60-SECOND APPRAISAL

For fallen silent film star Norma Desmond in “Sunset Boulevard,” idling outside the studio lot in her anachronistic Isotta-Fraschini limousine, the Paramount Gate was as eternal and mocking as the Roman Arch of Titus, a portal to her very oblivion. It was built in 1926, the year Adolph Zukor and Jesse Lasky moved their Famous Players-Lasky-Paramount studios to the present site off Melrose Avenue. Ornate and overblown, abutting the costumers’ warehouse on one side and the studio bosses’ sanctum on the other, the gate separated the manufacturers of stars from mere consumers. Studio craftsmen are said to have improvised its Spanish Mission design: the dual corkscrew columns, the elaborate scrolls and classical cameos, the black wrought-iron fence that conjures up a ghostly filigree of some vanished church (a bell tower and two votive urns perched atop the lintel did not survive the 1933 Long Beach earthquake). Today, the Paramount Gate stands as sadly diminished as poor Norma herself. With the extension of the studio’s southern border a block past the gate’s location at Bronson Avenue and Marathon Street, a “Melrose Gate’ has stolen the role as the grand entrance to the last great Hollywood studio lot. The usurper borrows so many design elements from the original that even the most clear-eyed former actor, returning to the studio after a few decades exile, would be tossed into confusion. The Paramount Gate has been stripped even of its legendary name. Now known as the Bronson Gate, it serves as a proscenium for pedestrians and golf carts.