Day 3.1: "Paramount is Paradise"

"Hi, good morning. Aren't we lucky?
Going to work with Cukor
Paramount is paradise
Movies from A to Zukor"
-- from Sunset Boulevard, the musical by Andrew Lloyd Webber

Due to my lifelong love of movies, I abso-freakin-lutely LOVE to visit movie studios. To date, I have toured Warner Bros. (3 times), Paramount (twice now), Disney (twice now), Universal (twice, though it's really more of a theme park ride), Jim Henson Studios, Sony (formerly the MGM lot), and EUE Screen Gems (in Wilmington, NC, for those of you going "Huh?"). No trip to Hollywood is complete without a Studio tour (and secretly, I'd love to be a tour guide myself just once).

My favorite lot is Disney, for sentimental reasons. My favorite tour is Warner Bros., which I've done the most and has almost become a tradition. Each time I've done it, the Vistor's Center was in a different place. WB was also my very first tour, back in January of 1998, on my very first trip to Hollywood.

Another sentimental favorite, for both similar and opposite reasons, is the Paramount tour, which I also did in 1998. Ever since then, I'd planned to return, but the Universe (or so it seemed) conspired against me for various reasons. The biggest one of all was that Paramount stopped doing tours for several years following 9/11. Which was a real shame (though quite understandable), as it's a very historic lot and the only one of the majors actually in Hollywood.

This year, over fifteen years later, I finally made it back. And for the most part it was well worth the wait. For me it was a fun walk down memory lane, the excitement of seeing a studio again, and the surprise of seeing what was different. There were three major changes, two of which involved technology. The first was transportation -- the old tour was all-walking, but the new tour has multi-seat golf carts, like WB. Our guide also carried an iPad, on which she showed us various photos and video clips. She also had a walkie-talkie system where she had a microphone and we all wore earpieces. That certainly made it much easier to hear and was a great addition.

After checking in and meeting our guide, she took us over to the Studio Store where we could grab some coffee or buy a souvenir. We'd also have time to do the same afterwards. Another interesting change: usually my tour guides are aspiring actors, but ours aspires to a career in marketing. A nice reminder that not everyone in Hollywood is there to be famous.

Our first stop on the tour was the Paramount Theater and the famous Bronson Gate. Paramount has several arched gateways, with the Bronson Gate being the most well-known. It was featured in Sunset Blvd. (when Norma returned to the Studio) and shares a special link with Charles Bronson. Most people think that the gate was named after him, but it was the other way around. Young Charles Buchinsky used to hang out at the gate (which was also by the casting office) every day looking for work. When a producer finally offered him a job on the condition that he change his name, he felt "Bronson" had brought him luck, so he stuck with it.

Right by the gate is the Paramount theater, a big, state-of-the-art movie theater on the lot. Like the TARDIS from Doctor Who, it looks much, much bigger on the inside. They use it for special screenings, studio previews, editing, and more. They even use the lobby for filming. 

Like everything else at the studio (such as office buildings that look like motels), everything is designed to be used for shooting. The Paramount lobby can easily double as a hotel lobby, and our guide showed us a clip from Clear & Present Danger where they did just that.

Inside the theater us amazing. It's not nearly as fancy as the Chinese, but the rows are wide and the seats are huge andunbelievably comfortable. Our guide said that they were First Class airline seats. This is the ultimate place to see a movie (maybe one day).

Right outside the theater is the Forrest Gump bench (or one of them, actually -- there were a few -- one of which used to reside in Savannah). I also saw this fifteen years ago. The back is extra straight to help Tom Hanks sit up straight as Forrest. We were told that one day he came back to the lot dressed in costume, sat on the bench and handed out chocolates all day.

Side Note: Every time I go on a Studio tour, they always give the standard speech about how it's a "working studio" and how to behave should we see a celebrity. Then they offer a humorous story about how somebody famous chased down the golf cart or handed out chocolates all day. But in all the studio tours I have done , I've yet to see anyone famous. The closest I ever came was LOST Writer/Producer (now Bates Motel) Carleton Cuse at Disney, but he's it. I've also never seen the sets for shows I actually watch, but that's for later. Just my luck, I guess. On the flip side, I've seen plenty of famous people in NYC.

Okay, back to our regularly-scheduled programming. Next we hopped back in the cart and headed off for the soundstages. Another side note: While the carts are great in saving a lot of walking, it can be harder to take pictures as you're whizzing by. I missed L.L. Cool J's car from NCIS: LA for this reason. Though I did manage to snap their "secret entrance."

All of the soundstages (around 30 total, as I recall -- Paramount is a big lot) have plaques outside which list notable movies and TV shows which have filmed there. One interesting standout was Stage 25, which has only been used for TV, so the entire (and much larger) movie section is entirely blank. Especially of note is Stage 9, which is also known as the Star Trek stage, since most of the TV series and a couple of the feature films have shot there.

Next we drove through The Alley, so named because it looks just like a... back alley. Like the New York streets on the back lot, it's much easier and cheaper to shoot on the lot than to cart all their equipment downtown, deal with the noise, crowd control, and so on.

One of the main spots I remembered from my previous tour, and the highlight of the Paramount lot, is the water tank parking lot. It's basically a big sloping swimming pool that's about 4 feet on the deep end, behind which is a big wall painted with clouds that looks otherwise like a drive-in movie screen. This is where Moses parted the Red Sea in The Ten Commandments, Kirk and Spock saved the whales in Trek IV, and Truman escaped his TV set world in The Truman Show. It also provides, ironically enough, the best view of the iconic Paramount water tower.

The only odd thing is that it also doubles as a parking lot. On both of my visits, it was full of cars. John asked the obvious (and, according to our guide, most asked) question: what do they do with all the cars when it's full of water? They have valets that park the cars in the offsite lots (like where we parked) and anywhere else they can.

From there it was off to one of the most exciting parts of the tour: the New York Streets on the backlot. This area is full of facades, with each street designed to look like a different area of NYC: Greenwich Village, Soho, Brooklyn, the Upper East Side and Upper West Side (actually, opposite sides of the same building), and the Financial District. There was one lone street that looks like Chicago.

Other studios rent these streets all the time, which is very expensive, but much cheaper than location shooting. Most interesting is the fact that renters are allowed to do whatever they want to the buildings, including blowing them up, but on one condition: they have to put everything back the way they found it. That includes making it not look "too nice." For this reason, most crews don't blow up the buildings -- they just blow out the windows in a big fireball. Our guide showed us a clip from Knight and Day that did just that.

One of the coolest things was actually going inside a couple of the facades. Most of them are only a few feet deep. Some are deeper, and a couple have full-sized interiors for filming characters inside and outside at the same time. For the really narrow ones, sometimes they'll put a big photo of the interior set on the back wall to make it look deeper. That's what WB did for the exterior ER set for E/R.

One of the more interesting features in this area was the pair of Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman doors in one of the brownstones. It's a pair of doors that look exactly alike, except that one is taller than the other. They shoot Tom walking out of the short door and Nicole walking out of the tall door, and they look the same height. Just another bit of movie sleight-of-hand.

About this time a scouting crew came up and told us that we couldn't photograph anything on the back lot and asked us to delete our photos of one particular direction. This is normal if an area has been dressed for a shoot (like the next street over, which was dressed for Glee -- if you look past the dumpster with the orange chute in the photo below you can just get a glimpse of it), but that wasn't the case here. Didn't make any sense, so I just pretended to delete my photos.

From there we actually walked through the Glee street set (once again, I always get to visit the sets for shows I don't actually watch). Apparently, the current season takes place in NYC. One building was a pizza parlour, which is only just a few feet deep and has a big photograph on the back wall of the interior set. Just enough room for the actors to walk in the door.

From there we drove over to the Financial District, which looks just like the Wall Street area of NYC. There are big square holes in the sidewalk where they can drop in entire trees, planters and all, to dress it up for whatever time of year they want. Right next to the planters was a subway entrance. The steps mostly lead to nowhere, with just enough room for a costume rack so that the extras can go down, do a quick change, and then come back up as someone else.

Then it was back over to the soundstages, where we actually got to go inside one. This was Stage 30, home of The Doctors, which is right next door to Dr. Phil on Stage 31. 

Both are produced by Dr. Phil's son, and having them side-by-side makes it easier for folks to go back and forth between the two. We got to sit in the audience area and look around while our guide explained what goes into making an episode of the show.

Our final major stop, which I also greatly remembered from my previous tour years ago, was the former Desilu Studios lot, which was owned by Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball. It used to sit adjacent to the Paramount lot, until Lucy sold it to the studio. As part of the deal, she made sure that they took Mission: Impossible and Star Trek. Not a bad deal for Paramount. Across from the Lucille Ball Building (Lucy's offices), were her and Desi's dressing rooms. They met on a movie called Too Many Girls, and later divorced for that exact reason. 

The grassy courtyard out front was build to look exactly like their back yard. Lucy got a lot of flack in the press for being a working mother, so she did photo shoots that made it look like she was at home playing with the kids. She also set up a day care on the lot for her employees, one of the first of its kind. After the divorce, she had Desi's door sealed up. The workers did such a good job, later construction workers had to cut another door to access the room.

As we made our way back to the Studio Store, we got a glimpse of the Hollywood Sign. Paramount is the only lot from which you can see it. 

We passed by the Studio Cafe (no luck on going in and looking around) and stopped at a kiosk which featured photos from several of their biggest hits and Best Picture winners.

Have to say, the Paramount tour was just as good as I remembered it. If not a little better. John enjoyed it, too, especially the mix of history and the behind-the-scenes look at real movie magic.