Until this street is experienced first hand, it is impossible to imagine that the home of TV’s Dennis the Menace is the same set used as the home of Donna Reed.  Or that the house next to it was Blondie’s home, the I Dream of Jeannie house, and the home where Father Knows Best.  Or that the house next to that was used in both Bewitched and The Partridge Family.  Or that the Bewitched home is next to the house used in the Lethal Weapon film series, as a not-so-stately Wayne manor in a Batman serial, and as the home of both Gidget and Hazel!  In 1999 this entire, surreal city block stared in the feature film Pleasantville. The plot concerned a strange place inside a black and white television where old sitcoms flower magically to life.

The real world however, could not be kept out. The turmoil the movie industry faced in general in the 1970s hit Columbia particularly hard.  In 1972, the young business school grads who had inherited Cohn’s cramped offices on Gower Street vacated many of them to cohabitate with Warner Bros. up in Burbank.  They turned the original lot, briefly, into a tennis club. In 1998,  Columbia moved across town again, this time to its current digs, the old MGM Lot One. The Columbia Ranch stayed part of Warner Bros., which it remains today.

rko manhole

RKO was in a similar situation to Columbia, although “the biggest little major” always had the prestige and cache that Columbia originally lacked.  The studio was the first major created after the coming of sound --as its logo, that of a beeping radio tower astride the globe seemed to testify.  An actual, physical replica of this insignia used to stand on the corner of Melrose and Gower Streets, astride one of the company’s soundstages.  The studio underneath this logo was hardly any bigger than Columbia, which lay only a few blocks north but in a decidedly shoddier neighborhood.  And as with Columbia, it seemed in the early days that the executives inside would be forced by the cramped locale to build their exterior sets off-lot in the San Fernando Valley.

Instead, those executives purchased an entire, preexisting studio complex, actually another old Thomas Ince lot, also in Culver City, in January 1931 – instantly fortifying the company with an additional 11 soundstages and a spectacular standing backlot as well.  Most RKO pictures from this era were shot at one or both of these facilities, with the interiors often being shot on Gower Street and the exteriors out on “40 Acres.”  In 1937 the studio also purchased 88 additional acres in the San Fernando Valley – Encino, actually.

With postwar hard times, the Hollywood lots were purchased by General Tire and Rubber in 1955 and shortly thereafter RKO ceased active production. Lucile Ball, once a perky RKO starlet achieved the dream of every starlet by buying her old studio for her own production company, Desilu, in 1956.

Paramount Pictures was RKO’s next door neighbor.  In 1967 Paramount executives bought the property and removed the wall between the two lots.  The surviving studio now occupies the entire 65-acre compound.  Even today, a walk across Paramount’s grounds will reveal ghostly touches of RKO, including the manhole covers on the west side of the studio, which still say “RKO” (One wonders if there are any companies today, however affluent, that would go to the expense of putting their names on sewer fixtures that would be seen only by employees!) Even the famous Paramount studio water tower was in fact once part of the original RKO property.  The beeping radio tower facing the street has been removed too, of course, but the globe it stood on paradoxically remains. It looks down on a very different world indeed.

Paramount, 1976.

Paramount, 1976.

Like RKO, Paramount, has always suffered somewhat in that their location, right in the center of Hollywood, became valuable quicker than the outlaying suburbs of Culver City and Burbank. With the “movie boom” of the teens and twenties came escalating real estate prices.  And, so relatively early in the game the studios with the most desirable and centralized locations, responsible for the sudden local growth to begin with, found themselves with no place to expand beyond their current locations.  Paramount’s lot was big enough for this to not be as much of a problem as it was for RKO and for Columbia, but they never had the space for the sprawling backlots which could be found at some of the other, outlying studios.

A look at the Paramount product tends to bear this out.  Most of the studio’s pictures are rather stage-bound.  There are few exteriors, and these are often soundstage exteriors, with painted backdrops and process screens substituting for the real thing. Artistically, this somewhat artificial mise en scene gave the studio’s pictures a definite and recognizable “house style.” And yet this look was definitely an economic choice rather than an artistic one.

To alleviate their lack of suitable exteriors, Paramount purchased a 2,400-acre ranch near Malibu in 1927 although perhaps due to its somewhat distant location it wasn’t used as much as other studio ranches. Sets included a New England Street, a frontier village and Calvary fort.  They actually sold the property in 1953 but continued to lease parts of it, along with other studios and independent producers, for decades.   Today the property is owned by the state. A western town, constructed shortly after the Paramount era ended still stands on the grounds. Television’s Carnivale and Dr Quinn: Medicine Woman have been comparatively recent tenants.

The primary backlot area Paramount constructed on their main lot was paradoxically built near the center of the studio and buttressed up against the wall looking over into RKO. Closest to that iconic main gate, which everyone still associates with the studio (and which, in case you ever wondered, was constructed between August 24 and September 10, 1926) stood, until the mid 1970’s, a smallish version of that must-have on every studio lot, a small-town business district. Until 1979, a “Western Street” stood on real estate where a massive parking lot sprawls today (Amusing but unsubstantiated rumors at the time held that Paramount was afraid to dismantle their Western town while John Wayne still lived!). The hundreds of black BMW’s which now bake under the California sun occupy ground where many a cinematic cowboy found immortality or oblivion.  A most interesting feature about this set was the artificial mountain range which buttressed the north western flank of the set, and kept audiences from realizing that unlike some of the street’s suburban cinematic neighbors, Paramount was in the middle of a city – even if that city was Hollywood.

A 75-foot-high sky backdrop (The original was built in 1947, the surviving version is a copy) still stands on the northern edge of the studio’s impressive “New York Street.”  At five acres and with five separate and distinct districts, it is one of the most impressive sets of its kind.  Unfortunately, the set which visitors and film goers see today is actually a copy of an older “New York Street” which was destroyed in a fire in 1983.  Happily, in 1991, it was rebuilt.

Incidentally, the South LA community of Paramount was founded in 1946 and was in fact named after the studio.

20th Century-Fox backlot and tank, 1940.

20th Century-Fox backlot and tank, 1940.

Twentieth Century-Fox is the studio which most tried to emulate the success of MGM.  Physically, their lot, located west of Beverly Hills in a community later and tellingly called Century City, was closer to Metro’s in size, ambition and even geographically, than any other.  In one respect at least, Fox was actually superior in that the entire property, almost 300 acres at one point, was located on one large parcel of land, and not broken up or eviscerated by distance or highways  (although Olympic Blvd. cut the plant into two distinct halves).  Some of this real estate was never really developed for production, although the open land must have come in handy.  Oil wells, real ones, not props, dotted the eastern side of the lot for decades. Quality-wise, the Fox pictures, while not really inferior to MGM, often felt so because their predominant choice of genres; musicals and period pictures, seemed consciously designed to echo the pictures made down the road in Culver City

The front lot, as befitting its (near-) Beverly Hills location, was beautifully maintained and landscaped.  The “sound” stages – for in fact they were the first of their kind constructed for sound anywhere – decorated with ornate statuary and scrollwork, looked more like a carefully regulated civil engineering project than a factory.  At least the early ones did.  The later stages are less gaudy, giving the whole place a sort of Oz-meets-the-Bowery-Boys lopsidedness.

Our traveler walking across the backlot could have encountered, depending on which decade he took the trip, any of the following:  “Bernadette Street” (from The Song of Bernadette, 1943) a French village, a Roman “slave market” set,   an enormous and pillared “Colonial Home,” a “Spanish Street,” a “Swiss Set,” a “German Village,” a partial castle with a moat. “Algerian Street” was a sort of Ali Baba/Jerusalem compound which sat behind the “English Garden of Charles II” – which was beautifully decked out with swimming pool and rolling lawns.  Behind this all was a long “New York Street” which dated to 1931.  “Tombstone Street” was the ambiguous Western village; It rested across from the “Alaska Town” and the “New England Street.” All of this finally led to the company’s back gate on Santa Monica Blvd. – a real Los Angeles street by the way, not a backlot.  Commuters on this street for years could see part of the elaborate Titanic model constructed for the 1953 picture peeking over the fence.

The East Lot, on the other side of the soundstage sector, contained the “New” “New York Street,” A section of Railroad, a “Compound” or fortress set, and a vast section of desert.  The Chicago set from In Old Chicago (1938) also stood in this sector and covered nearly six acres.  This area was redressed in 1944 and doubled for a gas-lit London in The Lodger. The “Chicago Lake” stood on one end and was repeatedly drained and refilled to portray every body of water on the planet for the 25 years.  “The Waterways,” a series of locks and canals also stood nearby.  “Jones Street” the studio’s all important residential street, also stood over here.

As if every location in the known world was not covered on-lot somewhere, Fox also maintained a ranch near the Paramount Ranch in Malibu.  They purchased the property in 1946, after leasing real estate in the area for several years.  The studio sold the property to the State of California in 1974.

Fox was the first studio to suffer physically from the contractions the film industry faced in the 1960s and ’70s.  The enormous overhead accrued by Cleopatra which was shooting in Europe in 1963, literally forced the moguls running the studio back in California to begin selling off some of their now-trendy Westside real estate upon which the studio had been built in order to meet payroll.

The acres of sets and landscaped lawns toppled over.  The lakes were drained. The palaces and kingdoms were disassembled.  In their place rose the skyscrapers and shopping malls and law firms of CenturyCity.  As recently as the mid-80’s, the beautiful commissary where Tyrone Power and Shirley Temple had once supped was halved to build a monolithic office tower.  One of these skyscrapers, decades later, would one day house MGM.

By 1969, when Fox was producing Hello Dolly, there was no backlot left on which to construct the elaborate turn-of-the-century New York Street the production called for.  Instead, the sets were built on the front lot; in the parking lots, across the lawns, on top of the offices and over the front of the administration buildings where the decision had been made to dismantle the studio in the first place.  It was as if, ghoulishly, those administrators, having devoured the backlots, the sinew and very flesh of the studio, now found themselves surrounded, entombed, and eaten by the very thing, the very flickering ghost they thought they had destroyed.

Many of the minor studios and several of the rental lots constructed permanent exterior set at various times and of varying degrees of interest and complexity. The Republic lot in Studio City, which survives and is now owned by CBS, being a particularly notable example.  Notable sets on this property included, naturally, several large Western streets, and the lagoon later used in the TV series Gilligan’s Island.  Part of a residential street survives today.

Powerful independent producers Sam Goldwyn and David O. Selznick also kept standing backlots on their property.  Goldwyn’s contained a few blocks of city streets and a small town district.  A “New York Street” lasted there into the late-’70s.

Selznick leased the “40 acres” Thomas Ince backlot of which RKO was the longtime landlord (and which for the record, was actually 28 acres) He burned down most of his standing sets spectacularly  on camera for Gone With The Wind (1939) Cannily, he then built his Atlanta sets over the ashes for that picture.

These vaguely “southern” facades saw duty for decades, most prominently on The Andy Griffith Show for American television.  At various times the backlot also contained the Hogan’s Heroes prisoner’s compound (built on the site of GWTW’s Tara), the Gomer Pyle Army barracks, a Western village, a jungle (utilized in RKO’s  Tarzan film series), an Arabian village, and detailed New York and Chicago Streets (kept very busy in The Untouchables TV series). The backlot portion of the studio, which was located near the end of Ince Blvd., was torn down in 1976 and is now an industrial park whose warehouses are used by a space-starved film industry for television production.

The Disney lot, 1959.

The Disney lot, 1959.

The other major independent producer of the era was, of course, Walt Disney.

Disney had little need for a standing backlot until the early 1950s.  Before this, most of his sets were, like most of his stars, painted cells animated for the camera. “I’ve always admired you” Alfred Hitchcock was reputed have told Disney at an apocryphal Hollywood party in the ’40s. “If you don’t like your actors, you can tear them up.”

The first Disney studio was located at 2719 Hyperion Ave in Hollywood (a grocery store today) and contained no facilities for live-action production.  Disney moved his operations to a 51-acre tract he had paid $100,000 for in Burbank in 1940 after the success of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.  Designer Ken Webber crafted all of the original buildings, imbuing the lot with a campus-like unity alien to the random hodge-podges of architectural chaos that existed at any other studio. The first soundstage was constructed at this time and was used for the occasional live action or live action/animation hybrid produced by the studio.  Stage 2 was constructed in 1949 and was used for live action features and television, including Dragnet (an original tenant) and “The Mickey Mouse Club.”  Stage 3 was built in 1954 and includes the underwater tank used extensively for 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.  The cavernous Stage 4 was built for Darby O’Gill and the Little People in 1958 and later subdivided for TV to become 4 and 5 (1988), Stage 6 and 7 were not completed until 1997.

In 1959, even as he started building a backlot on his own studio, Disney purchased a 700-acre ranch in Santa Clarita and started building sets there as well, mostly of the Western variety.  Golden Oaks Ranch, as it is called, and which Disney is still developing, remains a valuable location, not just for Disney but for all of the real estate-starved modern studios

On his Burbank lot, an early California pueblo set was constructed in 1957 for use in the Zorro TV series and became the first permanent standing set on the property.  It contained several blocks of cobblestone streets, a fountain, a fort, and a town square.  The result was versatile enough to be successfully redressed into a French olive plantation for Monkeys Go Home (1967) and a British village in Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971).   It was demolished in the mid-eighties and replaced, inspirationally, by the current “Zorro Parking Structure.”

A “Western Street” was constructed in 1958.  It too was rebuilt several times over the decades and stood in for the Irish countryside in Darby O’Gill and the Little People, (1959) and a beachfront fishing village in Pete’s Dragon (1977 — complete with ocean!)  “Western Street” was bulldozed in 1988.

A “Residential Street” was added in the early 1960s.  So by this time the only backlot staple missing from Disney’s fiefdom was a small town business street.  Disney of course, had already built just such a town, not at his studio but at Disneyland.

Walt Disney apparently had been looking for and recreating this street, in different ways ever since his childhood in tiny Marceline, Missouri.   His somewhat wistful longing for the charm of small-town America was common to men of Disney’s age and era.  A look at the works of such diverse artists as Thornton Wilder, Thomas Wolfe, William Saroyan, Sterling North, Rod Serling, Ray Bradbury, Norman Rockwell,  Frank Capra, Booth Tarkington, Meredith Wilson, and Earl Hamner Jr. reveals this same longing for a world which each of them had, presumably chosen to leave behind and then regretted forever.

Disney finally did order a small town American street built in 1965, obstinately, for 1966’s Follow Me Boys.  The set would rise near the north east corner of the lot, to compliment his already standing residential street. Oddly though, “Business  Street” as the set was called, turned out to be a decent if not spectacular shooting space.  Designer John Mamsbridge found that by this time there was little he could add to the street Walt had been over-designing in his head and at Disneyland for a decade.  In 1965, there was little more to be done except copy the copies and uncork the nostalgia.  The somewhat pedestrian result would turn out be Walt’s last personal addition to his studio, He would die less than a year later.

The “Business Street” backlot would survive Disney by a decade-and-a-half before being rebuilt for Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes in 1981 and demolished entirely in 1994. It was, at that time, the last existent sector of Disney’s original backlot. Stages 6 and 7 stand on the site today.

Walt’s original lot now has one tiny exterior set, a Midwest-themed boulevard built in 1997 over the outer wall of the Plumbing Department.  It consists of one half of one side of one city block.  Like its forbearer, it is christened “Business Street,” perhaps as much a hope for future production bookings as a homage.

Our tour of Hollywood’s lots and backlots then is over.  As has been observed in our travels, most of Hollywood’s backlots are now either gone or have been repurposed into parking lots or office space.   And with the advent of “virtual backlots” created inside a computer the future doesn’t look rosy.

So if you plan on visiting Hollywood and climbing that fence, you’d better do it soon.

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Steven Bingen is a historian, author, and former archivist for Warner Bros., who has written or contributed to innumerable books, articles, and documentaries on Hollywood history. In 2011, Steve coauthored MGM: Hollywood’s Greatest Backlot, the first significant book ever published about a movie studio lot. His latest book is Warner Bros: Hollywood’s Ultimate Backlot, an acre by acre and scandal by scandal examination of the legendary studio. He also authored the screenplay for 2012′s The Ghastly Love of Johnny X, which was the last theatrical feature film ever shot on black and white film stock. Appropriately enough, Steve lives in the world’s largest backlot, also known as Los Angeles.

Amazon link:

Oz 4

The Best Movies You’ve Never Heard Of: “Return to Oz” (1985)

“The Best Movies You’ve Never Heard Of” is a series of articles devoted to little-known movies of exceptional quality that dedicated film buffs may be aware of, but have somehow fallen through the cracks of the general public’s awareness.

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For decades, The Wizard of Oz, MGM’s 1939 adaptation of L. Frank Baum’s classic fantasy novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, was one of two films that stuck in the craws of the suits running Walt Disney Pictures as a movie “we should’ve made.” (The original 1977 Star Wars was the other one. Of course, Disney now owns the Star Wars franchise.) Ironically, MGM was inspired to make The Wizard of Oz when Disney’s first animated feature, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), became the highest-grossing movie to date. The Wizard of Oz did respectable business at the box office, but because of its gargantuan budget (it was Hollywood’s most expensive film at the time), it needed to be a megahit to make a profit. (It wasn’t until The Wizard of Oz started being broadcast on television that the film finally went into the black.) Eventually, it seemed as though MGM had the ultimate laugh at Disney’s expense in that The Wizard of Oz became a much bigger cultural icon among subsequent generations (beginning with the baby boomers) than Snow White, and also that Disney’s attempt at doing their own Oz movie, Return to Oz, was a major financial flop in 1985, particularly due to critics and audiences’ unfavorable comparisons with the MGM film. Still, the day may yet come when Disney has the last laugh after all because Return to Oz has built up a loyal following in the almost three decades since its release and has been increasingly acknowledged as the screen’s most faithful adaptation of Baum’s work.

Make no mistake; MGM’s The Wizard of Oz was a remarkable achievement, albeit one that’s gotten too much credit for what it isn’t and not enough credit for what it is. In the latter category, although the honor was usually misattributed for half a century (mainly by theater snobs) to Rogers & Hammerstein’s Oklahoma!, The Wizard of Oz was the first “integrated musical.” Practically all of the songs by Harold Arlen and E.Y. “Yip” Harburg serve to move the story forward, even the Cowardly Lion’s solo comic number “If I Was King of the Forest.” (The only exception is “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” which is one reason it almost got cut before the film’s release.)

While The Wizard of Oz is a great musical comedy, it is, however, neither a great fantasy film nor a faithful rendition of Baum’s literary vision. Despite the innovative use of Technicolor, Victor Fleming’s bland, pedestrian direction was too heavy-handed and literal to capture the sheer wonderment of such genuinely inspired cinematic flights of fancy as Raoul Walsh’s The Thief of Bagdad (1924), James Whale’s Bride of Frankenstein (1935), Max Reinhardt and William Dieterle’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1935), and Jean Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast (1946). Return to Oz, on the other hand, is the great live-action fantasy film that Disney always wanted to make, but could never quite pull off.

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In addition to negative comparisons to MGM’s film in reviews of Return to Oz, the other main complaint was that the movie was “too dark” to be suitable entertainment for children. These complaints only proved that most of the critics had never actually read any of Baum’s original Oz novels. (And apparently they’d forgotten that The Wizard of Oz was considered pretty frightening for a children’s movie as well. Flying monkeys, anyone?) Indeed, the most nightmarish elements of Return to Oz (the Wheelers, the hall of living disembodied heads, the deadly desert, the Nome King’s underground world) were taken directly from the film’s main source, Baum’s third Oz book Ozma of Oz. (There were also some elements borrowed from the second Oz novel The Marvelous Land of Oz.)

Return to Oz remains the only movie directed by award-winning film editor and sound designer Walter Murch. In a 2000 interview with Film Freak Central’s Bill Chambers, Murch recounted how he’d inadvertently initiated the project: “I had been approached by Disney in 1980—they had pulled my name from a shortlist of people who were doing interesting things in film and might someday direct. I went down to LA for an interview with Tom Wilhite—it was just a fishing expedition on both of our parts. But one of the questions he asked was, ‘What are you interested in that you think we might also be interested in?’ and I said, ‘Another Oz story.’ I had grown up with the specific books on which Return is based, The Land of Oz and Ozma of Oz—in fact they were the first ‘real’ books I ever read on my own. And Tom sort of straightened up in his chair, because it turned out, unbeknownst to me, that Disney owned the rights to all of the Oz stories. And they were particularly interested in doing something with them because the copyright was going to run out in the next five years. So, we went through the usual developmental phases: I wrote a treatment with Gill Dennis, they liked it, I wrote a script with Gill and they liked that, and eventually, much to my amazement, I was in England on a soundstage saying ‘Action!’ with all of these Oz creatures around me.” (At one point, when the filming was falling behind schedule and over-budget, Disney fired Murch off the project, but his friend George Lucas went to bat for him, praising the footage shot so far and convincing the suits to rehire Murch.)

The unenviable task of playing Dorothy Gale, a role forever inexorably linked with Judy Garland in the minds of most filmgoers, was given to a young 11-year-old actress making her film debut, Fairuza Balk. (At least, Falk was closer to the age of her literary counterpart than the then-16-year-old Garland, who famously had to have her breasts bound for the part.) In that same interview, Murch detailed the difficulties Balk faced: “There were 114 days of shooting, which is a lot, and the character of Dorothy, played by Fairuza Balk, is in almost every shot. She was absolutely great, a fantastic ally in the making of the film, but there are laws in England and the United States that limit the amount of time you can shoot with a child actor, so it put great strains on how much we could do each day. Add on top of that all of the creatures she was with—puppets and claymation and animals… All of the claymation was done in post-production, so when Fairuza had to act with the nomes, she was just looking at a piece of tape on a wall, having to imagine it as something else.” (In addition, Balk did all of her own stunts.)

Joining Balk in the cast were veteran character actors Piper Laurie (as Aunt Em), Matt Clark (as Uncle Henry), Jean Marsh (as Nurse Wilson and Mombi the Witch), and Nicol Williamson (as Dr. Worley and the Nome King). (Since the film was made in the UK, mainly at Elstree Studios, the other roles were played by lesser-known British actors, or in several cases, physically played by expert stunt performers and dubbed by voice actors.) As the dual roles indicate, Return to Oz did borrow some motifs from the MGM film. Disney even paid MGM for the right to use the “ruby slippers” as Dorothy’s magical shoes, as opposed to the “silver slippers” that appeared in Baum’s original novel.

The technical team recruited by Murch was particularly impressive. The film’s executive producer was Gary Kurtz, best known as the producer of the first two Star Wars movies. (By most accounts, Kurtz’s hands-on supervision of the second Star Wars film, The Empire Strikes Back, was responsible of it being the gem of the series.) Production design was by Norman Reynolds, art direction was by Charles Bishop and Fred Hole, the costumes were designed by Raymond Hughes, and, per Murch’s instructions, they closely modeled their work on the original illustrations by John R. Neill, the definitive Oz artist. (Neill’s contributions to the Oz books continued even after Baum’s death and Ruth Plumly Thompson took over as the official chronicler of the Oz adventures.) The cinematography was by David Watkin with uncredited assistance from Freddie Francis. (Unlike MGM’s film, which was filmed entirely on studio soundstages, all of the exteriors for Return to Oz where filmed on outdoor UK locations, with Wiltshire’s Salisbury Plain standing in for Kansas.)

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Return to Oz was made before the advent of CGI, utilizing practical effects instead, including animatronics and stop-action animation or “Claymation,” to be exact, with Will Vinton’s Studios providing the latter. As an example of the difficulties in depicting inhuman characters in those pre-CGI days, in order to enact the role of Tik-Tok the Clockwork Man, actor/contortionist Michael Sundin was forced to bend over to lock himself inside Tik-Tok’s circular torso and had to walk backwards while watching where he was going via a mini TV set. (Sean Barrett provided Tik-Tok’s voice.)

Music is crucial to fantastic films and Return to Oz’s symphonic score couldn’t have been in better hands than David Shire. Shire’s most notable previous works were his 40s jazz score for Dick Richards’ Farewell My Lovely (1975) and minimalist solo piano score for Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation (1974). (Murch also worked on The Conversation, earning an Oscar nomination for sound montage editing.) For Return to Oz, Shire outdid himself and the resulting score remains his masterpiece. As Shire explained to David Kraft in a 1986 interview for CinemaScore, “I wanted the score to have a truly American flavor and, even though symphonic, to employ various interesting smaller combinations within that texture.” Taking his cue from the film’s setting in 1899, Shire utilized styles from that period. His theme for Oz, for instance, was a ragtime march. And for Tik-Tok’s theme, Shire used a brass quintet, “which related to Tik-Tok’s metallic rotundity,” as he put it.

As Return to Oz opens, Dorothy has been suffering from insomnia in the six months since her adventure in Oz and sits indoors all day rather than playing outside with her dog Toto. (Keeping with the continuity of the original books, the kingdom of Oz actually does exist, unlike the MGM film, where it was just a dream Dorothy had.) Needless to say, Aunt Em and Uncle Henry are convinced that Dorothy’s tales of Oz are a delusion brought on by the traumatic experience of the cyclone that did severe damage their Kansas farmhouse. (Even Dorothy finding a metal key with an Oz glyph the morning after a shooting star appears over the farm fails to convince them.) Adding to the Gale family’s woes are a mortgage due and the inability of their hen Billina to lay eggs since the cyclone.

Finally, Em decides that Dorothy needs some professional help, so she takes her to the clinic of Dr. Worley. Despite the Doctor’s deceptively smooth bedside manner, it soon becomes clear that the treatment he’s recommending for Dorothy is a primitive version of electroshock therapy. Worley becomes even more insufferably patronizing after hearing Dorothy’s matter-of-fact account of the Tin Woodman’s rather gruesome origin (taken verbatim from Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz). “Well, I think I know just the thing to cheer Dorothy up,” he heartily proclaims while showing off his device. “This electrical marvel will make it possible for you to sleep again and will also get rid of those bad, waking dreams that you’ve been telling me about.”

Left by Em to spend the night in the clinic (with the promise of bringing Toto with her when she returns in the morning), Dorothy is taken in hand by Nurse Wilson, a stern, unsmiling woman dressed entirely in black. While in the waiting room, Dorothy meets a mysterious young girl (Emma Ridley) who’s the same age she is. The girl hints that there is more to Worley’s clinic than meets the eye, a cryptic warning that is supported by the sounds of screams coming from another room. The girl then disappears and Nurse Wilson returns with a gurney and a couple of sinister orderlies. Dorothy is strapped down to the gurney and taken to the room where the therapy is to be applied.

Fortunately, before Worley’s machine can administer its electrical charge to Dorothy, a sudden thunderstorm knocks out the power. Wilson leaves the room to attend to screaming patients while Worley goes to check the generator. The mysterious girl reappears, unstraps Dorothy from the gurney, and the two of them flee the clinic in the midst of the raging storm, pursued by a furious Wilson. The girls fall into a river and are separated as the rushing waters sweep them away in its currents. A battered chicken coop passing by in the water provides Dorothy with a makeshift raft as she floats away into the night.

The next morning, Dorothy awakens to find the coop in an overgrown puddle surrounded by desert sands with a green, grassy meadow just a few yards away and an unusually voluble Bellina (voiced by Denise Bryer) clucking away next to her.

Dorothy: (waking up) “What’s that?”

Bellina: “Oh, I was just trying to lay my egg, that’s all.”

Dorothy: “Bellina?”

Bellina: “Who else?”

Dorothy: “What are you doing here? Have you been here all night, too?”

Bellina: (sneezes) “I’ve never been so wet in my whole life… How big is this whole pond anyway?”

Dorothy: “I don’t think it’s a pond, Bellina.” (standing up and looking around.) “Maybe it is a pond.”

Bellina: “Told you so.”

Dorothy: “Where did all of the rest of the water go?”

Bellina: “Where did Kansas go?” (looking around) “Some place for a chicken.”

Dorothy: “When did you learn to talk, anyway? I thought hens could only cluck and cackle.”

Bellina: “Strange, ain’t it? How’s my grammar?”

Dorothy: “If we were in the land of Oz, your talking wouldn’t seem strange after all.”

Bellina: (watching the last of the water dry up) “There goes the rest of the water. High and dry.”

Dorothy: (awestruck) “Oz!”

Bellina: “Hmmm?”

Dorothy: “Maybe this is Oz!”

Bellina’s about to jump down from the coop and hunt for some breakfast when Dorothy realizes that, if they are indeed in Oz, then the sands surrounding them are the “deadly desert” and that anything that set foot on it turns to sand itself. Luckily, there are enough rocks nearby to allow Dorothy to use them as stepping stones to the safety of the verdant area beyond. As Dorothy carries Bellina from rock to rock, we hear the first few solo piano notes of Shire’s Oz theme in addition to be introduced to the first example of Vinton’s Claymation in the form of a couple of those stepping stone sprouting eyes to spy on the newcomers.

For those who haven’t seen Return to Oz, I won’t spoil the subsequent adventures that Dorothy and Bellina embark upon during their stay in Oz. Suffice it to say that they encounter an impressive array of thoroughly loathsome enemies and steadfastly loyal companions who become their allies against the villains. The bad guys include a witch named Mombi, who, among her magical powers, is the ability to wear different heads like someone wears a different hat every day and keeps a supply of disembodied heads in glass cases in a hall in her palace; the Wheelers, a malevolent group of creatures who travel around on the wheels they have rather than hands and feet; and the Nome King, who has kidnapped several citizens of Oz (including the Scarecrow) and transformed them into trinkets for his underground lair while turning the remaining Oz denizens (including the Tin Woodsman and the Cowardly Lion) into stone statues. The more trinkets the Nome King acquires, the more he transforms from living rock to an increasingly humanoid form.

The good guys include the aforementioned Tik-Tok the Clockwork Man, a mechanical being made of burnished brass who serves as a one-man Royal Army of Oz; Jack Pumpkinhead (played physically by rail-thin “body popper” dancer Stewart Larange and voiced by Brian Henson), a boy with a Jack O’Lantern head and body consisting of wooden twigs made living by Mombi’s Powder of Life;  and the Gump (voiced by Lyle Conway and manipulated by puppeteer Steve Norrington), another creature animated by the Powder of Life consisting of two sofas tied together for a body, large palm tree fronds for wings, and a mounted moose’s head for its head. (Dorothy and Jack create the Gump as a way of escaping from Mombi’s palace after she makes them prisoners there.) Other familiar Oz regulars can be briefly glimpsed in the climatic celebratory sequence, including the Patchwork Girl, the Shaggy Man, and Prof. H.M. Wogglebug. We also learn the true identity of the young girl who befriended Dorothy at the clinic in this scene.

As mentioned before, the reputation of Return to Oz has grown over the years. Iconic fantasy writer Harlan Ellison singled the film out for especially effusive praise (and defense) in his book Harlan Ellison’s Watching: “Return to Oz is smashing! For those of us who are familiar with the Oz canon of L. Frank Baum and those who lovingly continued the history of that special wonderland—even though we adore the MGM classic, watch it again and again, and know a masterpiece when we (and posterity) see one—the Judy Garland musical was hardly the definitive interpretation… No, my readers, turn a deaf ear to the boos and catcalls of the trendy critics who refuse to judge this absolutely marvelous film on its own merits. Take your kids, let them scream, let your eyes drink in marvels. Return to Oz is everything we hoped for.”

Return to Oz was first released on DVD by Anchor Bay in 1999. That release is no longer available, but Disney Home Entertainment issued its own DVD of the movie in 2004. A reviewer on a site called DVD Dizzy offered this appraisal of the Disney version: “Disney’s DVD release is a step-up from Anchor Bay’s now out-of-print disc, and presents the film with high quality video and audio, and even a nice little helping of extras.”

Man Featured

Blu-ray Review: “Man Without a Star” (Mit stahlharter Faust)

 

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Tired of waiting for the Hollywood studios to release discs of your favorite ’50s Westerns? Look East, young man, about eight thousand miles to Germany, where the Western genre has traditionally been just as popular as here in America. Their pulp authors were grinding out Deutsche sagebrush tales almost before our own became popular. Excepting an operetta or two, they may have beaten the Italians in putting big money into their own films set in the American West.

 

The German Explosive Films label got going several years ago, concentrating at first on top Spaghetti Western titles. But they’ve just released some Blu-rays of vintage Hollywood product, sporting beautiful new HD transfers. The first up is one of Universal’s more interesting oaters of the decade, King Vidor’s hyperactive Man Without a Star (German title: Mit stahlharter Faust). At first glance the show comes across as a full-Testosterone showcase demonstrating the talents and virility of Kirk Douglas, who does his best to embody the title character as the most red-blooded, fair-minded, sharp shooting womanizer of the 19th century. Although the picture is scored with Universal library music (even I recognize cues from William Alland’s monster movies), it opens with a title tune crooned in fine form by Frankie Laine, the sure mark of a matinee winner. In the opening titles Laine’s screen credit is positioned right next to that of the producer and the director.

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The final screenplay by Borden Chase is almost as anarchic as his script for Robert Aldrich’s Vera Cruz: at least one anti-social, aggressive or violent act occurs at least every three minutes. Drifting cowpoke Dempsey Rae (Kirk Douglas) rides the rails into a Wyoming town and tangles with the railroad bulls and deputies when they try to arrest him for a murder committed by a knife-wielding creep (Jack Elam). Rae befriends Jeff Jimson (William Campbell), a tinhorn kid desperate to become a cowboy. Using his fists, his personality and his musical talent on the banjo, Rae wins jobs for himself and Jeff on a huge ranch from the ramrod Strap Davis (Jay C. Flippen). While teaching Jeff how to work cows and shoot, Rae learns that the neighbor ranchers have much smaller spreads and are worried that the big ranch’s new owner Reed Bowman will not honor the ‘share the range’ good neighbor policy of the past. It’s true — the new owner arrives and proves to be a calculating Eastern businesswoman (Jeanne Crain). Reed’s intention is to double or treble the size of her herd and push out the other ranchers. In two years the grass will be destroyed, but that’s when she’ll sell out, reap her profits and move into some other business. Admiring Dempsey Rae’s skill with a gun, Reed makes potential romance an unspoken part of her offer for him to take over as foreman. But she also hires the unscrupulous Steve Miles (Richard Boone) and his gunslingers to enforce her takeover of the free range. When fighting breaks out Rae doesn’t know which side he should be on. He hates Steve Miles’ brutality and doesn’t trust Reed. Worse, the little ranchers have resorted to using barbed wire – and Rae has a psychotic hatred of barbed wire.

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Man Without a Star is almost as psychotic in its appeal to violence as an ubiquitous ritual. Almost every petty dispute among good men and bad is an excuse for a beating or a quick-draw showdown. Corrupt deputies are as bad as the sleazy gunfighters. The green Jeff Jimson starts out as a loveable guy (and attracts the affection of a drop-dead cute rancher’s daughter, Myrna Hansen). But even he goes gun crazy at one point and must be subdued by Rae.

Writer Borden Chase invented neurotic and disturbed characters for James Stewart and Anthony Mann’s very profitable series of ’50s Westerns. But Stewart favored stories with lame Sunday School messages and mottoes: can a bad man change his ways? Does one bad apple (man) spoil the whole barrel? The closest Man Without a Star gets to such drivel is when Rae tells Jeff that every man must choose a star to follow. But he hasn’t done it himself. Dempsey Rae was once tortured with barbed wire, and has nasty scars all over his mighty chest (show us again, Kirk!) to prove it. Just hearing the words ‘barbed wire’ makes Rae goes nuts, like Steve Martin reacting to the phrase ‘cleaning woman’ in Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid. Yet Rae finds eventually defends the downtrodden little ranchers who feel compelled to use barbed wire. Even a cowboy dedicated to the mantra of the wide-open range (read: unrestrained big-business piracy) yields to the fact that a West with people in it needs civilizing boundaries (lawful regulation?).

Man Without a Star has a knifing, several casual fistfights, two or three face-off gun-downs and one man torn up by barbed wire. Dempsey Rae is finally roped by Steve Miles in town and beaten to a pulp. In retaliation Rae “Learns To Stop Worrying And Love the Barbed Wire”: he sends one of Miles’ men back to Reed Bowman’s ranch tightly wrapped in the nasty stuff. The actual body count isn’t too terrible, but the movie’s overall message is that everyday life in America is a dog-eat-dog battle to make a buck.

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Although it may be hard to picture, most of the movie takes a lighthearted tone. The exuberant Rae jokes or sings his way out of average problems, giving Kirk Douglas a chance to show off the banjo tricks he learned during his stint with Walt Disney from the previous year. He makes merry with the town strumpet Moccasin Mary from Tucumcari (Mara Corday of Tarantula) and accepts plenty of favors from the hostess Idonee, an old flame (Claire Trevor). But Dempsey Rae flips over the slick chick boss lady Reed Bowman, who returns his leers with approving smiles and gives him a peek while she bathes in her so-modern-it’s-indecent indoor bathroom (Rae: “Right next to the bedroom — that’s kind of handy!”) Ms. Crain was always good playing demure farm girls and other upstanding femmes. She’s just as impressive as this film’s sexually devious and determined Alpha Female.

The director of note is the great King Vidor, a veteran artist who formulates shots, compositions and sequences that cut like butter. His angles are dynamic and his screen is always alive with action and personality. Vidor didn’t make Westerns often but they tend to be good ones: Billy the Kid with Johnny Mack Brown, and David O. Selznick’s delirious Duel in the Sun. That last title and Vidor’s weird Ruby Gentry both feature strong female characters that eventually engage their own lovers in murderous gun battles. The scenes are either operatically romantic/fatalistic or enjoyably ludicrous, depending on the individual viewer’s mental state.

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(Spoiler:) In Man Without a Star all the plot themes are wrapped up neatly but one: Dempsey Rae has settled scores with all his friends and enemies save for the intransigent Reed Bowman — unless one believes that he beats her at her own game, using sex to break her spirit. In terms of the sexual subjugation of women in the 1950s, this should work, but of course the movie can’t be explicit about it. So the curtain drops minus one showdown, leaving King Vidor and Kirk Douglas’s movie in sort of a funk. I mean, the woman has been sanctioning the killing of her neighbors, and she apparently exits poorer but with a full skin. I guess that means that Man Without a Star is sufficiently accurate about crime and punishment in lawless America to satisfy any European audience!


The packaging for Explosive Media and Alive’s Blu-ray of Man Without a Star (Mit stahlharter Faust) says it’s Region B only, but it’s really All-Region: both my review copy and a reader’s mail order disc play fine on standard U.S. equipment. The Amazon.de website says the disc is encoded with subtitles, which is sadly not true either.

The disc is a real beauty. Universal’s transfer department has put together a very handsome show. Some very minor color fringing appears now and then, especially on the left-hand side of the frame. Colors, granularity, and the richness of the image are uniformly excellent — Russell Metty’s cinematography is gloriously bright yet doesn’t make the screen look like the window of a candy store.

Explosive Media’s Ulrich Bruckner provides a handsome animated gallery of stills and ad artwork, an impressive string of trailers and an insert pamphlet with liner notes by Markus Tschiedert. They’re written in German, so I hope they don’t contradict too many of the opinions in my review.

Ulrich Bruckner is a published author on Italian westerns and can give an instant biography on the most arcane Spaghetti Western actor you never heard of. In that sense he’s the German equivalent of our Robert S. Birchard, who probably knows an equal amount about every one of the many familiar sagebrush actors playing ranch hands and gunslingers in this picture. Stuntman-turned actor Richard Farnsworth is said to be in there, although I wouldn’t recognize him without his retirement-age hair and mustache. Third-string bargirl “Boxcar Alice” is none other than pretty Millicent Patrick, who also worked in the Universal makeup department sculpting designs for, among other interesting creations, The Creature from the Black Lagoon.

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson


Man Without a Star

Blu-ray

Explosive Media GmbH (Alive AG)

1955 / Color / 2:00 widescreen / 89 min. / Mit stahlharter Faust / Street Date March 7, 2014 / EUR 15,99

Supplements: Art gallery, trailer gallery, insert pamphlet essay by Markus Tschiedert.

Deaf and Hearing-impaired Friendly?
NO; Subtitles: None

Packaging: Keep case

Reviewed: April 6, 2014

Starring Kirk Douglas, Jeanne Crain, Claire Trevor, William Campbell, Richard Boone, Jay C. Flippen, Myrna Hansen, Mara Corday, Sheb Wooley, Paul Birch, Roy Barcroft, Jack Elam, Myron Healey, Milicent Patrick.

Cinematography Russell Metty

Film Editor Virgil Vogel

Original Music (library) Hans J. Salter, Herman Stein, Henry Mancini

Written by Borden Chase, D.D. Beauchamp from a novel by Dee Linford

Produced by Aaron Rosenberg

Directed by King Vidor