Quote:
Originally Posted by ethereal_reality
I wasn't sure where this was taken until I saw the tourist tram in the background.
1966
http://prova275.tumblr.com/
I'm guessing this is one of the employee parking at Universal Studios.
movie props....or cars of poorly paid employees?
detail
I wonder if we could figure out where this employee parking lot was located if we looked at some vintage aerials?
yes I'm looking at you Hoss ]
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This picture brings back memories.
In 1964, I was working in the mail room at Universal Pictures. This parking lot--as Hoss's aerial shows--was around the middle of the lot. The Universal Studio Tour with its red and white striped trams had started around a year before I got there, so I'd say it's a 63-64 photo.
All those doorways and buildings you see had meaning for me. There were about eight of us in the mailroom. We had to deliver incoming mail, pick up outgoing mail, and distribute company stuff--call sheets, cast lists, scripts, budgets, interoffice mail--four times a day.
We divided up the lot into routes, circuits of certain offices and outlying buildings. The Black Tower was a route in itself, but there were maybe five other routes covering the lot, the Casting department, the Production department, Props, Lights, Construction, Vehicles, on and on.
Out weapons of choice were either those three wheel mailman carts for close in work--the mailroom was in the basement of the Black Tower--but for the outlying routes to distant departments, we used old-fashioned heavy cruiser bikes with a big wire basket mounted to the handlebars.
If I remember right, that road in the picture the tram is descending came from some of the old permanent sets further up on the hill, including the Psycho house, always a crowd favorite. But there were departments up there as well. If memory serves, one was the Staff Department--staff is a movie term for phony walls of brick or stucco or marble for sets, made, I think, from plaster and straw. Sweating the noontime delivery up that hill to Staff with the two-ton bike heavy with scripts and call-sheets in mid-August in the Valley was not considered a plum job.
The one story grey building on the right holds a row of was what was categorized as a "bungalow", meaning a single inner-outer office suite with a bathroom. Contract producers and contract actors--stars--got those. Some were much more lavish than what you see, decked out as charming little stand-alone houses. As I remember, that most-right hand black door was where I delivered mail to Alfred Hitchcock Productions, although it might have been an identical black door a few feet out of the frame to the right. The two story grey building behind it, if I remember right, housed Pennebaker Productions, Marlon Brando's company. We mail boys saw Hitchcock often, enough to say hello to him and get a nod back.
We never saw Brando.