Movie Reviews and Serious Nonsense
Movie Reviews and Serious Nonsense
Steve Bingen: Hollywood Behind the Lens
About his new book with Marc Wanamaker "Hollywood Behind the Lens: Treasures from the Bison Archive
Steven Bingen is an author, archivist, historian, and contributor to dozens of books, articles, and documentaries regarding film history.
Marc Wanamaker:
“Los Angeles is a city that runs from its own past” explains historian and Bison Archives owner Marc Wanamaker. Many of Hollywood’s legendary sets and props, mansions, theaters, restaurants, nightclubs, hotels, and even the studios and the films they produced are now either gone or have been redeveloped, repurposed, or remade beyond recognition. Even more disarmingly, the physical ephemera associated with such items is often MIA as well. Photographs, files, maps, documents, menus, production paperwork, records, manuscripts, everything from matchbooks to movie magazines and entire movie backlots have now been lost in the backwash of dubious progress, short-sighted corporate mindsets, and civic indifference. Fortunately, for the last fifty years, in the very epicenter of Hollywood, thanks to Wanamaker, there has existed a haven where over 70,000 of these items, physically or photographically, have been collected and protected. These artifacts tell the story of Hollywood’s glorious past, as well as its uncertain future as the hub of filmmaking in America.
Podcast music:
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Movie Reviews and Serious Nonsense is a King Dyro Production ©2024
Burka Dyro Podcast Season 03 Ep 06
[00:00:00] Welcome we have Tom Burka as always and myself, Greg Dyro. We have Steve Bingen here with us, who's second time on the show. And Steve's gonna talk about a new book he has coming out, or it's out, I believe, with with another author. And I'll let Steve tell us the title of the new book.
My new masterwork, which is on Amazon and in bookstores around the world, if you can find it, one is called Hollywood Behind the Lens, Treasures from the Bison Archives, and run out and grab your copy right now. Excellent. It's available on we'll have the link The purchase link available on Amazon.
And the publisher is off the publisher's offering it as a Kindle choice too, which I'd like to tell all your Kindle readers if they can buy it that way, although you might wanna buy it on paper just because. It's got a lot of photographs and documents and items in it that I don't know how well they're going to reproduce.
I haven't seen the Kenzil version. I've got my fingers crossed though. In some cases, a [00:01:00] digital format is actually better because you can enlarge the photographs more than you can on paper. But Kendall seems to doesn't seem to work as well that way. But see it any way you can trust me, your friends and relatives will be will be very impressed when they see it sitting on your on your coffee table.
Exactly. In fact, I just had this conversation with Greg because I just did buy the digital version of it and I was paging through it. It looks good, frankly. The illustrations and photographs come through really nicely on on an iPad or on a computer screen. I'm looking at the map of Hollywood on page 26 of I suppose the page number is different, digitally speaking, but Harvey Wilcox's 1887 colorful map of beautiful Hollywood.
And I can I can enlarge it. I love that. I love that. So you [00:02:00] can enlarge it. See, that's actually a good thing. On some of the photographs, I made reference in the captions to things that were happening in the background. And on paper, it's very hard to see those things sometimes. You can see it, but you pretty much need to reach for your handy microphone glass and do a Sherlock Holmes thing.
At the same time. To find those things. Yeah. And if you can enlarge it, it might even be better. Yeah. But I tried to include in the book the whole spectrum, like the original property map of Hollywood when it was first laid out and Stuff from Academy Awards a couple years ago. I wanted every reader to be their own archivist you can there should be something for everybody you can research anything you want.
You can find anything you want There's photos of modern stars and classic stars and silent stars And movie studios and movie sets and premieres and fast food restaurants and nightclubs and the sunset strips. So it should have something for the Hollywood nut in anybody's family. I'm going to ask you, Steve, to [00:03:00] describe the bison archive, which obviously was, really important to the formation of the book.
But would it be fair to describe the book as an examination of the history of. Hollywood through the items found in these archives, really? It's the ephemera of Hollywood. It's the stuff that the studios usually didn't bother to save that, the nightclubs and the restaurants and the movie stars didn't bother to save because.
It is, a lot of it is things like cocktail napkins and menus and contracts for movie stars that aren't in effect anymore and photographs of places that aren't there anymore. And so much of that is really hard to find. And that's the niche that Bison Archives has been able to fill.
I'm sure people look at the cover and they say, all right, I get the idea about Hollywood behind the lens, and that's a good idea, a photographic and document heavy look at the industry from the [00:04:00] inside. But they're saying, what is this Bison Archives? And it's the best kept secret.
In all of Hollywood, and that's an an interesting story that's never been told before is what this company is and what exactly they do and who exactly they are. I wanted to tell a story about the artifacts of, and the stuff that Hollywood has left behind in its wake. But I ended up telling the story about about a person that decided to start saving this stuff as well.
So I, I think that gives it gives it a, I think outside of what you might find just by looking at the materials themselves and the fact that it represents the passion and the insanity of one person who decided to save all this stuff and has been saving it for generations and we're all the better for it.
Yeah. And does he have a, is there a physical location that That he stores all the stuff or is it multiple areas? Is it, is [00:05:00] somebody going to discover it years from now? Because, it's in multiple locations. What's the physicality of it and how much of it's digitized, I'm asking too many questions.
I should probably mention a little bit about Mark Wanamaker, who started the Bison Archives, and his weird de facto position as the chronicler and the keeper of Hollywood's treasures and artifacts. He he was born in Beverly Hills. And when he was a kid, he was he used to be a an extra in Disney, in Disney TV shows, Walt Disney's one of Walt Disney's daughters lived up the road from him in Beverly Hills and thought this was a cute kid.
So they started putting him in Disney projects as a, as a supporting character or as a or as an extra, or a background person or one of the kids on the block, office opposite, some Disney star that they were trying to groom at the time. He was also, he also played a kid in the in the rent 10 10 TV series.
And as he got older, he was on he mar he was in the marching [00:06:00] band for the music man. He's one of the people that was playing one of the 76 trombones. Oh my gosh. Did the same thing, the big parade. And Hello, Dolly. He seems to be, apparently his his he seems to be typecast to play in marching bands and things like that.
But he was never really, he was never really an actor, he was more of a musician, actually. He used to play with Tan Deet and Janis Joplin and things like that in the 60s. But he got, he started working for for the American Film Institute back when it was Over at the Greystone Mansion in Beverly Hills.
Now they've got a big campus in Hollywood. But they used to be in a huge, one of the hugest states in Beverly Hills. And he said he was just sitting around one day and the phone rang. And it was the head of the steel department at Columbia Pictures. This was about 1972. And they were in the process of moving up to the Warner Brothers lot.
And so they needed to get rid of most of their stuff. They were going to have Jesus and she [00:07:00] said, would you guys like to have a photo collection? And someone just nodded. I said, yeah, sure. Have him send it over something. They said I don't think we could send it over and get it over.
You might have to, you might have to take a couple of trucks over to our lot. So he went up Columbia was on sunset and Gower at the time. And there were hundreds and hundreds of boxes from every, stills from every movie that Columbia had ever made. And he said it was really confusing because now, if there's, you can look all this stuff up online, but there was a lot of these titles weren't identified.
And if they were identified they had the wrong title because very often they, the movies would have a working title, which would be changed before the film was released. So he'd find it in a file with the title of some movie he'd never heard of. And, now you can just look that title up online.
But he said he had to go to the Academy of library and start looking all this stuff up and pulling all the paperwork for this stuff, and it was a rabbit hole. He just started falling into it. You [00:08:00] probably remember remember Mark from your days at Warner Brothers, Greg?
Yeah, because I use Mark I use Mark, I think for some of the things in the Warner brothers, I remember the way I met the guy when I was at Warner brothers, we had a client that wanted a picture of the, one of the labor disputes that the studio had in the forties and there's a really iconic photo of of the police out there and there's hundreds of picketers at the front gate and a car has been overturned and they're firing they're shooting fire.
Yeah. Fire hoses at the demonstrators and everything. The studio's logo was combining good good citizenship with good picture making. But Jack Warner ordered rifling up on the roof in case they breached the walls and got inside the studio. One of the screenwriters said that they should change the logo.
They should change the Their logo to combining good citizenship with good riflemanship. Anyway this is a very famous photo. You've probably all seen it. It's reproduced in my book. And so I went into [00:09:00] the still archives and they didn't have a copy of it. And, I called you guys at the photo lab, didn't have a copy of it.
I called television publicity. I called feature publicity. I went to the, remember the the glass building across the street used to have a lot of photos for every actor and almost every movie they made down in cages in the basement. It was like crawling around in the fence when the offer is there and they didn't have it down there either.
I spent several days looking for this photo. You could look, open up any book on film history and there'd be that photo there. And it would say copyright Warner brothers, but apparently corporate Warner brothers and his corporate Mike did not have a copy of this. I think it probably purged.
They probably purged it. They probably purged it because they didn't. Yeah, they probably weren't exactly proud of this, but I don't think it was a conscious decision. I don't think they were that smart. I think they just, I think every department assumed that the other department probably still had the negative or something like that.
So they would give them what is needed for all these books that published it. It's just one hand didn't know what the other was doing. [00:10:00] And so Mark Wanamaker found a niche that he could crawl in and help out the studios by helping himself. So he started reproducing these photographs and selling them back to the studio.
So you were describing Mark Wanamaker and first meeting him and the fact that. He found this niche to collect images and things, as you said, ephemera that the studios had discarded or didn't care to keep. And I totally agree with that because my, my, my experience of the studio is that same thing.
There was a certain like I, I was very concerned about photographic stuff, from the lab and historical stuff. And then I get this pushback sometimes from AdPub and some, from various nameless people, they would say. Why are you concerned about that? It's so you don't need to be concerned about that.
And it's because nobody else seems to be concerned. And I think they always felt like in such a big company, there was a fallback. There was somebody somewhere else that was [00:11:00] saving this stuff. So you didn't have to worry about it. Or maybe you were right. They just didn't see the value of stuff from movies.
They, that had already, we're already on home video and they didn't matter with them and they just, We've talked a lot. They just don't get it. Yep. Tom had a question about studio archivists at what point did the studio start actually having somebody on board on staff that Was archiving or, like the the Warner Brothers archive and stuff.
When did that kind of start happening? Is that much, much later, early on in some studios? No, they never, up until very recently they've never been concerned with that sort of thing. The only company that really seemed to care about their own stuff, Disney, They hired an archivist in, in the early seventies.
And they were the first company that had ever did anything like that. And you wonder what they did up until the 1970s. That's that still seems pretty late considering how long Disney has been around. But at least they were good at putting their stuff [00:12:00] in boxes and putting their stuff in warehouses and things like that.
And it probably came from the top. I, Walt Disney, I do have to say that my understanding is that originally Disney stored its cells and quote unquote preserved them with materials that actually ate into the cells themselves and deteriorated them. That there was a lack of understanding that these things could have any lasting value in the future.
And I, I, yeah, I think part of it was just, they didn't understand the chemistry of what would happen when when you lamb, they used to laminate these cells in plastic, like they do your driver's license or something thought that'll keep them, they'll be good forever.
I'm sure run Barbara Gallo could come on and tell us all kinds of horror stories about them in some cases, trying to save this stuff. And in some cases, not, in some cases, not really carrying, but just, sticking it in a box somewhere and hoping it's going to be okay. And Disney didn't make live [00:13:00] action films until the early fifties, so they, they didn't have, They didn't have props and they didn't have costumes and things like that.
It was just their artwork and documents and things like that. But they were a little better than the rest of the gang was as far as saving that. And the other studios really just didn't care. Warner's was one of the, was one of the first to show any sort of interest in that at all.
But at that point you're talking, the 1980s or something like that. So that, there's so much stuff that's already gone. Leif Adams, who used to run the archive, used to tell horror stories about, he'd go over to departments and find their, all their records and files, and he'd say, Alright, I know this is yours, because they, they showed a certain sort of protection of this old stuff.
And he'd say, I know, he'd say, I know this is yours, but if you guys ever decide you don't want to store it, or you're tired of dealing with it, just give me a call, and I'll, we'll come over and get this stuff. And they'd say, yeah, sure, whatever it is. And then they throw it away, someone else would come in, or VP would say, why are we keeping all this stuff, and they'd throw it away.
Even after there was someone there begging to keep [00:14:00] this stuff there were people that just didn't care, and they'd put it in the They weren't throwing They were thrown away, they were thrown away reams of proof sheets, printed, proof sheets at various times, it just got tossed. And sometimes, it was funny too, because the photog the unit photographers would sometimes say, this is mine, I want to keep it.
And they'd say, no, you signed the contract, this was a work for hire, you have to give it to us. So he'd reluctantly turn over his stuff and then they'd throw it away. Yeah, and there's jewels that you can find in here. I used to go, I used to take a loop and go through the box after box of these Pruces.
I remember finding the Pruce for the exorcist. And there was a page where someone was standing outside the Washington, D. C. Flat where the house was, and there was some fog, and they started shooting pictures of Max Bonsito walking into the unit. And that's the most iconic still from that movie.
It's on every poster to this day for the Exorcist. And one of them, the one that we all recognize, they circled it with a grease pencil and said, let's save this [00:15:00] one. And I thought, this is this is like history right here, and we're so lucky that these didn't get, these didn't get thrown in the dumpster.
It was just by sheer luck. That we still have that sort of thing, there was fun stuff that, you can find all kinds of horrible pictures of the stars in the proof sheets and you can find wonderful pictures of the stars and say, why didn't they use this one? I remember looking at the the proofs for Magnum Force.
It was the first dirty Harry sequel. And if they had naked photos of Suzanne Summers playing in a swimming pool, she was the, she was an extra who got murdered by the bad guy in that film. And I thought, I wonder if she was shooting a sick. On the lot at the time, I remember saying, I wonder if she knows that we've got naked pictures of her frolicking in the pool over in the archive.
So there is value in this sort of thing. We've seen that in some of the social groups, but. Oh yeah. Yeah, naked Hollywood. Naked Hollywood. Wait, Steve. Naked Hollywood. Can I co author That sounds like a sure bet. We could do that. That's Bison Archives book in the dust, I'm sure.
Okay. I think we need to do it. I [00:16:00] think, Tom? And then you can do the, I've already, you can do the audio. Yeah. I'd like to preorder it too. I remember anyway, Warner brothers gave me when I never, I, when I couldn't find that still of the labor strike, Warner brothers gave me a big, someone pulled a Rolodex card out of their Rolodex.
You remember those? And had Mark Wanamaker, Bison archives and a phone number on it. And I called him up and I started to describe the photo I need. And he's Oh yeah, absolutely. I'll send it to you. And he'd send it to us and he'd send us a bill and we pay it. And all of a sudden we had this still again.
I thought, how wonderful is that? I wonder if he's got anything else. And to answer your question from half an hour ago, he did. He had, he'd been saving this stuff for decades, starting with the fact that he took that phone call from Columbia pictures in the early seventies. And he'd been going to New York.
He went to Europe. He worked at the different research libraries at the different studios and copied everything and a lot of people knew that these departments were being closed. They [00:17:00] would give this stuff to him. And it's a legal loophole where he can hold on to this stuff and he can sell this stuff even though he doesn't own the copyright to it.
Because the studios themselves need him and they realize that they need him. When they're writing a public tour or, They need a press release about one of their old movies coming out the video. They either, they'd use his materials or they would fact check, they'd get him to fact check this stuff so that they could get it right.
And I kept thinking, yeah, I've got to meet this guy some, someday. And at the time, he doesn't have any more, but his office was at Raleigh Studios in Hollywood across the street from Paramount. And to answer your long ago question, a lot of his stuff he was storing there. And they finally ended up he had a sweetheart deal because he'd been there since the late 70s or something like that.
He was paying hardly any rent for all this space. But now soundstage space and studio space. Based on such a premium, they finally threw him off the lot. So his material is, he's got a, he still lives in that big house in Beverly Hills that his parents had. He's got a lot of the [00:18:00] material there, and he's got it stored in different warehouses and unidentified locations all over Los Angeles.
You can call him up and ask him for just about anything, and he'll come up with this stuff. It's just amazing. I for my first book, I got a licensing agreement from Warner Brothers, and they were great, they were really nice about giving me this stuff, but there was a lot of stuff they didn't have. So I ended up getting it from Mark.
And for subsequent books I shied away from using the studios themselves. They're, even when they want to help, it's such a big bureaucracy, there's always a million rules that they want to inflict on you. And it's impossible to get a lawyer to like, come up with a contract on your license agreement because they've got, that's not what movie studios do.
They've got better things to do. They're dealing with million dollar deals. They don't want to deal with a license agreement for somebody to use their photos. It's just not, It's not really worthwhile as far as, just putting a lawyer to work on it. People always complain about how they go to the studio for something or to research something and they get nowhere.
And that's just because that's not the business the studios are in. They're making [00:19:00] movies. They're not, that's not really their gig. So Mark is the backup for everybody that's written the book. I doubt if there's been a book written about Hollywood in the last 50 years, it hasn't had Mark's name or Mark's photos in it on there.
And I got to thinking that this would make a good book into itself, and that's what leads us to today. And it has, and I have to say, there's a real breadth of different topics and histories that you cover taking us on a tour of parts of the archives. I was just looking at your chapter on nightclubs and nightlife in Hollywood.
Which exciting. That there is this whole whole world, which is illuminated by the photographs and other stuff that's in the archives of that time. The if you live in LA, it's fun to look at, find out what's in the spot where the coconut grove was now, or where the Macombo was now, or where the legendary nights [00:20:00] were.
It's always disappointing to go there because there's always a bank or condominiums or something like that. The Hotel Roosevelt, I see you have a picture of that here. Is that still around? Yeah, it's still there. They held the first Academy Awards ceremony there. And it's still across the street from the from Brahman's Chinese Theater and it's still there.
And as I think I said in one of the captions, and you're, it seems familiar, even if you've never been to this swimming pool, because of all the movies that use this pool. Is that quintessential Hollywood hotel swimming pool? And I love Lucy. That was the hotel that Lucy and Ricky stayed in whenever they came to Hollywood.
So Ricky can make a movie for MGM. So it's a weird experience seeing this pool in this book and then you're in actually going there and then turning on your TV at three in the morning and seeing an old movie where there's somebody who goes to Hollywood and they go for a swim in their hotel pool.
And it's that swimming pool at the Roosevelt, which is nice. The the very first time I came to [00:21:00] Hollywood, I actually stayed at the Roosevelt. That was where I stayed. That's a great Hollywood story. I was job inter, I was job interviewing and I ended up taking the job running a photographic lab, the photo lab on Highland, and that's where I they Patrick Donahue put me up at the Roosevelt and I stayed at the Roosevelt, in a room looking out over, Hollywood.
And it was like, I had no clue at that point. Just, I knew I was in an old, an old original Hollywood hotel. But yeah, that's why I started my career. That's a good place to start. You've been working your way down ever since, huh? Yes. Yeah. All the way to the basement and lower. I know what you mean.
Yeah. The Roosevelt is, it's filled with all these interesting ghosts and, like people talk about Marilyn Monroe appearing in a mirror next to an elevator there, but checking her makeup and Montgomery Cliff practices bugle licks and from here to eternity there. It's those.
Sometimes late at night, you can still hear a mournful bugler playing taps that they say is Montgomery Cliff, or else it's somebody from a, [00:22:00] military academy across the street or something. I love that. I see go on. No, I'm go ahead. I was just looking at this picture. I didn't realize this.
So Basil Rathbone's wife Is there is her name Bwita Berger? Yeah. Is that a great name or what? Yeah, someone with a name like that would have to marry someone named Rathbone. . . Yeah. The name Rathbone itself is bizarre, but his whole name is bizarre. He for those who might not know Basil Raspo is best known for playing Sherlock Holmes in the Sherlock Holmes movies that were coming out of Hollywood, none of which were based on stories from the actual Sherlock Holmes stories just insane stuff with Sherlock Holmes and world war II, but.
Having said that, you have a picture here of
Wida Berger, apparently had the [00:23:00] most lavish parties in Hollywood, according to you. And there is a picture of just a huge number of Hollywood people at one of her parties. And like a hundred people there easily. Yeah, something like that. A time capsule is just amazing, isn't it? It is. What King Vi, is it King Vidor or Vidor?
How do you pronounce it? I think it's pronounced Vidor, I believe, but I could well be wrong. It's a name I've seen on screens and on books for years, but it's hard to say how he actually pronounced the direction of the same room as he was. Yeah, but he w he was one of the directors of the wizard of Oz, I believe.
And yeah, Yasha Heifetz was also there. And I don't know who this actor is. Montague Love. Yeah, a lot of these were, this was like at the cusp after, when silence were going out, it was like this party represents the last Charleston before the, before everything changed, the talkies and depression struck, [00:24:00] so Rathbone had a hard time when he was a, when he was playing Sherlock Holmes and when he was playing, sword fighting with Errol Flynn and things like that, he was making a lot of money.
And so he was able to support his wife's lavish lifestyle in these parties. But, in the late 40s, he got tired of playing Holmes. He was playing Sherlock Holmes both on the radio and in films. And both contracts came up at the same time. And he said, I can't do this anymore. So he stopped. And Hollywood was so upset that their quintessential Sherlock Holmes turned his back on the role he was born to play.
That they basically, I wouldn't say they blacklisted him, but he was unable to get much employment after that because he was so typecast to Sherlock Holmes, who could see him as anything else. So it crippled his career, his decision not to play Sherlock Holmes anymore. And so his wife was still throwing these million dollar parties.
And he ended up financially practically bankrupted. He had to take horrible B movies like hillbillies in a haunted house and things [00:25:00] like that, just to support his wife's lifestyle and these parties that she was still throwing. To her, it was still 1929, even though it was 1949 by this point.
He had a really hard time keeping her in the lifestyle with which she'd become accustomed, but he's not really the last, yes, he's not the last guy who's gone broke supporting his his wife, lover or girlfriend. Sometimes at the same time, sometimes you look at this picture though, you almost wish you could whisper in his ear and say you better be careful how much bootleg gin they're swilling at this party, you're not going to be able to afford it forever because someday you're going to get tired of playing Sherlock Holmes and it's all going to come crumbling down.
But that picture looks like it looks like the final shot in the shining, where you see Jack Nicholson's picture on the wall of all the people part. Yeah, that's what that's what it reminds me of. It's like the real version of that photo. So if you don't buy the book for any other reason, you should buy the books.
You can see this photograph that we're talking about it. [00:26:00] I had to go to there's a basil rap phone website and I had to go to the curator of that. Help her, help me and her identify some of the people in that still and which picture, where weda was, if she was to the left or the right and everything she was able to help me out.
I wasn't sure how solid a ground that was sitting on for this one for that photo, but I'm glad I did. It's well worth, it's worth of the price of the book right there. This whole chapter is fascinating in itself. There's a picture of. Musso and Frank's Grill. Wow. That's it's still, you need to we need to get you out.
We need to get you out to Hollywood, Tom, and we'll take you to Musso and Frank's and have one of their world famous martinis. Oh, I'm there. And and also, there are pictures you have of I didn't realize that the Brown Derby actually had several kind of franchise restaurants.
Around 1926 and [00:27:00] 1940 with some. Interesting. Not the classic depiction of the Brown Derby that I'm used to. I love the, I love what it says eat in the hat in big letters on the side of the hat. It really does. Yeah, I don't think that would fly today. You eat in the hat.
You go ahead. But that literal hat is still there. It was across the street from where the the the coconut grove nightclub was at and the ambassador hotel for man. And if you go there, if you go there today, There's like a strip mall that's been built around it and someone has covered they turned it into a laundromat.
It's like a Chinese laundromat or something and they've covered it with like aluminum siding You can still see the outline of the brim of the hat if you look into this into the city a strip mall Yeah I thought I've always thought about going in there and taking in some laundry [00:28:00] to give it to the curators there and asking if They know that used to be the most famous restaurant in Hollywood where they're You know, where they're washing the sweat stains out of people's socks.
I love that. I also was just, I should have went over there and taken a before and, a then and now photos so people could see what it looked like now, what it looks like now. I did that in a couple places in the book. I did it or Mark did it. There's a picture of the, it used to be the Earl Carroll's nightclub and in the 60s, they painted it with these psychedelic designs because the musical hair, the Broadway version of hair came out to L.
A. and played at this nightclub. And so they painted with these psychedelic designs and there's a photo of it in 1970 or whenever it was with these designs on it. And a couple of years ago, for once upon a time in Hollywood, Quentin Tarantino went there and had them paint the same designs on this wall.
So that they could make it look like 1969 in Hollywood. And it's funny, so I printed the [00:29:00] photo that Mark came up with, of how it looked in actuality, during that era. Then I went out there with a camera and took a photo of it today. And they're almost identical. In fact, it's not very dramatic seeing it on the page, because it looks like two copies of the same photo, practically.
Tarantino's just done such a good job about recreating it the way it looked in the 60s. I'm sure people drive by, tourist drive by, and say, that sure looks dated. They should paint over that wall. It looks like 1969. But in a way, it's not very dramatic, just because it looks so similar. It's almost better to show pictures.
A picture of the half of the aluminum siding over it and then how it looked in glory days and it shows something exactly the same as it did in the original photo. Oh I learned the left, right? That's I've got photographs of various stars on Avenue D and Warner brothers.
And I've done other pictures of Me standing in the same spot or holding up an actual print of the photo in the same spot or stand over the grate where James Dean is dropping [00:30:00] stuff into one of those You know drainage grates or whatever on Avenue D. It's always fun to see the before and after Or standing right where they were pink Floyd and they're on fire or whatever she were here.
I know. Yeah. That's a, that's Avenue D where it looks almost the same. Doesn't the soundstage walls haven't changed too much. If you say your hair on fire and that's like my once upon a time in Hollywood, but it would be almost the same thing for those who might not be familiar with what we're talking about.
The cover of Pink Floyd's album, Wish You Were Here, depicts a guy walking across the street who's on fire. I think it's, I think it's symbolically says what happens when you sell out to Hollywood, you end up going to burning in hell or something like that. I'm not sure what it means, but it's a very dramatic way.
A very dramatic, shot. Yeah, I don't really understand how the image relates to the [00:31:00] music on the album, but But Pink Floyd was really known For having album covers that just were eye catching. Think of all the teenagers that sat on their bed listening to that album with the volume turned all the way up, staring at that photograph.
And that's the, that's actually the same, that's the same drainage grate, I believe, that I've got photographs of James Dean dropping coins or something. I believe it was probably heroin. Is the same. This is the street that my office was on. So yeah, I know the street very well.
Great photo. You can almost see there's a good photo in your book. Go ahead. Go of the retailer young from I love you, Alice B. Toklas, dancing on that street. And she said later that she was wearing, that they brought her a pair of pants that had James Dean's name in them. So she's wearing James Dean's blue jeans, dancing on that same street near that same grate where James Dean was dropping stuff into.
Once [00:32:00] again, you've got echoes on top of echoes here, don't you? Yes, totally. Totally. This is odd. I don't understand what I just came upon this while I was flipping through the book, but you have a picture of Notre Dame in the book. And is it actually the actual No it's Universal Studios.
It's Universal Studios version of Notre Dame for Lon Chaney's Phantom of the Opera, Hunchback of Notre Dame. Oh, my God. That's crazy. It's amazing, isn't it? Now, it's not all real. Above a certain point, it's a map painting. Or I guess it would have been a piece of glass if they hung it in front of the lens at that point.
But it's impossible to see the scene where one stops and the other starts. And that set was on the back lot for years afterwards. In another Lon Chaney movie in the Phantom of the Opera, you can see, at the end when the Phantom is being chased through the streets of Paris, he runs by Notre Dame Cathedral, I guess they just wanted to get their full value for that set.
And it was still there for years after that. [00:33:00] It's not there anymore, obviously, but it's amazing, isn't it? It is. Yeah, you've done full books on the back lots of different studios and this one chapter that I seem to have wandered into is really mostly about that. You've got previously unpublished maps of studio back plots and And what is this?
The actual model map for the Barnum style Bali who of universal studios, grand opening. You've got, I'm not exactly sure what this map depicts. See, that's the sort of thing you're supposed to, you're supposed to look at it and stare and look at it from zoom in or pick up your magnifying glass.
Yeah, you can actually see, I don't even think it's called Lancashire Boulevard, the Universal runs along Lancashire Boulevard on one side now. And you can see the main street that's on the edge of the studio, [00:34:00] back, even back then I think it had a different name. But it's Lancashire Boulevard, and then you can see what they originally built when they bought this when they bought this land and opened this studio.
Apparently it was a it was a chicken farm, and I don't think they wanted the entire 450 acres, but the farmer said, No, you're gonna have to buy the whole thing, and they thought, we're never gonna fill this land. And now, of course, it's filled with their park, and their studio, and their hotels, and their themed attractions, and theaters, and everything else.
They lucked out on that. But they kept some of the chicken coops there. And what that map depicts is, they thought it would be fun to open the studio up and let visitors come in and see movies being made. And if you bought a ticket, you'd get a free box of eggs from the chicken farm. So whatever you could go watch silent movies being made and then you could go home and fry up a mess of eggs from Universal Studios, Hollywood chickens are much more glamorous than just regular chickens.
So their eggs would obviously taste better. And they continue to offer tours [00:35:00] through the silent era because there's photographs of platforms built above the sets where they were working in order to go up there and watch. And they have. You know that they could eat popcorn and they could make, they could maybe start a fire and fry up their eggs and watch silent movies being made.
And this was a pretty good arrangement up until talkies came in. And then you couldn't have a hundred tourists standing up there rooting on the actors and cheering when the love scenes came and dissing the villain because it would have been picked up on the microphone. So they had to close down this great idea of giving a tour of their studio.
For the next 50 odd years and finally in, in the 1960s, they finally decide, we should, we used to give tours of our studio. Remember that old map we've got laying around somewhere? We should do that again. And of course now, Universal Studios gets, I think it's 30, 000 people a day or something like that.
Wow. That is crazy. I know that's where that's in. That's really interesting Universal Studios and what [00:36:00] it is today to that picture from their opening day. And then, that map showing, telling people that he can come on by and, watch a movie being made and get a dozen eggs.
That's great. I love that. You're killing me with the eggs here. Yeah, there's just something in every single chapter here is just chock full of really cool stuff. I happened to love, I just came upon a street scene in Hollywood that is some kind of a leaflet from the Hollywood chamber of commerce that says, don't try to break into the movies in Hollywood.
Yeah. Yeah. And actually it's a, yeah, it's a misleading title because it's in smaller text underneath that says until you have obtained full frank and dependable information from us, the chamber of commerce. Leave it to the Hollywood chamber of commerce to hedge their bets on everything, even back then.
Yeah, see, that's something that like marks [00:37:00] world away, and I don't know if it would something like that would exist. It was literally a flyer that they would give out to people at the bus depot, starstruck girls when they got off the bus, thinking they'd be discovered in front of the cameras in 24 hours or something.
And even back in the so called golden age in Hollywood, that was not the case, so they're saying, unless there's somebody who's got a job and their check is clear, offering you a job and the check is cleared the bank. You shouldn't come out here, but of course, millions of people did anyway.
Yeah. I know that at the bottom of this, yeah, it says out of a hundred thousand persons who start at the bottom of the screens, ladder of fame, only five reached the top, which honestly by a publicist, it does. And actually I think it's wrong because if. 5 percent of all the people who tried reached the top.
That would be an extraordinary number of actors who are actually getting [00:38:00] paid. Yeah, for Hollywood, those are pretty good odds, so I wish we, I'm sure there's a lot of people getting off the bus station, at the same bus people right now in Hollywood. I wish they could have odds like that.
And there's people that, there's people that gain somewhat success playing, we would call the old B pictures, there's a lot of B films, there's a lot of, There's a lot of million dollar films being made, and there's a lot of people working it. I don't know how much people are making money, but I know a number of people that go from show to show to show, and none of them are ever going to be a big star, or even a, a big, side kind of star.
They've got work. I've got a friend that makes money and doesn't support herself, but she does okay. Just going from game show to game show. That's something that she didn't make, she didn't get big as an actress, but she, she said she's won cars and cash and stuff on game shows because she's [00:39:00] photogenic and she's smart.
And so she can just hop from one game show to another. Sometimes I'll turn on the TV and she's the contestant on a game show, like people making it in Hollywood in different ways, or you can marry Basil Rathbone and throw lavish parties. There's different ways where you can support yourself in Hollywood.
You put, you find the sugar daddy or you become a sugar daddy, or find different ways where you can make Hollywood pay off for you, maybe that's what they mean by the 5%, I don't know. I love this picture of Jack Levin. Barbecuing in his backyard. Yeah, do you think that was staged or did he really barbecue in his backyard?
Did he have a butler that would flip the hot dog for him? Or did he Jack Lemmon seems like the sort of person that might've flipped his own publicist, all of them out there. And is that actually his house or was it a, a set on the back lot where, we're going to do, we've hired a photogenic actress to play your wife and play a couple Muppets to play your kids.
Kids that we're gonna work. We've invented this fictional family for you. There's good There's so much of there's there's so much of that [00:40:00] There's so much of that publicity picture where it states that you're talking about I used to see lots and lots of that stuff going through the archives and it's like It literally was stage stuff, even stage stuff on the lot, in the offices or, yeah.
All the one I love is the yeah. And oh yeah, like quiet on the set stuff. The guard at the door who's. Who's checking your ID before you come into the stage. Every bit of all that was like staged. They just, they probably didn't use a real security person. They probably took an actor and put him in a security uniform that they got from the costume department and, staged that thing there.
So are those real hot dogs that Jack Lemmon's flipping on the barbecue? Or are they made of rubber? Are they props?
Probably happens in other businesses too, but it's more prominent in Hollywood. But I remember seeing it. Yeah, I remember seeing a cartoon once showing a nerdy looking author who, with light glasses and, no physique and he looks like Woody Allen and they're, he's shaking hands with [00:41:00] this guy this guy with chiseled features and a cleft in his chin and patches on his, on, on his jacket and a publisher saying this is Cliff, he's going to be posing for the author photo on your own, on the jacket of your new novel.
Oh my God. Oh. Isn't it? Isn't it? Isn't it? What's his name? Kurt Vonnegut that always had an unusual photograph of somebody else as the author. I heard that. I don't know if it's true or not, but I heard that. I seem to remember. Kurt Vonnegut might have did. I seem to remember or, some other, personage or whatever.
That, in a beard and sunglasses that's not really him and stuff. Throw them off the trail. Hollywood is like that sort of thing. Amplify by, by a hundred or by a hundred thousand or cube by the power of three hundred or something. Everything is an illusion. It's it's fun to both.
Perpetuate that. I won't say it's not. It is fun to perpetuate that, but it's also fun to tweak it and look, look at these pictures with a little bit of [00:42:00] cynicism and say, is this legit or did they stage it just for the camera? And I try to leave it up to the reader to figure out what's hogwash and what's whitewash.
Jack Levin appears to be wearing a dress, which I suppose is really an apron. And he. Has the most ridiculous chef's hat on as he's barbecuing. So I feel like it was a little stage, but it's, you can go through this book and just leaf through it and just see something spectacular on any page. And then, you can now box of chocolates.
There's something interesting, no matter what you buy. I just, I didn't realize this, but so you have a shot of Batman and Robin leaping out of the Batmobile. On the Culver City lot, because they wrote into one of the episodes scene. I think the penguin was a movie director in, in, in one of the episodes of Batman [00:43:00] 1966.
And I suppose they were paying a visit to the lot for that reason. Yeah. Are you going to build a fake movie studio and you've got one in your backyard? No, you'll just move the camera, point the cameras outside and, pull the battle built into position. That's a favorite, that's a favorite kind of a scene slash trope of all kinds of television series, to We're coming from New York and we're going to Hollywood and then suddenly you're seeing behind the scenes on the stage that they film the thing that pretending to be New York.
Yeah, talking about an illusion. I love that. So I love the Hollywood set episode of a TV show. There was an Andy Griffith show episode where they went out to Hollywood. And they do it all the time. The Beverly Hillbillies had this whole cycle of episodes. Jethro started running this bought himself a movie studio with it with their oil money.
And there was some episodes of the Man from that were set in Hollywood. So they had you got to see, you got to see MGM Studios behind the scenes. And, [00:44:00] it wasn't a real behind the scenes, but it gave you an idea, like you said, you'd recognize the New York street play in a set that you'd recognize previously from a hundred movies where it played in New York.
So it's putting a frame around something that you've already seen a thousand times, giving you, they're giving you some context. And it, and there's modern, yeah there's current television shows that have done it. I've seen it on watching old versions of Castle or whatever, where they came out to Hollywood and suddenly, because they film a lot of it at Raleigh studios, I believe.
And suddenly they're there and even more. CSI, the original CSI occasion would come to Los Angeles for something and it would be, they'd be in L. A. Where they filmed it, mostly not Las Vegas, which is back and forth thing. Which is, it's
the exterior stuff, obviously, the second unit stuff, the helicopter shots of the Of the city and all that. Steve, was there [00:45:00] Any things that you found in the archive that kind of, you know produced some surprising revelations for you about hollywood or?
Anything like that in, in Mark's archives or in various studio archives and in, in Mark's archives, I'm talking about the book, but in this book, there's just stuff I really liked was the stuff where you really felt like you were peeking behind the, behind the pages between the pages of history and of the history books.
Like Mark had a. He found a, like a cocktail napkin or something like that was what the original was, like I had a copy of it. It was a doodle where someone drew a mountain. With some clouds and some stars encircling it and that became the mountain the logo for paramount pictures, you know So they must have my god Looked at the Adolf Zucor and Cecil B.
DeMille and they said what are we gonna call this company? What should we use for our logo and somebody doodle the mountain on? On the back of a [00:46:00] napkin or a place of matter something like that and you know that like how many times have we? Seen that mountain. I'm sure we've seen that mountain more times than any real mountain anywhere in the history of the world You It's not even a real mountain.
It's a fictional mountain, but yet, we could close our eyes and we can all see that logo. We probably know every crest and peak and rock on the side of that mountain because we've seen it. Hundreds of thousands of times over the course of our life. And that started with someone doodling on the, on the back of a piece of scratch paper.
A hundred years ago. God, I love that. That's the sort of thing where you look at it and say, this is this is almost, it's like a time machine. It's not like being there, but it's as close as we're going to come. It's like you were sitting at a table over and you saw someone doodling on the back of their cocktail napkin.
That's what happened. Seeing a picture like that makes you feel like, there's only a few artifact where you get that little tingle of recognition. And that, that one, I always thought was really exciting.
Amazing. Wow. Amazing. So we're we're at [00:47:00] about an hour now, so I don't want to keep our listeners. Too long today, but it's been an excellent time with you, Steve, and we're excited to promote your book. And hopefully we can get this linked up to some places where someone that's interested in this book could actually hear you talking about it, which I think is fantastic.
And I'm thinking at some point, maybe we need to get you and Mark Wanamaker. On and talk a little about fun talking to Mark. Mark's very accessible. He's, and he's very humble considering how important he's been in the history of Hollywood over the last 50 years.
And it's been a great relationship that I've been able to use and take advantage of year after year. So I was really happy when the publisher showed some interest in telling his story. Because it's a fascinating story that's never been told before and I'm really excited about it. And I hope he's as happy with the book as I am.
Excellent. So I have a question on the physicality of stuff. Is there [00:48:00] any opportunity to actually see this as a show or? Or at the Academy Museum, maybe, or some type of an exhibit where you could, see a lot of this stuff for real. I think it's a great idea.
Like all, he, all these companies use Mark. In fact, he's donated more material to the Academy probably than any other individual in their history. And he's still got, he's still got acres and acres of material stored away himself. And, he's slowly giving it to the Academy. And so I wish they would give him some recognition for the fact that he's been a patron, an angel for the Academy and for AFI and for all the major studios around town for decades.
I don't know what they would have done the last time. The last few, the last absent minded decades that the studios have had, he hasn't been there. So I wish, I'm hoping that this book will shed a little light on the fact that he has been doing such good work for so long. And I'm hoping, it'd be nice if they reciprocated some.
So if you're if the president of [00:49:00] the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences happens to be listening, I'd like to put a bug in his ear. Yeah we'll reach out to the Academy and see, because there are some people there. I'm not saying they're on our listeners list, but you never know.
We've been very fortunate to have you on yet again, Steve. Your work as a archivist, film historian is incredible in itself. And I know you actually do much more than that. And so thanks for taking the time. We appreciate it. Happy to help out. Yes. I feel like I've got friends on your podcast, so it's really fun to talk to you guys.
Excellent. Thanks everybody. We'll see you hopefully next week or although I keep saying see, this is audio, so we'll listen to you next week or you'll listen to us next week. Where we'll have a, another exciting show. We're out of here. Thanks, everybody. Have a good one. You've been listening to movie reviews and some serious nonsense with Tom Burka [00:50:00] and Greg Dyro.
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