Saul Pick, 85; Developed Cinerama Dome, Rebuilt Columbia Studios

Saul Pick, one of the largest single land owners in Hollywood, who built the Cinerama Dome, redeveloped a corner of Sunset and Vine, and turned the abandoned Columbia Studios into the biggest independently owned television and movie facility in Los Angeles, has died. He was 85.

Pick died of pneumonia May 8 at UCLA Medical Center.

A German concentration camp survivor, he arrived in Los Angeles with little money and did not speak a word of English. But by the late 1950s, he had begun buying and developing many familiar Hollywood landmarks.

In addition to building the Cinerama Dome in 1963, Pick built the two buildings on the southwest corner of Sunset and Vine that house the Hollywood headquarters of Bank of America and Wells Fargo Bank.

He also turned the former KHJ-TV studio on North Vine Street into a thriving independent television facility that was bought by ABC in 1970.

Pick also built the first high-rise hotel on the Sunset Strip. Originally called Gene Autry’s Hotel Continental when it opened in 1963, it is now called the Hyatt West Hollywood, but may best be known as the Continental Hyatt House.

But Pick’s biggest project was the old Columbia Studios lot at the intersection of Sunset and Gower.

The onetime fiefdom of studio czar Harry Cohn and the former home of director Frank Capra, the “Gower Gulch” studio had fallen into disrepair when Pick and partner Nick Vanoff bought what was considered a white elephant in 1976 for $6.2million.

Several years earlier, Columbia Pictures had moved to the Warner Bros. lot in Burbank, which became the jointly owned Burbank Studios, and many of the old Gower lot’s sound stages had been converted into indoor tennis courts.

But Pick and Vanoff, seeing an increasing demand for production space, renovated the studio, whose antique doors, carpeting and even toilet seats had been looted.

By 1981, the renamed Sunset-Gower Studios had become a bustling lot, with ABC renting a third of its 16 stages and some 50 other tenants, including film director Robert Wise.

“There was no sense of history and no sense of what it had been until Saul took it over,” said longtime tenant Paul Junger Witt, a television and film producer (“The Golden Girls,” “Soap”) who began his career at Columbia in the mid-1960s.

“When Pick-Vanoff took over the studio, it was in disrepair, and Saul painstakingly restored what was salvageable and built what needed to be rebuilt and managed to save a true Hollywood landmark.”

In 1983, Pick and Vanoff also purchased the landmark Aquarius Theater, which previously had been the Moulin Rouge nightclub and the Earl Carroll Theatre.

They converted it into a state-of-the art television theater that for nine years was the home of “Star Search” and today is the Nickelodeon Theater.

Witt, who knew Pick well, marvels at the man and his legacy.

“To experience the Holocaust and come to this country and build a new life and leave behind important landmarks is testimony to a truly remarkable individual,” Witt said.

The son of a tax attorney, Pick was born in Bendzin, Germany, which is now part of Poland. He was an engineering student when he was drafted into the Polish Army and captured by the Russians three days into World War II.

As a prisoner of war, he managed to escape twice, first from a Russian POW camp and later from a Nazi prison camp, but was recaptured.

Pick met his future wife, Mala, in a forced-labor camp, but they were separated when he was sent to Dachau, where he spent the last two years of the war.

Pick’s parents and four of his eight siblings perished at Auschwitz.

After the war, Mala tracked down Pick in a former German hospital, where he was being treated for typhus. They were married in Munich shortly after their reunion.

In 1947, the couple immigrated to the United States, and moved to Los Angeles where his wife had relatives.

Pick found work as a carpenter’s assistant. But after about a year, he came home one day and declared, “I can’t work for anybody else.”

Tapping into the post-war housing boom in Los Angeles, he began manufacturing aluminum doors and siding for houses.

By the late 1950s, he had moved into real estate by buying both the southwest and southeast corners of Sunset and Vine.

“My dad was an incredibly optimistic man and a dreamer and builder who, after the experiences in the war, felt anything was possible: It was a miracle to be alive,” said Pick’s son, Mark, the managing partner of Sunset-Gower Studios.

Assemblywoman Jackie Goldberg (D-Los Angeles) remembers Pick as a man who not only took care of his own Hollywood property but “looked out for the area. He tried to encourage other businesses to do repairs.”

Goldberg, a former member of the Los Angeles City Council, said Pick also “did a lot of things that were very quiet,” such as making sizable donations to homeless outreach programs and making annual donations for after-school groups in the area.

“He was of the old school, which was a person who looked at the bottom line, but he also looked at something other than the bottom line; he wanted to know how the community as a whole was doing.”

Mala Pick died in 1977.

In addition to his son, Pick is survived by his second wife, Karen; his son, Bernard, two grandchildren; his brother, Moritz; and sister, Sala Magier, all of Los Angeles.