Struggling Before the Congestion

Marvin Coil became a messenger at Universal Pictures in 1930. He has been with Michael Landon Productions since 1958, first as a film editor, now as associate producer in charge of post production. Coil, 78, and his wife, Olive, live in Studio City. My father was a policeman in Detroit, three of my brothers were also policemen. When he retired we came out here and my mother said, “We need the money, you got to go to work.” I should have finished high school, but I wasn’t the worst one off out here. It made it a little bit more difficult for me to get moved up like other people did with the bigger educations, but it worked out all right. I’ve been in the studio business all my life.

I bought this house in 1940 and moved in in January of ‘41, so I’ve been here 50 years, next year. It was a very small, three-bedroom home and we paid $4,400 for it, house and lot, in the heart of Studio City. It was brand new.

My payments were $29 a month, and we were only making $26 a week so we had a little trouble making them. We were trying to raise a family at the same time and it became somewhat of a problem for a while, until we got it worked out.

We worked out a budget with coffee cups. Every payday she would take so much and put in a coffee cup for the house payment, put in another coffee cup for the groceries, and another coffee cup for our gas bill and our electric bill. That was the only way we could do it.

And you couldn’t rob from one cup to another. So it was difficult, but when I look back on it we were really disciplined living on that money, because we didn’t dare go in debt like they do today.

In the Depression there was no money at all, so consequently we were brought up through the hard stuff and we did not get in debt. We didn’t know if the Depression was going to come back in six, seven months or a year or two, so we just kept ourselves above water by putting our money in coffee cups, and it worked out all right.

Now the real estate dealers come here and say, “We can get you $400,000 for this house.” I say, “Yeah, but I got to find something else and we’re comfortable here.”

This area was beautiful, absolutely gorgeous. It was such a nice neighborhood that we did not lock a door in the house for the first 12 years. Today, we not only lock them, we’ve got deadbolts on them and we’ve got security systems.

When we moved out here to the Valley there weren’t over 35,000 people. Now what have you got, a million and a half? The Valley exploded after World War II, absolutely exploded. You could almost see the eruption, it was that bad. You could count the cars every day, it would go from two cars to six cars, to 12 cars. It kept going up.

I still love the Valley, I love the heat, I love the trees, I love everything green at this time of year. The only thing I don’t like is the congestion that has been created.

We’ve had our share of problems in this house. We lost one child to leukemia when he was 9 years old. We had a boy and a girl. My wife has had cancer four times. She’s fine today, but that went on over a period of six or seven years. Six years is tough.

We had no insurance, everything was out of your pocket. I walked away from the hospital bankrupt, I had practically nothing. I said, “We’ll do it, don’t worry.” So we did it. There’ve been times when we didn’t have the security we have today.

We may not have the energy we used to have, or go dancing like we used to do, but we’re happy. We’ve got everything, and we’ve got the house fixed up, this deck is just perfect in the summertime. We’ve got the best of life at this point, but it’s been a struggle at times to get here. You can do it, it just takes determination and discipline in your younger life.