Your definitive source to filming locations and all things Hollywood!
If you’re a big midcentury fan, you were likely immediately enamored of the Gulf + Western offices from the Paramount Plus series The Offer. You can read all about the glorious space, which is located at Los Angeles Center Studios, in my latest post for Dirt.
Fans of The Offer should be sure not to miss my latest post for Dirt about the extensive role Paramount Pictures plays on the new series.
In early March, my friend Tony, the fellow stalker who has the amazeballs On Location in Los Angeles Flickr photostream, wrote a comment on my post about the duplex where George Valentin (Jean Dujardin) lived in The Artist alerting me to a blog named Silent Locations. The blog, which is authored by business lawyer/film historian John Bengtson, features a six-part column chronicling several locales that appeared in The Artist and their connection with various silent films made during Hollywood’s heyday. I highly recommend checking out the feature and the site in general. It is fabulous! Anyway, one of the places mentioned in the column was Red Studios Hollywood, the exterior of which stood in for both the exterior of Kinograph Studios in The Artist and Maroon Cartoons in 1988’s Who Framed Roger Rabbit. So I dragged the Grim Cheaper right on out to stalk the place on a very windy Sunday afternoon two weekends ago.
The site where Red Studios Hollywood now stands was originally founded as Metro Pictures Back Lot #3 in 1915, long before the company joined forces with Goldwyn Pictures and became Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. During its Metro heyday, such films as Scaramouche, Little Robinson Crusoe and The Champ were filmed on the premises. Beginning in May 1946, the lot went through a series of different owners, the most prominent of whom were Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz. The showbiz powerhouse couple leased the property in 1953 and turned it into the very first Desilu Studios, where they shot seasons 3 through 6 of I Love Lucy. In 1974, the lot became known as Ren-Mar Studios, an independently owned and operated facility where various production companies were able to rent out studio space. Legendary television producer David E. Kelley made his home there in the 80s and shot Picket Fences (one of my faves!), Chicago Hope, The Practice and the first two seasons of Ally McBeal. In January 2010, the lot was sold yet again, this time to Red Digital Camera Company, who renamed the place Red Studios Hollywood.
A few of the countless other productions that have been filmed on the premises over the years include The Golden Girls, The Dick Van Dyke Show, the first four episodes of Seinfeld, The Andy Griffith Show, Make Room for Daddy, Lizzie McGuire, NewsRadio, Empty Nest, Monk, and, most recently, True Blood. The series Weeds was also filmed on the lot, back when it was Ren-Mar, and during Season 4, after Agrestic burned down, producers had Nancy Botwin (Mary-Louise Parker) move to a fictional seaside town named “Ren Mar” in honor of the historic studio. Love it!
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In The Artist, the back entrance of Red was used as the main entrance of Kinograph Studios, where George Valentin worked at the beginning of the flick.
As you can see above, that area was changed drastically for the movie – so much so that it is virtually unrecognizable today. A huge false front was built over the actual studio entrance for the filming and the Hollywood Rounder blog was lucky enough to get to watch it being constructed. You can check out some very cool pics of the construction here and here, the fake security guard kiosk here, and the finished product here.
Interestingly enough, when Peppy Miller (Berenice Bejo) is shown being dropped off at a location that is supposedly directly across the street from the Kinograph entrance, she is actually on New York Street at Paramount Studios, in front of the building that is used regularly as the Boston police station on Rizzoli & Isles.
At one point in The Artist, George is also shown walking in between some of the Red Studios Hollywood soundstages.
The area where he walked is denoted with a pink circle above.
In Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Red’s main entrance on Cahuenga Boulevard stood in for the entrance to Maroon Cartoons, where the famous animated hare worked.
The courtyard just beyond that entrance was also used in the filming.
That area is denoted with a pink circle above.
On a Who Framed Roger Rabbit side-note – while doing research prior to writing this post, I came across a blurb in The Worldwide Guide to Movie Locations book which, in reference to the flick’s title, stated, “No, there is no question mark, as it’s considered bad luck in a film title.” I had never before heard that bit of trivia and found it interesting, especially since my good friend Owen, of the When Write Is Wrong grammatical errors blog, had recently written a post which mentioned WFRR’s punctuation error. Superstition or not, I think the flick really needed the mark in its title and I found myself inadvertently adding one each time I typed “Who Framed Roger Rabbit” in this post. I guess some habits are hard to break.
The music video for Britney Spears’ hit 2000 song “Lucky” was also shot at Ren-Mar and the exterior of the studio is visible in the MTV Making the Video special about the production.
You can watch Part I of the Making the Video of “Lucky” by clicking above.
Until next time, Happy Stalking! 
Big THANK YOU to fellow stalker John Bengtson, from the Silent Locations blog, for finding this location and to fellow stalker Tony, from the fantastic On Location in Los Angeles Flickr photostream, for pointing me to John’s site!
Stalk It: Red Studios Hollywood, aka Kinograph Studios from The Artist, is located at 846 North Cahuenga Boulevard in Hollywood. You can visit the official Red Studios Hollywood website here. The area of the studio used in The Artist can be found on Lillian Way, in between Willoughby and Waring Avenues. The studio’s main entrance on Cahuenga Boulevard is the entrance that stood in for Maroon Cartoons in Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Red Studios Hollywood is not open to the public and does not currently offer a tour.
Well, I guess it is finally about time that I start blogging about my wedding, but I can’t very well do that without first writing about the place where I got almost all of my wedding planning inspiration – the Studios at Paramount Pictures in Hollywood. When Mike, from MovieShotsLA, and I embarked on our very first VIP tour of the historic lot back in September of 2008, our fabulous tour guide, Ian, who sadly no longer works at the studio, mentioned that sections of Paramount could be rented out for parties, weddings, and other special events. And even though at that point in time I already knew without a doubt where I wanted to get married, the thought of tying the knot at Hollywood’s oldest continuously operating studio definitely piqued my interest. Especially once Ian told us that it was possible to rent out the New York Street backlot area, which is quite possibly my very favorite place in all of Southern California. So, pretty much immediately after the Grim Cheaper proposed, I called up the Paramount Studios Special Events Department and scheduled a tour of the lot’s various event venues. And, let me tell you, it was an amazing experience! The special events tours are actually very similar to the VIP Tours in that all of the same areas of the studio are shown. The main difference, however, is that the event tours are private, so ours consisted of only four people – my two parents, the Grim Cheaper, and me – which was absolutely INCREDIBLE! The special events coordinator who we dealt with, a super nice man named Craig who I believe no longer works for Paramount, was extremely knowledgeable about the history of the lot and where various filming had taken place over the years, so the entire two-hour affair pretty much became a private, walking tour of the lot which was customized just for me! And, as you can imagine, I absolutely loved every single minute of it!
Events at Paramount can pretty much be held in any section of the 65-acre lot, making the party possibilities absolutely endless. Available venues include empty soundstages, each of which can hold up to 1,500 guests and can be completely decorated and customized based on each particular event;
the B-Tank, which is a 914,023 gallon water tank that can be filled and dressed to resemble any sort of water setting one can imagine;
any of the studio’s park areas, including Production Park;
and Lucy Park, which I’ve blogged about previously;
any of the lot’s theatres, including the historic Paramount Theatre;
and the smaller Gower Theatre;
the famous Bronson Gate and water fountain area, which can accommodate up to 500 people;
and, of course, New York Street.
As luck would have it, a huge breast-cancer awareness fundraiser was being set up in the New York Street section of the lot during our tour, so we were actually able to see firsthand what an event in that space would look like. And I have to say that it was absolutely AMAZING! I honestly don’t think I’ve ever been more inspired in my life than I was when I set foot onto New York Street that day and witnessed the extravaganza pictured above.
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Because the fundraising event incorporated three of the things that I love most in this world – New York, Hollywood, and filmmaking – I was completely in awe of the whole thing and my brain immediately started working on overload. All of sudden, idea after idea started pouring into my head and it was at that moment that I decided that the Grim Cheaper and I would be having a movie-themed wedding. Which in retrospect really seems like a no-brainer, but for whatever reason, up until we visited Paramount, the thought had never occured to me.
The most inspired wedding idea that came to me while at Paramount was that we could name each of the reception tables after various movies that had been filmed on New York Street and that, upon arrival, each guest would be given a card with a movie line written on it. Each line would correspond to one of the tables and our guests would have to figure out which movie their particular line came from in order to find where they would be sitting during the reception. And even though we didn’t end up getting married on New York Street, we did use that idea for our tables and our guests absolutely LOVED it, but more on that in a future post.
Even though I absolutely loved the idea of getting married on New York Street, the GC and I ultimately decided against it. As my best friend Kylee said after viewing the above pictures of the breast cancer fundraiser, a wedding – especially one as small as ours (we only invited 80 people) – would wind up getting lost in the spectacle of the space. The venue is much better suited for a party – a ten-year anniversary party, perhaps 
– rather than a wedding ceremony. Oh, and there was also the little matter of cost! Renting New York Street will run you $12,500, which may sound like a lot, but is, amazingly enough, a fairly average venue rental rate for the L.A. area. (According to msn.com, Los Angeles is one of the most expensive cities in the US to get married!) The New York Street backlot area measures a whopping five acres and can accommodate up to 5,000 people and while it, according to the Paramount Special Events website, can now be customized to suit smaller groups, that wasn’t actually the case when we were thinking about getting married there. Even though we only wanted to utilize a small portion of New York Street, we would have been required to rent the entire five acres, which is actually fine – I expected that. What I didn’t expect, though, and what we were not told until we received the actual proposal, was that we would also have to pay to light the entire backlot as well – at a cost of $12,000!!!! – even if we were, in actuality, only going to light a small section of it. And, mind you, that $12,000 only covered “washing” the street in light, so that the space wouldn’t be pitch black during the reception. If we wanted any sort of specialty lighting, that would, of course, be an additional cost. There was also a fee of $3,500 just to power the event. I’m not kidding! And because Paramount hires only in-house employees for its events, you also have to pay union wages for absolutely everyone who works it – from the lighting technicians to the catering staff to the parking attendants. Besides paying union wages, you also have to adhere to union regulations, the most maddening of which was the fact that every employee must be paid for a minimum of six hours of work, whether they worked a full six hours or not. So, while I knew that getting married at Paramount would be pricey, I had no idea it would be as exorbitant at it actually was. Our proposal came to a whopping $41,000 for a pretty bare bones wedding – no open bar, no appetizers, no specialty food. The GC literally almost choked when that email came through! And keep in mind that that $41,000 did not include a DJ, a photographer, ceremony musicians, a dance floor, flowers, or the mashed potato bar that I had my heart set on. As the old saying goes, though, you get what you pay for, and a party at Paramount would have, no doubt, been nothing short of incredible!
Even though we did not ultimately choose to tie the knot at Paramount, I am so incredibly thankful that we considered it. Our wedding would have been a very different event had we not. And now at least I know where I want to hold our ten-year anniversary party.
Until next time, Happy Stalking!
Stalk It: Paramount Studios is located at 5555 Melrose Avenue in Hollywood. If you are interested in hosting an event on the lot, you can visit the studio’s special events page here or you can call (323)956-8398.
As I’ve mentioned a few times before, this past October, my good friends from Switzerland came to visit my family for a few weeks. While they were here, I decided to take them on a Hollywood studio tour. The only problem was I couldn’t decide exactly which Hollywood studio tour to take them on. So, I got Mike, from MovieShotsLA, on the phone and the two of us had a very in-depth discussion about it, carefully weighing all of our options. Not kidding – you should have heard the two of us. 🙂 Anyway, we quickly narrowed down our choices to either the Paramount Studio Tour or the Warner Brothers VIP Studio Tour. And even though I was leaning towards Paramount, Mike convinced me that because the WB Tour covers the overall studio experience, it would be the best choice for those stalkers who had yet to visit a movie studio. Paramount is geared more towards us die-hard stalkers, in my opinion, which is probably why I like it the best. 🙂 So, with our tour location finally decided upon, the four of us headed out bright and early the following morning to stalk the WB. This was actually my third time stalking the lot and it really is true what they say – no two tours are alike. I already want to go back for a fourth time. 🙂 Sadly, though, our tour guide left quite a bit to be desired on this particular venture. We still had a blast while there, don’t get me wrong – it’s pretty hard not to have fun on the WB lot – but, for whatever reason, our guide was a grump pretty much the whole way through. She also seemed to have a pretty high opinion of herself, which didn’t help my opinion of her. 😉
She even got a bit testy with me at one point, after bringing us to the Central Park portion of the lot and asking if anyone knew what television show it had been featured in. I, of course, raised my hand and said “It’s where Phoebe runs weird on Friends!” to which she snapped, “Well, you must have been on the tour before, which is the only reason you’d know that!” I wanted to explain that I had actually known the answer to that question while on my first WB tour, but I was afraid she’d pretty much bite my head off if I did! So, since it was obvious she didn’t appreciate stalkers, I kept my mouth shut for the remainder of the tour. The other disappointing aspect of the day was that Hennesy Street, which is one of the WB’s New York areas, Midwest Street, aka Anytown USA, and the Jungle area were all closed off to tour groups due to filming. 🙁 The Witches of Eastwick was actually the production being filmed on Midwest Street and we were very briefly allowed to venture over to the outskirts of that area to take a peek at what was going on, but unfortunately no photographs were allowed. Anyway, aside from Debbie Downer and the fact that numerous areas of lot were closed off, we had a great time on the tour. 🙂
The tour began the way it always does, with our guide driving us via golf cart through the very same studio gate that Carrie Bradshaw drove through in the Season Three episode of Sex and the City entitled “Escape from New York”. LOVE IT! 🙂
Our first stop was the old ER hospital set which has all but been dismantled. 🙁 So sad! While the hospital entrance and L Train track will be left up to be used by future productions . . .
. . . the area behind the large brown double doors which used to contain the ambulance bay and waiting room set, is now just empty space, as you can sort of see in the above photograph.
The way it used to look is pictured above. You can see more photographs of the old ER set on my two previous WB Tour posts which can be viewed here and here. According to our tour guide, ER’s Jumbo Mart Diner set is going to be left intact to serve as the studio’s tribute to the longest running medical drama ever to air on television.
Our next stop was the Nate’s Bar & Grill set from ER, which is also being left intact to be used by future productions. Nate’s Bar & Grill is what’s called a “practical set” in studio terminology because both its interior and its exterior can be used for filming.
Unlike the facade pictured above which has no interior area.
As you can see in the above photograph, Nate’s Bar & Grill lacks a ceiling, which is actually typical of movie sets. The ceilings of sets are always left open so that lights and other production equipment can be hung above the area being filmed. That’s often how I can tell if something was filmed in a studio or on location somewhere – if a ceiling is shown onscreen, that’s pretty much a dead giveaway that the production was filmed at a real life location. 😉
Located just outside of Nate’s is a very realistic looking subway set, which was extremely cool to see being that we had just returned from our New York trip a few days beforehand. 🙂
Our next stop was the the Embassy Courtyard, an area which was used in the 1999 made-for-TV movie Annie, in the television series Without a Trace, Hotel, and, as you can see in the above screen captures, Chuck .
We also visited New York Street, which is not to be confused with Hennesy Street, the lot’s other Manhattan-like area. New York Street has been used in the movies The Big Sleep, Blade Runner, Yankee Doodle Dandy, and The Last Samurai, for which the entire area was dressed to look like 1870s Japan.
Located on New York Street is the movie theatre facade pictured above, which was featured in the “New York and Queens” episode of The Drew Carey Show in which Drew and the gang challenge Mimi and her friends to a Rocky Horror Picture Show/Priscilla Queen of the Desert dance-off.
That very same area was also featured in the Season One episode of The Mentalist entitled “A Dozen Red Roses”.
We also briefly visited the Warner Village area of the lot, where we saw “New Christine’s” apartment building from the series The New Adventures of Old Christine.
Our next stop was the soundstage used in the filming of the television show Chuck, a series which I have never before seen. But I was extremely excited to see the set nonetheless because it was modeled after the very same apartment building featured in the movie ‘Til There Was You – an apartment building which I have not only stalked, but also blogged about. 🙂 I cannot tell you how cool it was to be seeing that set in person, as it looks very much the same as its real life counterpart. Love it! And while our tour guide did let us know that the Chuck set was based on a real life apartment building, she mistakenly told our group that said building was located in Los Feliz, which is actually incorrect. The building, which is named El Cabrillo, is actually located in Hollywood. I didn’t dare correct her, though, since she had already made it pretty clear that she didn’t care to hear any information I had to share. 😉 We also got to venture inside the characters’ individual apartments, which really are located directly off the building’s courtyard area. Unfortunately no photographs were allowed inside of the Chuck soundstages, but you can see what the set looks like in the above screen captures. When I asked our tour guide why the area was off-limits to cameras she said it was to prevent spoilers, i.e. if a crewmember accidentally left something on set that gave away a future plot point and then a tour group came in and took pictures of the set and then those pictures somehow wound up on the internet ;), fans might figure out the future plot development and stop watching the show. Which I think is pretty silly reasoning, but c’est la vie.
No WB VIP Tour would be complete without a visit to the car museum, where we got to see several vehicles from The Dark Knight, including the Batmobile;
the Bat-Pod motorcycle;
and the Stealth Launch Batmobile; all of which my best friend, Robin, the only guy in the group, loved seeing. 🙂
Also on display was the Ducati 996 motorcycle from The Matrix Reloaded;
the “Shaguar” from Austin Powers in Goldmember;
Clint Eastwood’s Gran Torino from the movie of the same name;
the Nerd Herd car from Chuck;
the General Lee from The Dukes of Hazzard;
several vehicles from AI, including the Hovercopter;
the Ford Angila from Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets;
and a 1969 Lincoln Continental from The Matrix, along with a wax figure of “Agent Smith”.
The best part of the tour for me, though, had to be when we got to see the Central Perk set from Friends. Granted, I’ve seen the set twice before on the two other WB Tours I’ve attended, but this time we were actually allowed to venture ONTO the set, walk around, touch things, and even sit on the furniture! YAY! Let me tell you, I just about DIED I was so excited! (Those are my friends Doina and Stephanie sitting on the Friends couch with me in the above photograph.)
And I just HAD to take pictures of absolutely EVERYTHING!
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Well, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again – I HIGHLY recommend taking the WB VIP Studio Tour! Even with a craptastic tour guide, it’s still a fabulous adventure to have in L.A.
Until next time, Happy Stalking! 🙂
Stalk It: Warner Brothers Studios is located at 3400 Riverside Drive in Burbank. Tours run every 30 minutes Monday through Friday from 8:20 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. Advance reservations are recommended. Tickets cost $45 per person. You can learn more about the tour here .
