EARLY STUDIO TOURS IN ‘MECCA’ SERIES

The “L.A.: Mecca of the Movies” series continues with “Motion Picture Studios of Hollywood and Los Angeles,” a delightful, informative and historically priceless two-hour program of studio tour movies and other shorts on the motion picture capital, spanning the years 1915 to 1931. The program will be presented at 7:30 tonight by film historian and archivist Marc Wanamaker at the Workman and Temple Homestead, 15415 E. Don Julian Road, City of Industry.

It’s only fitting that Universal, which today has the most famous studio tour of them all, was already in the business when the studio moved to San Fernando Valley from Sunset and Gower in 1915. Its tour film of that year is a wonderful record of the hectic atmosphere that those who worked there then were able to recall decades later with affection mixed with the memory of fatigue.

Taking full advantage of the medium’s silence, studio mogul Carl Laemmle had multiple productions cranking away assembly-line fashion, cheek by jowl on often tiny, easily knocked-down sets--all in view of the visiting public. (Their tour film of a decade later records a somewhat more sophisticated atmosphere and considerable expansion of the handsome, now long-gone Mission Revival complex.)

Wanamaker rightly considers “A Tour of the Thomas H. Ince Studio, 1920-1922” one of the best of its kind and an invaluable record of the actual working of the film industry at that period. Ince is considered the father of the efficiently managed studio system with its specialized departments, and although there are lighthearted shots of Ince taking his exercise and of his stars at their decidedly stagy ease, his tour film shows how movies were made, all the way through post-production. Happily, his 70-year-old facility remains remarkably intact as Laird Studios, soon to become Culver City Studios.

Also in the program are several shorts made soon after the advent of sound in 1927 that look back on the Hollywood-L.A. film industry, barely two decades old, with surprising nostalgia. “The Ghosts of Hollywood” (1931) is a wistful record of decaying studios, including Mack Sennett’s, then undergoing demolition. Ironically, the film’s mournful sentiments were by and large premature: the ancient studio on Occidental Boulevard, with its glass-roofed silent stages that looked abandoned 56 years ago, is still in business--and even a portion of Sennett’s studio still stands on Glendale Boulevard. The point is that the Hollywood film industry, while scarcely preservation-minded, has never hesitated to recycle its facilities to save a buck.

Wanamaker has also included some bits and pieces of film from Cecil B. DeMille’s private vaults. They include bloopers made during shooting, and also glimpses of a smiling, playful DeMille--in poignant contrast to the grand, humorless “spokesman of the industry” he had become by the ‘30s. “Motion Picture Studios of Hollywood and Los Angeles” is history at its most pleasurable. (818) 968-8492.

EZTV, 8547 Santa Monica Blvd., will present at 8 p.m. Friday through Sunday (and again March 27-29) John Hunt’s 20-minute “Henry Miller, 84, No. 2” (1976) and D. Mosier’s 80-minute “William S. Burroughs: The Dossier/Re-Search Interview” (1985). About the only thing these two iconoclastic authors would seem to have had in common is an admirable command of the language. In the first, a jovial, vigorous Miller recalls the struggles he had in becoming a writer. The second is a very hard go for the uninitiated as we listen to Mosier question Burroughs on such weighty matters as death, immortality, religion and the possibilities and implications of mind control, all of them discussed at length by a somber Burroughs in the context of his intricate metaphysics. (213) 657-1532.