Carl Laemelle: The Making of the Movie Business: Part 7 - Universal City: Hollywood’s Dream Factory (1915)

On a Monday morning in March 1915, ten thousand people crowded a dusty road four miles beyond Hollywood to watch a small man in a neat suit turn a gold key in a lock.

A sudden burst of light went off as if the sun had slipped a flashbulb into its pocket. Cowboys whooped. Extras in cavalry uniforms snapped to. Somewhere nearby an orchestra struck up for no reason other than that this was a day meant for music.

The man at the gate was Carl Laemmle. The lock opened onto Universal City. It was not just a studio lot. It was an actual, chartered municipality built to manufacture dreams.

The idea had started a year earlier as a line on a map and a very large check. Laemmle bought two hundred and thirty acres in the San Fernando Valley, ten miles north of Los Angeles on the old El Camino Real.

He paid one hundred and sixty five thousand dollars for what many friends considered pretty scenery and very poor judgment. They thought The Trust fight had rattled him, but he was thinking bigger. By March 1914 the purchase was complete. In October the first shovels hit the soil. In March 1915 the gates opened, and a long vision had become lumber, concrete, and payroll.

Laemmle made the opening a show. The pageant began in downtown Los Angeles and rolled into the valley like a parade that had mislaid the word modesty. Nickelodeon favorites, great beauties, clowns, cowboys, and cowgirls formed a living advertisement for everything the movies had taught people to love.

At the gate, Laura Oakley, the chief of the Universal City police, handed Laemmle the key. He turned it, set off an electric stunt he had not been warned about, flinched, grinned, and walked into the city that would define his career.

The specification read like an engineer’s fairy tale. A main stage four hundred feet by one hundred and fifty. A second stage for smaller work, eighty dressing rooms, company offices with electric light and running water, three pumping stations and a concrete reservoir, a hospital on site, two restaurants able to serve twelve hundred people, a full run of shops and forges and mills, Stables and corrals, macadamized roads, a police department and fire brigade, a school and libraries, a spur track from the Southern Pacific to feed the place with lumber, animals, costumes, and everything else that pictures devour. It was a community with municipal rights that existed to produce make believe at industrial scale.

A city designed by a movie producer. Laemmle’s practical instincts never left him. He had once counted customers with beans in a pocket and had learned that a show only sells if it runs on time.

Universal City was that lesson written across a valley. It offered scale to exhibitors who needed fresh programs every week. It offered reliability to filmmakers who needed power, water, and a place to put a camera without asking permission from a landlord who hated cameras. It offered a promise to the public that the movies they had fallen for in nickelodeons were about to grow up.

It also offered a policy that revealed how Laemmle thought about people on both sides of the screen. He opened picture making to public view. He built a grandstand so visitors could sit and watch directors and players at work on the central stage.

A few thousand tourists in a year are not a mass audience. They are something better, they take what they saw back to friends and cousins and barbers and club meetings. They become witnesses who talk about movies being made. The practice ended when microphones arrived and sound became the enemy. Until then, Laemmle insisted on it. He was sure it helped the industry far beyond the number of people who could make the trip.

He paired that openness with a rule that has aged even better than the grandstand. No performer at Universal City was to be asked to take personal risks. If a player felt that a stunt or a setup carried even a small hazard, they had the right to refuse it without prejudice to their employment.

Accidents halt schedules, and a studio that treats people as people raises morale and lowers cost. The rule put a floor under ambition, and it told directors to use ingenuity before they reached for danger.

The city quickly settled into a rhythm that looked like work and felt like spectacle. Trains rattled in with lumber and rattled out with finished reels. The restaurants fed a small army at noon. The school taught children who grew up thinking that a call sheet was a normal thing to bring to class.

A police department kept order on streets that featured both real horses and fake bank robberies. A fire brigade stood ready for sets that loved to burn when cameras asked them to. Somewhere between the reservoir and the costume mill a visitor could see the trick at the heart of the place.

Universal City was both ordinary and impossible. It needed water pressure and sewer mains. It also needed cowboys from distant ranches and native americans from distant reservations, all hired, paid, and lodged so that a director could make a single scene feel like a slice of frontier life.

The whole thing grew out of a very simple story. When Laemmle first looked west he did not buy a dream. He bought an address. Years before Universal City, he had acquired the Nestor studio at Sunset and Gower and then opened a second site at Edendale.

The car got stuck in the mud on his first inspection and an elephant pushed it out. The rain came down like London, but he kept going. Those early experiments taught him that Los Angeles offered something the Trust could not regulate. It offered light and space. Universal City multiplied that lesson by a factor of a hundred.

Other studios would build their own compounds and backlots, but in 1915 this was a new idea carried to its logical end. The city did not pretend to be a civic utopia. It was a hive for production.

The place helped shape how the public thought about movies as a business. Universal City made production visible. Not only through the grandstand, but through the simple fact that you could drive out from Los Angeles and see an industry at work.

You could watch carpenters build a medieval arch in the morning and a New York stoop in the afternoon. You could meet a star at lunch in a cafeteria and a prop man in the same line. Newspapers wrote about the city as if it were a cross between a fairground and a new town. Laemmle did not correct them. He understood that wonder sells. He also understood that familiarity sells. The combination was irresistible.

The opening season captured that mood. The main stage could be dressed as Monte Carlo, Cairo, Paris, Madrid, or Berlin. The back country could stand in for any canyon the script required. Horses moved in herds.

Cats and dogs wandered. Monkeys and parrots got the kind of billing animals get when publicists run out of adjectives. It sounds chaotic, but it was orderly enough to release pictures on time and varied enough to look like the world.

There was generosity in the plan as well. Shortly after the opening, the producer Thomas Ince lost his Santa Monica studio to a fire while shooting a Civil War epic. The loss put him on the brink.

From New York, Laemmle wired instructions that Ince was to have the use of the Universal plant and stores. The message ended with four words that carried a company’s values in their plainest form. Do not charge a cent.

Ince finished his picture. He later said no other man would have done that. The remark says as much about the town as it does about Laemmle. A city that can help a rival finish a feature is a city that knows what it is for.

As the seasons passed the place kept changing. Silent stages multiplied, and a sign on the roofs spelled out Universal Pictures and the word Quiet in letters fifty feet high so pilots would keep their engines away from the microphones once sound arrived.

Laemmle Boulevard became the main drag. A poultry ranch with room for thousands of white Leghorns appeared at the edge of the property and made the mogul smile on his rounds with a scoop of corn. It sounds like a joke. It is also how real towns behave when they mature. They add things you could not have predicted when the ribbon was cut.

If you stand back from the dates and the acreage you can see what Universal City really proved. A studio could be more than a set of leased stages and a shaky power line. It could be a civic organism with its own rules, its own services, and its own pride.

It could invite the public in without surrendering the work. It could treat players with care without dulling the appetite for spectacular scenes. It could be practical in the morning meeting and romantic by the afternoon call.

The romance of that opening day never quite left the place. The contractors probably had not finished sweeping. A few shops might still have had sawdust on the floor, bit It didn’t matter. In a few months Laemmle had taken a piece of ranch land and given it an identity.

The movies would do this again and again in the next century. They would take an orchard or a warehouse and fit the world inside it. Universal City did it first at the scale of a town. It turned the act of production into a civic event. It told everyone who bothered to make the trip that what happened in those stages belonged to them too, because they could see where it was made.

That feeling is why the key in the lock mattered. It was showmanship and it was also a statement. The gate opened on a city that would keep on building itself for decades.

It would change hands and modernize and rethink its signs, but the basic promise would hold. There will be a stage ready at nine. There will be a story on Friday. There will be a place to sit and watch the work, even if only for a little while. That is what a dream factory looks like when you give it an address and ask it to behave like a town.

And it all began the moment a small man recovered from an unexpected flash, smiled at the crowd, and walked through the gate.