To Live and Drive in LA

We have been run off our feet trying to do and see everything that we can in what little time we had in Los Angeles. Most of our time was spent driving from one place to another, the city is so vast and spread out, we usually had to take two freeways to get from A to B.

So anyway, Day Two (Friday June 8th) was a jam packed day. It all started with a visit to Warner Brothers Studios in Burbank (photo of the iconic water tower above).

This tour was everything we were looking for and more! Forgoing the more theme parked oriented Universal Studios, Warner Brothers is more a tour of a working movie studio. Constantly, we were standing in the way of people trying to prepare props and sound stages for use in television shows and movies.

The first stop on the tour (after an introductory video) was the backlot. This is where facades are constructed to suit whatever production is currently filming. The look of the buildings in this photo can be changed to accommodate any time period or location around the globe.
This photo in particular is interesting as it is a part of the backlot called Hennesy Street, named after Dale Hennesy, a production designer who built real metal fire escapes to these facades so actors and dancers could perform on them and not have the collapse! Hennesy died while working on the film Annie hence the reason this street was named after him. The building on the right is the original House of Wax from the Vincent Price movie, and to the left is the entrance to the shop where the Dad buys Gizmo in Gremlins!

To the left, our tour guide Josh (who was extremely knowledgeable and enthusiastic), and to the right, one of those Hennesy fire escapes. This one in particular was used in the movie Annie for the dance number accompanying "It's a Hard Knock Life". In the far background (you can't see it too well in this photo) is the fire escape used in the upside down kiss scene in the first Spider-Man film!

Next stop was the front lot where we saw street after street of these huge sound stages. We were allowed to see inside one, where the set was still up for a new sitcom called Sullivan and Sons. We got to see what it is like to be in a "live studio audience". What was curious about these sound stages is out the front of each, there is a plaque showing you when the stage was built and what films and TV series have been shot there:

Next up was the "garage". Here, they had on display many vehicles used in Warner Brothers films.

Including THE Gran Torino:

The Lincoln Continental from The Matrix films.

And the Batmobiles from Batman Forever...

And Batman and Robin.

We were hoping for the Tumbler from the new Batman film but it was touring country, appearing at auto shows to promote The Dark Knight Rises.

 

After the "garage", we were shown inside the prop house. This was an enormous warehouse filled with props as far as the eye could see, and all the men and women who build them. At one point we went through the workshop where prop masters and carpenters were hard at work creating new pieces as we watched.

Inside the prop house we were shown various pieces of interest.

Including Jack Lemmon's portrait from My Fellow Americans:

 And props from Saito's compound in Inception:

After the prop house we were driven by the largest sound stage on the front lot, use to make films such as; The Perfect Storm, Inception and Jurassic Park.

 

Speaking of Jurassic Park, we visited what they called "The Jungle" which is used to film jungle and rainforest scenes. The below photo is the strip they used for the T-Rex vs Jeep scene from the 1993 classic. 

 

At the end of the tour, we were shown into their "museum" where unfortunately, cameras were not permitted. In this room, there were props and costumes on display from many Warner Brothers productions including: Incerption, The Dark Knight, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Dirty Harry, Corpse Bride, Rock of Ages and, as it would happen, the Bat-suit vault from The Dark Knight Rises, fresh from the set. It was gorgeous.

Warner Brothers was so much fun. We wanted a proper movie studio tour and the WB delivered in spades.

After Warner Brothers, we decided to go to Hollywood Boulevard.

But we went to the wrong end of the street, not the tourist trap part, but the gross, depressing part.

But we did see some interesting stars on the Walk of Fame.

So we beat a hasty retreat for lunch and were directed by a local to the beautiful, art deco design of Union Station.

This gorgeous location was used in Blade Runner as the police HQ, and no wonder as it is one of the most picturesque buildings I've seen.

When we left Union Station we stumbled across a square near Cesar Chavez Boulevard inundated with Mexican markets.

Where we saw this fellow. His idea of busking was to dance to a prerecorded tape while balancing a bottle of water on his head!

Well, that was our Friday.

Stay tuned for more as Lindsay covers our Saturday tour of Downtown!