The Dream Factory of old Hollywood

David Niven gives his impressions of the bustling movie factories of Hollywood at the time of his arrival in California as a would-be actor in 1934:

'Eddie Lowe taught me much about Hollywood in the weeks to come. He tried valiantly but unsuccessfully to arouse the interest of his producer friends in my stagnant career and personally gave me a conducted tour of one Dream Factory in which he worked. He drove me around the cosily-named Back Lot, a two-hundred-acre spread, upon which stood the permanent sets, including New York streets (some smart, some brown stone), New England, French, and Spanish villages, medieval castles, a railroad station complete with rolling stock. Lakes with wave-making machines and rustic bridges, a university campus, an airliner, a section of jungle and another of pine forest, a Mississippi steamboat, a three-masted schooner, native canoes, submarine, a stretch of desert with ruined fort and in case anything was missing, several acres of carefully dismantled, dock and stored, streets, villages, cathedrals, mud huts, dance hall skating rinks, ball parks, theatres, vineyards, slums, south plantations, and oriental palaces. Lowe also took me to the Studio's Western ranch; several hundred acres of rolling hill the San Fernando Valley upon which stood the permanent townships and Indian habitations. 

Huge tracts of make believe were necessary to Hollywood because air travel was in its infancy and if, for instance, a film was set in Venice, canals, churches, palazzi, gondolas and bridges would soon be conjured up locally. Small wonder then, that Gone With The Wind was filmed in Culver City, Mutiny on the Bounty just off Catalina Island, The Charge of the Light Brigade in the San Fernando Valley, The Hunchback of Notre Dame adjacent to Vine Street, The Ten Commandments behind the Western Costume Company, The Adventures of Marco Polo a hundred yards from the city gasometer, and Scrooge's breath in A Christmas Carol imaginatively photographed in a vast refrigerator near the Ambassador Hotel. 

Under Eddie Lowe's sponsorship I spent days wandering about the Back Lot, and also the main studio at the heart of the Dream Factory where for some reason the buildings, car park and streets were uniformly white or pale yellow thus extracting the maximum amount of glare from the cloudless California sky, and where the whole place resembled a mixture of the business district of a thriving small town and the maintenance area of a busy airport. Twenty or thirty towering, hangar-like, sound stages clustered together, dominated the centre, surrounded by the Fire Department, the generator turbines, the electrical grid, the transportation, construction, carpenter and plasterer departments, camera and electrical stores, wardrobe departments, legal departments, acres of dismantled 'sets' and furniture repositories, 'tailoring' and 'dressmaking' shops and ever widening circles of photographic studios, painters' stores, cutting rooms, make-up, hairdressing and sound departments, projection rooms and theatres, rehearsal halls, orchestra recording theatres, accommodation for set designers and set dressers, the story department, accounting offices, publicity offices, casting offices, fan-mail departments, greenhouses, restaurants, a hospital, a gymnasium and a shoe-shine parlour'

- David Niven, Bring on the Empty Horses, London, 1975, p.5-7 (paragraph breaks inserted for convenience)