Pasadena Hillbillies: Having problems with the construction...

Pasadena Hillbillies: Having problems with the construction of that new house? Maybe 20th Century Fox will come to your rescue.

When the studio was searching for a site for the movie, “The Beverly Hillbillies,” it noticed an unfinished mansion on South Oakland Avenue in Pasadena.

“The building had burned down a number of years earlier,” said Ariel Penn, the city’s film liaison. “It was bought by a developer who had started to rebuild but hadn’t been able to finish. So it had sat there for more than a year with just the frame up. They (the studio) thought it was perfect--they could dress it themselves.”

In return for its use, 20th Century Fox said it would “be happy to stucco the building and put some finish on it,” Penn continued. “The developer agreed.”

The neighbors were so happy that they gave 20th Century permission to film a cattle drive on the street.

“Unfortunately, it got axed from the script,” Penn said. “Several of the neighbors were disappointed because they had scheduled picnics. They were going to have people over to watch a cattle drive.”

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Recalling Stan and Ollie’s fine mess: In contrast to the above, Hal Roach Studios once destroyed a real-life house--the wrong one--the late Hal Roach said in Kevin Brownlow’s “Hollywood, The Pioneers.”

In the 1929 movie, “Big Business,” Laurel and Hardy, as door-to-door Christmas tree salesmen, were supposed to get into a fight with a resident that culminated with them leveling the man’s home.

The studio had contracted with a couple on Dunleer Drive in West L.A., who had agreed to have their house knocked down.

The problem was, the film crew arrived at the wrong house, whose owners arrived just in time to see their place being devastated by the Boys.

Cut!

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No, it wasn’t Oliver Stone casting “JFK 2”: Parodying the far-out theories about the Kennedy assassination, the performance artists in the L.A. Cacophony Society recently held what they called “an unprecedented orgy of paranoia and disinformation”--a party in which guests were invited to dress as “your favorite suspect.” Hey, look over there--is that a grassy knoll or Castro’s beard?

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Hasn’t USC suffered enough?The losses to Notre Dame and UCLA, again. The failure to make the Rose Bowl, again. And now the 1993 Trojan football team is subjected to this blooper, which Richard Sinclair noticed in the San Francisco Examiner. If that newspaper were a football team, it could be penalized for taunting.

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The other F word: John M. Wilson noticed a new euphemism on Wilshire Boulevard--a rent-a-car agency that offers both domestic and “exotic” models. Notes Wilson: “Anything to avoid that dreaded ‘foreign-made’ backlash.”

miscelLAny:

L.A.’s Plaza Firehouse opened as Firehouse No. 1 in 1884 but later, after a dispute over ownership of the property, became a saloon, a boardinghouse (allegedly staffed by professional young ladies), a cigar store, a poolroom, a vegetable market and a Chinese drugstore . . . before becoming a museum in 1960.