Plastic Fantastic Universal Studios

This weekend, L. and I went to Universal Studios... which made me question whether or not I’m too old to truly appreciate amusement parks. When I was a kid, I loved going to King’s Dominion and Busch Gardens in Virginia – my family would buy season passes, and we’d go every other week throughout the summer. I was a little disappointed to find that, at Universal Studios, there is nothing to compare with the rollercoasters at King’s Dominion or Busch Gardens. The Revenge of the Mummy rollercoaster is too short, and the Jurassic Park water ride is tame by comparison.

The main attraction for me, of course, was the studio tour… but I have to say that I have much prefer self-designed tours of random shooting locations in and around Los Angeles. Just this past Friday, I went to visit a friend in Agoura Hills and made a detour through the neighborhood where they shot exterior establishers for Poltergeist. (The main house is in Simi Valley.) As I wandered, I could practically hear the theme song in my head. On the edge of the neighborhood, there was also a random shooting location from Phantasm. Being there made the movies seem more real.

I learned about these locations from a guy named Sean Clark, who runs a website called “Horror’s Halloween Grounds.” He writes: “When we as fans visit these locations it is not unlike returning to a childhood home we haven’t seen in decades. They hold a special place in our lives. A piece of nostalgia from a classic moment in time. Even though you may have never been there before, you feel at home.”

I saw Poltergeist for the first time when I was seven years old and my mother was in the hospital. That movie scared the bejesus out of me. I still remember sitting in a darkened room while the credits rolled across the screen, listening to that ethereal theme music and feeling completely disoriented, as if I was only half awake. I knew that the things that happened in the movie couldn’t really happen… but scary movies served as a safe, friendly reminder that bad things could happen. Oftentimes, when people ask me why I like horror movies, I think of that particular time when I was learning to cope with the realization that bad things could happen. Driving through the neighborhood of Agoura Hills (called Cuesta Verde in the movie), I remembered how real the movie had been for me when I saw it for the first time.

I had a completely different reaction to the Universal tour. The back lot made everything seem fake. You may be protesting: "Of course it seemed fake. Sets on a back lot are fake." Often, they’re just wood and foam façades – one or two sides of a building, with nothing behind them. This came as no surprise to me, but it was still a little disappointing to imagine some of my favorite films being shot in such a sterile environment.

Universal films have always been known for their grandeur. When Carl Laemmle founded the company during the silent film era, he aspired to create “the entertainment center of the world.” The studio’s first major success was the extravagant Lon Chaney feature The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923). They followed up with The Phantom of the Opera (1925), which necessitated the building of the first front lot stage (now known as #28). These two films became templates for the Universal monster movies of the 1930s – Dracula (1931), Frankenstein (1931), The Mummy (1932) and The Invisible Man (1933) – which kept the studio going strong through the Great Depression. Many of these horror films (as well as portions of the 1929 Best Picture All Quiet on the Western Front) were shot on the back lot’s “Little Europe,” which we passed on the tram tour. Sadly, the films were mentioned only briefly by the tour guide (“Hey look, there goes the Invisible Man…. Just kidding.”)

Despite the fact that the Psycho house and the Bates Motel loom large on the tour, they also got short shrift on the way to a much more “dazzling” sight: a suburban neighborhood devastated by a crashed airliner from the Tom Cruise vehicle War of the Worlds. We slowed to a crawl through that set, so I had to turn backwards to get decent photographs of Norman Bates’ home.

The tour organizers have obviously determined that most visitors would rather hear about newer blockbusters and television programs… Courthouse Square, made famous by Back to the Future, has been rendered unrecognizable for TV’s “The Ghost Whisperer.” The set on which Charlton Heston parted the red sea in The Ten Commandments is now little more than a storage place for miniatures from Peter Jackson’s King Kong. The home of “The Munsters” is now part of the suburban hell from “Desperate Housewives.” And then there’s Whoville… one of the most elaborate (and surely among the most hideous) sets ever created.

It was exciting to see Bruce the Mechanical Shark from Jaws in good working condition, after all the trouble he caused during filming. But then the tour guide gently informed us that this model of the shark was actually from Jaws: The Revenge.

That’s it, I thought, the bubble has been burst. Why mention a movie that nobody liked?

Universal goes to great lengths to immerse the casual visitor in the world of classic films – through the tour, interactive rides, actor lookalikes, and the constant blaring of familiar theme songs. But throughout the tour, I wanted nothing so much as to go home and watch the movies instead.

In the afternoon, we abandoned the amusement park and went to see the new James Bond movie. Somehow, this is the first time we’ve managed to make it to the cinema since we arrived in L.A. Even more shocking: This particular movie wasn’t a half-hearted effort at nostalgia. Daniel Craig actually manages to reinvent what had become a one-note character. (In my opinion, the new Bond has a touch of Steve McQueen.)

At the end of the day, I decided that I probably am too old to truly appreciate amusement parks - at least, the way I used to. I may also be too old to appreciate the current incarnation of the decades-old Universal tram tour... But I still had fun, mainly because I love being reminded of just how real some movies are to me. Even the actual locations and actors who brought a story to life don’t seem as real as the films themselves, because those fictional worlds have taken on a completely independent life in my memory.

That’s the magic of Hollywood.

The Hanging Tree - from "Phantasm"

Welcome to Cuesta Verde (Agoura Hills)

Welcome to Cuesta Verde (Agoura Hills)

In the foreground, you can see Universal's back lot. In the distance: Warner Brothers studio.

Universal Studios

... where you can ride the movies.


Brownstones, looking east

Brownstones, looking west

Church facade

Town square from "The Hunchback of Notre Dame"

"Little Europe"

"Little Europe"

After the filming of "Psycho 3," the house and motel were restored to their appearance in the original film. The oblong monstrosity above the motel is part of Whoville from the live-action "How the Grinch Stole Christmas"

Bedroom window of Mama Bates

The airplane crash set from "War of the Worlds" is directly behind the "Psycho" house

The Courthouse Square from "Back to the Future" (clock tower absent from the main building on the right), dressed for "The Ghost Whisperer"

Stage 50 is rigged for earthquake special effects.

Stage 55 is rigged for exploding cars.

Just in case you don't know, this is a hovercraft from Joss Whedon’s “Serenity.”

Our tour guide said that "Jurassic Park 4" is in the works.... but it looks to me like this franchise is pretty much played out.

This is why I don't have very many action photos. One minute, you're in "Little Mexico" admiring the view....

... the next minute, you're shielding your camera from flash flood waters that are headed directly for you...

It seems like every attraction at Universal Studios is designed to get you soaked.

Just when you thought it was safe....

Troubled waters

Bruce Almighty

Bruce gets hung out to dry

Nothin' says Christmas like a big blue monkey.

The Archivist

In the past two and a half years, I’ve studied a lot of works that inspired T.S. Eliot in his formative years. The goal of my self-imposed research project is to understand why a man who struggled so desperately to synthesize all of the world’s major religions and philosophies eventually embraced Anglo-Catholicism. Attempting to answer this question means trying to understand one of the most enigmatic minds of the 20^th century. No easy task…. though, judging by the number of books and articles published on the subject, many have tried.

This week, I took a break from works that inspired Eliot to read a work of fiction about him – more specifically, about his transatlantic correspondence with his first love Emily Hale. Martha Cooley’s debut novel The Archivist is the story of Matthias Lane, a stuffy Princeton librarian who guards the “approximately 1200 letters and other enclosures” that Eliot sent to Emily Hale between 1930, when he left his first wife Vivienne, and 1956, when he married his second wife Valerie. (Despite Eliot’s pleas that she burn the letters, Ms. Hale instead bequeathed them to Princeton University with the stipulation that they were not to be read by anyone until 50 years after her death.) When an eager young grad student named Roberta insists on seeing the letters, Matthias flatly refuses to grant her access. She persists, and the two strangers come to know each other through their assumptions about Eliot.

Roberta believes that the letters to Emily Hale will provide a better understanding of why Eliot “was driven from the arms of his neurotic wife into those of a neurotic church,” as well as offer an explanation of “what that conversion cost him.” It is clear that Roberta identifies with the dejected women in Eliot’s life – both of whom, she contends, Eliot loved only as abstractions. Understanding the poet’s mind will help her come to terms with people in her life who likewise have held her at a distance – parents who concealed their Jewish ancestry, and an ex-husband who abruptly walked out on her.

Matthias has his own personal reasons for maintaining a sacred duty to protect the letters. Years earlier, he had his wife committed to a mental hospital – just as Eliot had Vivienne committed. Matthias’s wife eventually committed suicide, leaving behind a journal which explained how this decision led to her demise. She asked that the journal be destroyed; Matthias read it instead. Ever since, he has lived with the guilty truth that he was unable to love his wife the way she loved him. To him, she was an abstraction – like a book in a library. Later, when Roberta tells Matthias about her ex-husband, he realizes that she is describing him as well: “He belonged to a special, small class of hugely gifted people – mostly philosophers, mathematicians, scientists – you know the types I mean. They’re people who live for the experience of honing their abstractions. They refine their thinking until it becomes lustrous and elegant, like burnished gold. Everything else is secondary.”

Matthias remembers that his wife read Eliot “because he understood how the sacred resides in time, is time.” For her, Eliot’s poetry provided vital answers. For Matthias, it provides vital questions… And that’s all he expects, or wants. Matthias appreciates Eliot’s unwillingness to simplify anything: “For me, reading his work is like trying to intercept a butterfly. It comes so close you can see its markings, the luminous wings, and then as you extend a hand it’s gone – hidden among other flickering objects of consciousness. There’s a pleasure in this approximation, I suppose, and even in the failure to apprehend. I don’t mind the obscurity of Eliot’s verse. (What good, after all, is an insect pinned on velvet, gorgeous but dead?)” Roberta, like Matthias’s first wife, wants intimacy. For Matthias, as for Eliot, intimacy seems comparatively irrelevant.

In a 1931 essay, Eliot himself said, “There are only four ways of thinking: to talk to others, or to one other, or to talk to oneself, or to talk to God.” The implication is that you can’t do more than one at the same time. Matthias seems to understand that this choice has already been made for him: “Books never cease to astonish me,” he says, “When I was a child, I knew – in the incontestable way that children know things – that God was an author who’d imagined me, which is why I (and everyone else) existed: to populate His narrative. My task was to imagine God in return: this was all He and I owed each other.” In the beginning, he doesn’t believe that he owes Roberta anything. Instead, he aims to protect her from the truth – the way both he and Eliot “protected” their wives by having them committed… And, in the process, protected themselves from the “fierceness” of women who experienced life as so much more than an abstraction.

Though The Archivist pales in comparison to similar novels like Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair or Philip Roth’s The Human Stain, it formulates an intriguing question for Eliot readers: Did T.S. Eliot abandon Vivienne and Emily in order to protect them, or possibly to protect himself? Did he perhaps believe that it was necessary for him as a writer and an Anglo-Catholic, to be alone... To resist being loved by another human being? “What kind of faith allows a man to diagnose the spiritual illness of his culture so well, and at the same time view his wife as some kind of witch who needs to be walled in? Even if she is sick?”

Of course, these are questions that have already been asked in numerous biographies – most notably, T.S. Eliot: An Imperfect Life by Lyndall Gordon and Painted Shadow: The Life of Vivienne Eliot by Carole Seymour-Jones. And it’s safe to assume that people will keep trying to answer such questions well into the 21^st century, especially as new research materials become available... The Complete Prose of T.S. Eliot is scheduled to be published in a 7-volume set in the Fall of 2008. Around the same time, Valerie Eliot is expected to publish a revised edition of the only existing volume of Eliot’s letters (covering the first seven years of his marriage), simultaneous with the publication of a second volume (covering the five years leading up to his conversion). Five more volumes of collected letters are expected in the distant future… but until January 1, 2020, when the Emily Hale letters become available, some of the most tantalizing questions will remain unanswered.

LOS ANGELES HISTORY, Part 1: The King's Highway

A few weeks ago, on the way out to California, we kept passing markers for legendary “Route 66.” At some point, it occurred to me that I had no idea why Route 66 is legendary…. I just remember the song: “Get your kicks on Route 66.” Wasn’t it on a Mountain Dew commercial or something???

Before the Interstate system was created, Route 66 was the major cross-country highway, stretching from Chicago to Los Angeles. It no longer appears on maps because the road no longer exists as such. For example: Between Pasadena and Santa Monica, following Route 66 means taking Colorado Boulevard to Fair Oaks Avenue to Huntington Drive to Mission Road to Sunset Boulevard to Santa Monica Boulevard. Not all of these roads are directly connected. In fact, one would have to do quite a bit of research in order to follow the old trail.

The same goes for “El Camino Real” – a path carved out by Spanish missionaries who settled California in the late 1700s. El Camino Real (Spanish for The Royal Road, or The King’s Highway) is also mentioned in a popular song… remember Jim Morrison beckoning “ride the King’s Highway” in The Doors’ song “The End”? He managed to make it sound like a path through the underworld… the stuff of myths and legends. Actually, the King's Highway was a dirt path stretching from present-day San Diego to Sonoma.

The first mission on the King’s Highway was built at San Diego in 1769. From there, Franciscan missionaries continued up the coast, building new missions on sites where the soil was fertile and the Native American population was large. The last mission was built in Sonoma in 1823.

Amazingly, all 21 missions still exist, in one form or another. There are two in greater Los Angeles – San Gabriel Archangel (1771) and San Fernando, Rey de Espana (1797). Since these missions seemed like a good starting place for a tour of California history (the Jamestown or Plymouth Rock of our new home) we decided to pay a visit to one of them.

 

An exact replica of the original San Fernando mission - named for the King of Spain - is on the north side of the valley, and it’s an unassuming little compound packed into the Mission Hills neighborhood. It’s an extremely popular location for weddings and, since 2003, has also drawn a lot of Bob Hope fans – the entertainer is buried in a mini-amphitheater in the middle of a lush garden behind the chapel.

  

For me, the most intriguing sight in the entire compound was a room filled with photos of the mission before it was restored, and the San Fernando Valley before it was densely populated. The realization that, until fairly recently, this was an untamed wilderness with a single dirt road through the deserts and mountains, really does make it seem like the stuff of myths and legends.

Like Route 66, El Camino Real doesn’t appear on most modern maps… but tourists traveling along the coast will probably notice at least one of the 158 cast-iron bells that exist to commemorate the first highway.