Oldest Active Studio Orders a Remake : Raleigh Budgets $25 Million to Curb Runaway Film Production

When it comes to doing something to curb runaway film production, Raleigh Studios, believed to be the oldest continuously operating movie studio in Hollywood, is doing its share.

Raleigh Enterprises, which bought the small, deteriorating studio in 1979, has been pumping millions of dollars into it for acquisition, renovation and construction.

The idea is to make the 10-acre property, which has a building dating back to 1915, more appealing to current tenants and potential users who are filming elsewhere.

So, as George Rosenthal, president and founder of the 22-year-old Raleigh Enterprises, views it, “Keeping the film business in Hollywood is one of our great goals.”

He calls Raleigh Studios a “facilities operator.”

“We do not shoot a foot of film,” he explained. “Most studios are directly involved in creating the product, getting the film in the can and putting it out there for distribution.”

Raleigh is more like a landlord.

Using the slogan “More Than a Lot,” Raleigh leases equipment as well as space--offices, stages and labs.

Its tenants are entertainment-related office users--among them, Bozo the Clown (Larry Harmon)--and independent producers, primarily--these days--of network TV commercials, although feature films are also shot and edited there.

“Lady in White,” starring Katherine Helmond (also in TV’s “Who’s the Boss?”), and “Nothing in Common,” featuring Jackie Gleason, were among those filmed at the studio last year, and several others had post-production work done there. The last Academy Award-winning film made there was “In the Heat of the Night,” starring Rod Steiger, in 1967.

The studio’s lot, which also has a restaurant and modernized screening rooms, occupies a square block, bounded on the north by Melrose Avenue; south by Clinton Street; east by Bronson Avenue, and west by Van Ness Avenue. The Polar Palace, where Sonja Henie and other Olympic skaters were trained, was built in 1929 on a corner of the lot, but it burned down in 1962.

Raleigh Studios was recently expanded with the purchase of an apartment house on the east side of Van Ness. The units are being turned into offices, and a parking structure and design building are planned on the rest of the site.

New construction is already under way on the lot itself. A power substation was just completed (studios use a lot of electricity), and work has begun on a four-story, 40,000-square-foot office building. Another like it is planned.

Three new sound stages, with support facilities, are also being built, with two expected to be completed in April, a third in July. The studio already had 10.

Many of the stages, including the new ones, are immense. Two of the ones nearing completion can be combined for a length of 240 feet. They are 136 feet wide and 45 feet from floor to grid.

The sizes are unusual in Hollywood, where many existing stages--even three at Raleigh--were built to accommodate television sets, which are small in contrast with those used for motion pictures.

Tom McGovern, vice president of Raleigh Studios, said many sound stages are being opened in old supermarkets and stores, but there are few new ones the size of the ones being built at Raleigh and, for that matter, few large ones of any age available for independent producers of television commercials.

These producers often need big stages. “Like the Big Mac commercial, which was done on our old Stage 1. You know--(the) Mac-Tonight (ad campaign)? That was a remarkable set,” McGovern recalled, “and remember the TransAmerica commercial a couple of years ago--the one with the gorilla climbing up the side of the building? That was also done here.

“You need height to do these grand commercials.”

This and other needs of producers, especially of network commercials, helped save Raleigh from becoming a K-Mart in 1979.

Rosenthal explained:

“We initially bought the property to tear the studio down, but after analyzing the situation, we thought it would be much more exciting and rewarding to work with the studio.”

It was a different kind of venture for Raleigh Enterprises, which owns the Sunset Marquis Hotel & Villas and Westwood Marquis Hotel in Los Angeles as well as hotels in Texas and Aspen, Colo. It also operates a hotel in Phoenix and just got the go-ahead to develop a $60-million, 200-suite hotel just off Parliament Square in London.

The studio was barely making ends meet when Raleigh Enterprises bought it.

As Fred Jordan, who has been associated with the studio since 1961 and owned it for three months before selling it to Raleigh, remembered it, “We were just hanging on, that’s all.”

Jordan, who is president of Raleigh Studios, helped convince Raleigh Enterprises to save the studio and spend some money on it, but Jordan gives Rosenthal all the credit: “He was a man with the dollars, the courage and the vision, and I like what he’s done.”

The first thing Rosenthal did was plant trees. Then he ordered the buildings painted. At first, the budget for fixing up the studio was $10 million. Now it’s $25 million.

The increase doesn’t seem to bother Rosenthal, who said that if he had a Christmas wish, it would be to make the studio even larger--”but it’s almost a physical impossibility.”

Indeed, he’s been having so much fun giving Raleigh Studios new life that he says, “We’d love to buy another studio.”

In December, he bid on Laird Studios in Culver City but lost out to Gannett, the nation’s largest newspaper publisher, and former NBC Chairman Grant Tinker. If Rosenthal had won, he says, “we would do the same thing that we’re doing at Raleigh.”

The same thing--focusing on TV commercials--was a dramatic change for the studio from the days when major motion pictures and such early TV hits as “Gunsmoke” and “Have Gun, Will Travel” were routinely shot and edited on its grounds.

Jordan said, “The reason we started having commercials filmed here was that runaway production, which started in the late ‘60s, was huge. For us, it was a matter of surviving.”

In the studio’s heyday, the biggest names in the business worked there.

As McGovern put it, “When we’re asked who worked here, we like to say, ‘Who didn’t work here?”’ Some actors and technicians even lived there.

Bob Hope, Frank Sinatra and Blake Edwards had offices on the lot, he said, and Douglas Fairbanks built a bungalow, which is still there.

That was before he married Mary Pickford in 1920, the same year he made the “Mark of Zorro,” a year before he made “The Three Musketeers”--all at what is now known as Raleigh Studios.

It was known then as Fairbanks Studios. Fairbanks leased much of the lot in 1919 and painted his name on a couple of buildings, said Marc Wanamaker, a historian who specializes in Hollywood through his Beverly Hills firm, Bison Archives.

Through subsequent years, the lot was known, at various times, as Tec-Art Studios, Inspiration Pictures, Enterprise Studios, California Studios and, most recently, Producers Studio--but it was owned by William H. Clune until he died in the 1940s and after that, by his heirs.

Clune, who owned two downtown Los Angeles cinema houses and was a backer of D. W. Griffith’s classic “Birth of a Nation” (known as “The Clansman” when it opened in one of Clune’s theaters), bought the studio property in 1915 from Famous Players, said Wanamaker.

Famous Players owned it briefly after a showman named Charles Frohman drowned with the sinking of the Lusitania, he added. The site was used as a studio for the first time, possibly before 1915, by Frohman’s Fiction Pictures. Before that, it was probably a horse farm.

Famous Players became Paramount and eventually built a studio across the street, Jordan said, so in a sense, Paramount got its start on Raleigh’s property.

United Artists also traces its roots there, he noted, as Fairbanks moved and started that company with Pickford, D. W. Griffith and Charlie Chaplin, who often visited Fairbanks on the Raleigh site.

“And a company named CBC (for Harry and Jack Cohn and Charles Brandt), which made short subjects under the name of Waldorf, moved (some of their operations) onto the lot in 1922,” Jordan said. “Later, CBC established a studio on Gower called Columbia Pictures.”

Howard Hughes had an office on the Raleigh Studios site before he took over RKO, Jordan continued, “and Herbert Yates was here before he left to build Republic Films. Ziv also started here.” And Disney had a unit, or department, there in the ‘30s while its studio was being revamped.

“Review, the production wing of MCA that became Universal, also filmed on this lot,” Jordan said. At the same time, Review filmed on other lots in town.

Jordan figures that the Raleigh site was used as a studio before 1915, because he has photos predating buildings constructed that year, showing other structures long since razed.

As for the 1915 office building that is still standing, few movie-type structures in the area were built earlier.

The most noteworthy is the 1880-era horse barn where the first feature-length motion picture, the silent movie “The Squaw Man,” was filmed in 1913. The barn, at Selma and Vine streets, was deeded to Hollywood Heritage and moved in 1983 to the Hollywood Studio Museum on Highland Avenue across from the Hollywood Bowl.

So Raleigh has some of the newest and oldest studio buildings in town.