Phantoms of the Back Lot : Fire Leaves Embers Where Much of Universal’s Movie Magic Was Made

Once, years ago, when I was doing a story on the back lot at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer for West magazine here at the paper, I imagined what a great location it would be for a mystery. With its crazy-quilt of streets and structures and cultures, tumbled together like a child’s dream, it seemed alive with stories, and ghosts.

I even conjured up a quick synopsis about an old actor, crazed by a life of failure, who dwelt undetected among those fragments of old plots and foraged out to take his revenge on those he imagined had thwarted his career.

And as I watched part of Universal’s great back lot go up in those fittingly cinematic flames on television two nights ago, I thought of all my roamings on Hollywood’s back lots over the years, and it struck me again that the back lots have always had an eerie, poignant and provocative life of their own.

If you are a movie buff, of course, it is engrossing to walk the back lots and try to remember where you might have glimpsed that storefront, that seedy hotel entrance, that waterfront cafe, that theater marquee, that picket fence. (Didn’t Andy Hardy park his first roadster there?)

Where there are embers now on the Universal lot, Robert Redford and Paul Newman had conned their way through “The Sting.” It had been Kansas City for Clint Eastwood and Burt Reynolds in “City Heat” and any place you could wreck a car for John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd in “The Blues Brothers.” It was made to shake for “Earthquake” and Diana Ross filled it with sweeter sounds in “Lady Sings the Blues.” And most recently, it was the splashy big town backdrop for Dick Tracy and his gal Tess Trueheart.

Most back lot sets change roles as frequently as the actors themselves. But the Norman Bates “Psycho” house became a landmark, and there are still the false fronts and the billboards that created turn-of-the-century Manhattan for “Hello, Dolly!” on the lot at Twentieth Century Fox. But at Universal as elsewhere there were also the generic shops that became a hundred different cities or maybe a thousand, or the clapboard houses that stood on Main Street in villages in every state in the Union, the boardwalks that heard the clink of spurs and the sound of hoofbeats.

It was the closeness of one culture to another that made the back lots--I suppose Warners must be the most extensive one left--so bizarrely enchanting. Marseilles abuts Manhattan, which adjoined the jungle or who knew what else. Tarzan, misjudging a swing, could have lit in Boston.

Walking a back lot should have been entirely destructive of illusion. The doorways lead to nowhere. Squinting through the grimy shop windows you are likely to see only some loose boards or a length of old rope or the ancient leavings of some crewman’s lunch. The buildings are all sham--fronts and an occasional side, and the enduring granite of the bank building is seen to be gray-painted plywood that has begun to curl at the edges.

All illusion, all fakery. But that turns out to be the peculiar and alluring charm of back lots like Universal’s. Even more than real places, they somehow remain suffused, or haunted, with the presences of all those who acted out their celluloid tales in those spaces, taking their pratfalls, tearing their hearts out, running to embrace lovers, fleeing the stalking peril--making the illusions believable because we wanted to believe them.

In a day that wants even heavier infusions of reality, the back lots have been relatively less used. Many of the structures, as you stroll about, look long abandoned and perilously dry in a dry climate. It is not surprising that all back lots have been prey to fires, despite the fact that the studios maintain their own fire departments.

What goes up in flames, or, as at MGM, under the developers’ bulldozers, is not necessarily that valuable in dollars. But it was the priceless proof of a special kind of genius. The “Once upon a time,” “Tell me a story” tradition that is as old as speech itself was brought up to date in the 20th Century by wizardly men and women who imagined how to find Tahiti in a bucket of sand, fashion ancient Rome with some plaster of Paris and carved linoleum or create the whole world, plus occasional glimpses of heaven and hell, on a chicken ranch in the Valley.

The films live on in their ghostly ways, but the ghosts themselves will need new quarters.