Backlot
Started: 2024-04-13 11:29:30
Submitted: 2024-04-13 17:48:50
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Visiting the Warner Bros lot in Burbank for a movie studio tour
The first thing we did in Hollywood on Friday, the 5th of April was head to the Warner Bros studio tour in Burbank, just on the other side of the hill. Our route to the studio took us past the huge sound stage buildings, each painted in the same shade of tan and numbered in large numbers, visible over the perimeter fence at the edge of the studio lot.
Our tour started in a darkened gallery that set up the history of the studio. Here I learned that there actually were four brothers in the Warner family who founded the studio (which seems obvious, but I didn't want to jump to too many conclusions). There were some artifacts from the studio's history, and displays on the walls identifying movies and tv shows the studio was proud of (that we might recognize), showing clips from some of the movies. There was a history display that mentioned that "DVDs changed everything" in the 1990s, which was true, but hadn't been updated after 2018 to mention that streaming has also changed everything, and continues to change everything as studios like Warner thrash around making stupid decisions about their streaming platforms.
We watched a short video introducing the studio tour and the magic of movies, which featured a number of Warner Bros movie stars (not all of whom I recognized, but most of them were identified by name in the closed captions). We headed outside to board a 14-passenger van-sized golf cart to see the studio backlot. We started in the "jungle" section, which is used to stand in for any number of vaguely-tropical and sub-tropical locations, including a recurring location in True Blood. We passed a set being taken down after filming a scene for Abbott Elementary, and a very-gothic-looking house surrounded by jungle. The road we were driving on, we were told, had been used to film the Jeep chase scene in Jurassic Park, after a hurricane prematurely ended production in Hawaii.
We left the jungle and the scene shifted abruptly to a suburban street, lined with single-family houses, winding into the distance. These houses were real buildings, but inside each building were production offices; the interiors are shot on sound stages elsewhere on the lot.
At the end of the street, the scene shifted again, as abruptly as a jump-cut in a movie, to an office park (a real office building, used by studio execs, but also used as the exterior for anything needing an office park), and emerged into the center of the purpose-built backlot, a network of roads and alleys that can be dressed for any scene. Our guide jostled for a parking space and we stepped out onto the sidewalk in the middle of a generic town square, surrounded by four stories of building facades devoid of any identifying marks, awaiting the next production design team to set the stage ahead of filming.
The stripping of identifying marks went as far as to remove all of the door handles and light fixtures on the buildings. (Having replaced multiple door handles and light fixtures myself, I can confirm that minor changes in the appearance of a few highlights can significantly alter how a space is perceived.) In multiple places I saw bare wires hanging from the walls, waiting for the next light fixture.
We took an access door hidden in the facade and ended up in a dead-end alley lined with fire escapes, used to film any scene needing a brick-lined alley, including the upside-down kiss in the 2002 Spider Man. (The brick construction was itself a skin, a thin layer of foam rubber embossed to look like brick and painted to look weathered. In places the layers had worn through but the effect sort of looked like weathering.)
Our guide told us that one particular set of stairs (pictured above) had been used to shoot the cover art for Purple Rain, and I can see how that would work.
As we walked around the backlot, our guide told us that most of the doors and windows on upper floors didn't really go anywhere, because the entire building was just a facade. If actors needed to get up onto the rooms, or the fire escapes in front of them, they had to be lifted on a cherry picker from the street for the scene.
Our guide told us many of the locations in the backlot where various movie scenes were filmed, many of which I didn't recognize. This basement staircase, we were told, was the location for the shop in Gremlins where the gremlin was purchased.
Most of the buildings on the backlot were thin facades, but some had rooms on the ground floor that could be used as stages. One of them was the green storefront on a corner, which is apparently used as a setting for the current season of Abbott Elementary.
Inside the set we could look into the ceiling, where beams sat waiting to hold lights for production, and air ducts carried air conditioning to compensate for the heat of the lights. The set was undressed, waiting for the next production to arrive to set up whatever furniture and set dressings they required.
(One of the problems I had was remembering precisely which studio had produced or distributed or filmed a particular movie or show. It seemed like it would be gauche to talk about a movie filmed elsewhere, even if the backlots look similar. The studio was proud of their involvement in Ted Lasso and Shrinking (the gift shop at the end even had AFC Richmond merchandise), even though the shows stream on Apple TV+.)
We returned to the van-sized golf cart and continued driving around the backlot. The clouds that had been lurking in the sky suddenly intensified and began pouring rain, which only lasted a couple of minutes until the sun came out again and the rain subsided. While it was raining we drove past the exterior set for Abbott Elementary, with a black tarp covering the entrance to protect it from the rain.
Around the corner from Abbott Elementary was a square with the "Friends Fountain", which was apparently an important piece of iconography from the tv show I never actually watched. (The fountain was originally located on a different property, but Warner moved it here.) There was a fiberglass replica of the "Friends couch" set up right in front of the fountain, and we waited in line to get pictures on this apparently-important piece of American culture. I was more interested in the neo-classical building overlooking the square, looking like it could be a bank built in the 1930s. This was apparently used as the Gotham City Police Department in the Adam West version of Batman.
From there our tour turned to the front of the lot. We drove between the massive windowless sound stages, each painted a uniform shade of tan. Some of the stages had red lights illuminated outside, indicating that they were filming inside and asking us on the outside to be quiet so we didn't disturb the scene. Each of the stages had a sign that showed some of the major productions that had been filmed there. Many of the stages dated back to the early days of the studio a hundred years ago, and the movies listed on the stage go back that far. So much of movie technology has changed but the stages remain, because all they need to be is a big soundproofed windowless box in which they can build whatever scenery is required for a particular movie.
We drove past the prop department, where they store and catalog every prop ever used in a movie, and looped back to the middle of the lot. Here the guided portion of the tour wrapped up and we were delivered to a satellite visitor's center with a series of self-guided exhibits.
The exhibits started out with a high-level overview of how movies are made, starting with a spec script that gets backing to go into production. To illustrate this they had a stack of scripts reaching to the ceiling, each one a hundred or more pages crudely bound together with a plausible-sounding movie title hand-written on the spine, with Argo on the top. The room had a tiny representation of a writer's room, with whiteboards showing the story beats in each act of a five-act TV drama, and character beats for each main character in the show. There was an exhibit on casting, on storyboards (illustrated with scenes from The Matrix Reloaded), costume design, and production design.
Next was a set from Friends, recreated as a photo opportunity where people could line up to sit in the apparently-important couch in the middle of the set. (We skipped this part of the experience.) Around the corner were the apartment and cafeteria sets from Big Bang Theory, also set up for photo opportunities. I lingered here a bit longer, since I've actually seen some of the show, so I at least recognized the set. It was still a little weird to see it out of context, with a crowd of people replacing the fourth wall (where the cameras sat for the show, in front of the studio audience).
Around the corner was a series of displays about special effects, including some models and miniatures, plus a practical forced-perspective set, recreating a version of any scene in which Gandalf sits at a table with a hobbit. I took the bigger chair in back, and Calvin got the small chair up front, and it looked like we were different sizes sitting at the same table. (We switched places for another photo, but I kept looking at the monitor off-camera showing me the camera's view of the scene, and I couldn't stop grinning at the visual gag.)
We watched a presentation on sound design (showing the same scene from Gravity with different sounds), and looked at some interactive exhibits on Foley effects and ADR, which wrapped up the end of the mid-studio self-guided tour. We were in the middle of the studio lot and the only way out was to catch another van-sized golf cart back to the visitor's center at the edge of the lot. Here there were one last set of galleries with exhibits on three Warner properties: Game of Thrones, Harry Potter, and DC Comics. I would not consider myself a serious fan of any of those properties, but I at least know enough about DC Comics (Warner has spent the last decade thrashing about trying to figure out how to make a decent superhero movie, while their neighbors down the street at Disney have been cranking out so many Marvel movies that they've successfully saturated the market.)
The last thing we saw on the way out to the gift shop was the advertising blimp from Blade Runner, hanging over our heads in a glass display case. We exited via the gift shop (which had a bunch of stuff across various properties, including red leather jackets with the Wonder Woman logo), then left the lot in search of lunch. It was interesting to be able to see the backlot and the stages where movies are made.
I took more pictures on the Warner Bros studio tour at Photos on 2024-04-05.
