CineSavant Column
Hello!
This item might hand readers some fun, at least those curious about Hollywood real estate! Good old Michael McQuarrie has once again made my day, with a film clip link from ‘Mega.nz’ of 9 minutes of aerial footage of the Hollywood area, reportedly filmed sometime during the 1940s.
Somebody took a full reel of 35mm film from a moving airplane, that’s flying pretty darn slow; we thought ‘helicopter’ until an errant wing and tail slip into our view.
The perfectly clear images do several loops up and down Hollywood Blvd., essentially the same corridor that in the movie “1941” is lined with 4 and 5-story buildings. As you can see here, only occasional buildings are over two stories in height. The coverage begins at Hollywood and Vine, with The Broadway department store and I believe the Taft building, both of which were duplicated for the movie. The view then flies all the way West to almost La Brea, and turns back again. We can spot several theaters, the Pantages, the Egyptian, the Paramount (now the El Capitán) and finally Grauman’s Chinese with its walled forecourt.
↑ The picture just above comes from 01:49 on the clock that comes with the film clip. It shows the Chinese Theater just right of center. The big building on the left is the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel. By the way, not only did ‘1941’ give the Boulevard taller buildings (to make a trench for the planes to fly through, just like Star Wars), we relocated the landmark buildings closer together. The historic Hollywood USO was actually off on a side street.
After the aerial view hoses down Hollywood Blvd. a couple of times, we see some random shots I can’t identify, then Cahuenga Blvd. up until we see the Hollywood Bowl. We end up in The Valley, over two studios.
One of the last clips begins on the Universal Backlot, and then shifts East until we fly over Warner Bros. It moves over the dozens of sound stages to show the vast back lot of street fronts. By the 1970s most of those sets were gone, replaced by parking lots. The Warner lot was at that time shared by Columbia, and called The Burbank Studios.
↓ The second picture with all the arrows is a detail of a frame that pops up at 08:40. It’s the famed New York Street Set, that was never taken all the way down. The street fronts were all reconfigured many times, but this is where all the Hollywood Blvd. scenes from ‘1941’ were filmed.
The instructions to generate text failed me, so you have to put up with my crude letters and arrows. As you can see, all the fake buildings are about two stories tall, but they have no tops. Here’s the ‘legend’ for the diagram:
A. This, I believe, was the studio commissary in 1979. It had a little studio store up front. I only ate there once.
B. Walking downward on the photo, you get to the row of brownstone apartments, New York style, that resembles the street seen in many WB pix. Last month I mentioned Wait Until Dark. As you can see when you watch, there are so many false front streets that there might be another similar streetfront that is the real location for that movie. In the video the view pivots so you can see the front of the row of brownstones.
C. This is the front of the building that became the USO for ‘1941’, with the big neon sign that is shot down.
D. This corner has the traffic signal in ‘1941’ that John Belushi’s strikes when his P-40 fighter plane crashes and slides across the intersection. It was a real full-sized plane mock up, with no visual effects at all. An enormous ramp was built down the middle of the street, engineered by A.D. Flowers and Logan Frazee’s crack special effects unit. Steven had this expensive stunt filmed twice. On the first attempt a cable snagged and slowed the plane down, so it didn’t come off the ramp as fast as it should. The second take, quite a bit later, was perfect. When struck, the traffic signal fell halfway over, perfectly. Exactly the luck of Spielberg.
E. Right in front of that corner, a few minutes earlier, is where Dan Ackroyd’s M3 Lee tank comes to a stop, in the middle of a crowd of rioters. Tank rebuilder and driver Pat Carmen drove it at full speed down the row of brownstones and took a hard right turn into the intersection, running over a car on the way. The shots in the movie are not sped up. Pat skidded to a stop in a rectangle space kept empty for the tank’s final position. A fatal mistake would seem too easy, but Pat knew he could do it safely.
F. This is where the movie theater is, where Robert Stack stops to see Disney’s Dumbo. The street only looks broad — it’s hard to believe that a car could do a U-turn in it. A big car stunt takes place there as well, during a dialogue scene. No optical effects.
and
G. The tank ‘charges’ to this point from position E, so that Bobby Di Cicco can rescue Dianne Kay from Treat Williams. Without a cut it skids to a stop, overturning a big truck, which was actually overturned with a Logan Frazee / AD Flowers mechanical trick.
Here’s the link for the full video:
And this idea for a good item just occurred to me. Fifteen years ago I frequented two ‘acccumulator pages’ I really liked, that gathered eclectic art and thought pieces and obsessive little memes from various corners of the web-o-sphere, arranged as if in an art gallery. The coolest was Tom Sutpen’s “If Charlie Parker was a Gunslinger, there’d be a whole lot of Dead Copycats.”, and it was chock full of great art and frequent non-PC content, sometimes very non-PC content. It eventually disappeared, without being archived anywhere, it seems. [ That’s a good reminder to get serious about migrating some old DVD Talk articles over to Trailers from Hell. ]
But the second runner-up is still here, even if it is now a shadow of its former self. It’s called This Isn’t Happiness and has something of the same modus operandi, except that in recent years it’s become somewhat tame and bland. It’s still worth checking out.
The biggest lift I get from This Isn’t Happiness is manipulating the URL to reach back in time … if one goes back just a couple of thousand posts, it gets fascinating, with clever, artistic, witty, creative, inspirationsal, and sometimes erotic items. Some are themed. What you do is drop into the page, go the second page listed as “2”, and then change the URL so that ‘2’ becomes any 4 numbers between roughly 2,000 and 9,000. Here’s a random starting link, to page 6584. Nothing is dated, but every once in a while pops up an ‘obit’ photo that will give you a clue where in the timeline a post item fell. Current events are sometimes noted as well. Good luck! You’ll know right away if you like it, and if you do it will be addictive.
Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson