DREAM FACTORIES : Historical Drama
If the ghosts of movies past roam studio back lots--and it’s hard to visit such places and not believe they do--then the recently refurbished Sony Pictures Studios in Culver City is where they’re likely to feel most at home. At a cost of roughly $100 million, only a fraction of the $2.7-billion losses the company wrote off last month, the former home of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer has been renovated in a manner befitting both the grandeur of the site’s history and the ambition of its present owners.
This was hardly happenstance, according to Peter Guber, the former chairman and chief executive officer of Sony Pictures Entertainment who conceived the project. “A major entertainment company benefits greatly from having a creative center of gravity,” he said. “But we didn’t want it to be only state-of-the-art; we wanted it to be state-of-the-heart. The historical significance of this lot had to be preserved and advanced.”
MGM, founded in 1916 and once the most glamorous of studios, was first sold in 1985 and passed through four more or less indifferent owners--”Not even a coat of paint had been put on since that sale,” Guber said. Enter Sony in 1990. The company, which owns TriStar and Columbia, repainted everything, from a dull tan to a cool gray, restored the elaborate ironwork of the original gates on Washington Boulevard and the charming vintage buildings on the lot’s once-prestigious A Street. Then, under the supervision of Kenneth Williams, senior vice president of corporate operations, it went further.
Recognizing that the lot’s most architecturally interesting structures, including the 1936 Irving Thalberg Building, were in the Art Deco style, Guber and Williams made this the redesign’s leitmotif. Existing Deco touches on sound stages were highlighted and a 1 1/4-mile-long perimeter wall with Deco flourishes was built.
They also used the Deco style to improve the look of many boxlike buildings. A terrazzo and stainless-steel lobby and a gaudy but graceful orange and pink neon sign now announce the Cary Grant Theatre, and the studio commissary has been turned into the ocean-liner-elegant Rita Hayworth Dining Room, complete with George Hurrell photographs of the Columbia actress.
Some of the most obvious changes are the false fronts on a series of drab, windowless buildings once relegated to storage and now used as offices. The result is a playful Main Street, with fanciful signage for stores such as The Sporting Age (with costumes and pictures from Columbia’s “A League of Their Own”) around a town square dominated by the Frank Capra Bank clock. It all looks real enough to function as a working back lot, and, in fact, was used as such TriStar’s recent “Cops and Robbersons.”
Typifying the nostalgic spirit of the remodel is the proliferation of enormous, hand-painted copies of old movie posters. Though the most visible ones are placed on 40-foot-high turrets at the lot’s two entrances (“Lawrence of Arabia” and “Lost Horizon” at Columbia, “Terminator 2” and “The Natural” at TriStar), the most impressive is near The Grill restaurant: a huge reproduction of a German poster for Columbia’s 1935 Peter Lorre feature “Crime and Punishment.”
A great deal has been done as well to the technical interiors on the lot, and Sony is especially proud of its new high-definition video facility and the Imageworks special-effects unit. But ghosts probably don’t care that much about new machines, and just this once, it might be nice to let them have their way.
