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Cecile B. Demille

932-935 Vendome Street, Los Angeles

One of my favorite Laurel & Hardy comedy shorts is The Music Box, in which the boys are hired to deliver a piano to a house located at the top of a long flight of stairs. The boys struggle to push the piano up the stairs, becoming trampled by the piano in the process. Not until they reach the top do they realize there was a driveway that lead to the top! The film won an Academy Award for best short comedy subject at the 1931-1932 awards.

932-935 Vendome Street "Music Box" Stairs

The stairs that were used in The Music Box are still standing, located between 932-935 Vendome Street, just south of Sunset Boulevard in the Silver Lake neighborhood of Los Angeles. Above is a picture of how the stairs look today. Not only were the stairs used in The Music Box but they are featured in an earlier Laurel & Hardy film from 1927, Hats Off. In this film the boys were delivering vacuum cleaners.

Plaque located at base of The Music Box stairs.

At the base of the stairs you will find a plaque ackowledging the significance of these steps. The Los Angeles Cultural Heritage Board has made this location a cultural landmark. Not only is their plague but there is now also a street sign for this particular location.

Metro / Buster Keaton Studios, Hollywood, CA

Of the top three silent comedians this is what comes to mind: when I think of Chaplin I think "finesse." When I think of Lloyd I think "Sporty." When I think of Buster Keaton I think "daring." Keaton devised some of the most elaborate and dangerous stunts of any of the silent film actors. Not only did he do all of his own stunts he often played the role of stunt double for his fellow supporting actors. Many times Keaton would injure himself but that rarely kept him from continuing his work and I believe this, along with his well developed gags, made him one of the greatest.

Many of Keaton's most memorable films including Steamboat Bill, Our Hospitality, and The General to name a few, were made at the Buster Keaton Studio in Hollywood, CA. The main entrance to the studio was located at 1325 Eleanor Ave but the structures of this studio are long gone. In the vintage photo at the top you can see part of the Keaton Studios which eventually became the Metro studios. In the two photos below you can see the studio site as it appears today.

Note* There used to be a Buster Keaton statue that stood at this location but it has been removed. If you go to where the Eleanor street sign is and look at the ground you can see a plaque where the statue used to stand. I need to go back with a towel and clean it off though in order for a photo of it to show up.

Eleanor Ave & Lillian Way, Hollywood

Site of the former Buster Keaton Studio

Parva Sed Apta Apartments

The Parva Sed Apta Apartments, located at 1817 Ivar Avenue, just a couple blocks north of Hollywood Boulevard was the home to author Nathanael West while he wrote his screenplays and his most famous novel, The Day of the Locust. While living here West got to know the Hollywood neighborhood as it was during the 1930s, including the many different characters that were also part of this community. Some of the people that West met while living in this building are said to have been inspiration for the characters he created in his novel.

1817 N. Ivar Ave. Parva Sed Apta Apartments

When The Day of the Locust came out in 1939 it was not a commercial success. It wasn't until years later that the book would take off in popularity. Unfortunately, West died a year after the book came out in a car crash. West was driving home from a hunting trip and died the day after his good friend and fellow author F. Scott Fitzgerald who had a heart attack.

172 South McCadden Place, Los Angeles

Fridays in March the Silent Movie Theatre in Los Angeles is showing gothic films about Hollywood and not surprising one of the first films they showed was the 1962 classic Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? The story is about former child star Jane Hudson (Bette Davis) and her sister Blanche (Joan Crawford), a movie star forced into retirement due to a crippling accident. Jane takes care of her crippled sister in their old Hollywood mansion but increasingly mistreats her as her mental health begins an aggressive downward spiral.

Yesterday I went around an took some photographs of a few of the locations which can be seen in the film. They are almost all in the Larchmont neighborhood of Los Angeles near Paramount Studios. The first picture up at the top is the home where the characters played by Bette Davis and Joan Crawford live. Below is a screenshot of the house as seen in the film.

170 South McCadden Place, Los Angeles


Bette Davis going to Citizen News building in Hollywood

Yours truly at Paramount Studios backlot c. 2006

This is a picture of me taken a few years ago from one of the rooftops of the Paramount Studios backlot. It's one of my favorite pictures because you can see so much. If you look closely in the background you can see the famous Hollywood sign. Where all those palm trees are standing that is the Hollywood Forever Cemetery, the resting place for many old Hollywood stars, including C.B. Demille, Rudolph Valentino, and Douglas Fairbanks. In the left corner you will see a tall building wrapped in what looks like a white trash bag. That building stands on the corner of Sunset & Vine and is one of the towers that is almost destroyed in the 1974 Universal film Earthquake. Just to the right of that you can vaguely see what is the iconic Capital records building. And of course immediately behind me are the fake buildings that have been the backdrop for so many films, TV shows, and commercials. But, you know what I like about this photo most of all? No smog! That is a rare thing in Los Angeles.

Vintage Photograph - Echo Park, Los Angeles

Another great photograph I found while antiquing in Temecula is the above picture taken in Echo Park, Los Angeles. I have no idea who the gentlemen in the picture is but he seems like a pretty stylish guy don't you think? I wonder what his story is - what he was doing in Echo Park at the time? I'm guessing by the clothing that this photo was probably taken some time in the 1950s?

Even if you've never been to Los Angeles before you've likely seen images of Echo Park in the movies. The famous silent film director Mack Sennet built his Keystone Pictures Studio here in 1912 and everyone from Charlie Chaplin, Fatty Arbuckle, and Gloria Swanson have filmed here. Likely any scenes that take place near water in those silent films were shot at Echo Park lake. But, if you haven't seen any of those early films but the lake in the picture still looks familiar it's a good chance you saw the film Chinatown starring Jack Nicholson. Remember the scene where Jack is in the little rowboat? The below picture is a little closer to how the lake looks in the film. The lake can also be seen in L.A. Confidential and True Confessions as well as other films set in Los Angeles.

Photograph (C) Stevie Nelson

The Chutes, Los Angeles - Postcard

A couple weeks ago I took a trip down to Temecula, California for some wine tasting and antiquing and in one of the shops I found this great old postcard of The Chutes amusement park in Los Angeles. I have only seen a few images of the park before so I was excited to find an image of this little talked about extinct Los Angeles attraction for my own collection of images.

Chutes Park started as a trolley park in 1887. During the days of trolley cars in urban cities there would usually be some kind of recreational park at the end of the trolley line to attract riders during the weekends. These were places where people could come and picnic, watch concerts, see fireworks shows and other special events. The main attraction at Chutes Park was a flume type ride which dropped riders in boats from a 75 feet tower into a man made lake which you can see in the postcard above.

The Chutes Park was always growing, adding new attractions, including a theatre, miniature railroad, merry-go-round, seal pond, fishing pond, and even hot air balloon rides. In 1900 a baseball diamond was completed and it would be the home of a minor league baseball team called the Los Angeles Angels. Eventually the Angels would move from this location.

One of the first major movie companies, Vitagraph, is one that is hardly remembered today. Vitagraph was started in 1896 by two vaudeville comedians, Albert Smith and Stuart Blackton in Brooklyn, New York. The two comedians created films that they incorporated into their live acts, but when the films became more popular than their acts, the two actors invested themselves fully into the motion picture business. Like most film companies that started on the East coast Vitagraph would open a West coast location. The new Vitagraph Studios was opened in 1915 in the Los Feliz neighborhood of Los Angeles at the corner of Prospect Avenue and Talmadge Street. The lot can be seen in the forefront of the photo below.
When the Vitagraph Studios first opened there were 2 daylight soundstages, exterior sets and support buildings. Some of the first stars to work at this facility included the silent legends Clara Kimball Young, Wallace Reid, and even a pre-Hardy Stan Laurel. By 1925, Vitagraph was having financial troubles and would eventually be bought by Warner Bros. then a fast growing new motion picture company.

Warner Bros. already had a West coast studio located in Hollywood on Sunset Boulevard so the Vitagraph lot, now known as the Warner East Hollywood Annex, was used for the additional space. Many Warner Bros. films were shot at this lot from the mid-twenties to the late-forties. Some of these include The Jazz Singer (stage 5 is where the shot the interior club scenes), Public Enemy with James Cagney, and The Gold Diggers of 1933 with Ginger Rogers and Joan Blondell.

Mill Building where sets are constructed. Photo (C) Peggy Archer Photo (C) Michael Patrick Breen

The Prospect Studios 4151 Prospect Avenue