Tuesday, January 29, 2008 – Screenland Details

Culver City, in the flats south of Hollywood, calls itself The Heart of Screenland.  The old MGM Studios, now Sony-Columbia, sits right in the middle of it. Gone with the Wind was filmed here, and the Wizard of Oz, and all the MGM musicals like An American in Paris. It's more "Hollywood" than Hollywood itself. This was covered previously in The Other Film Capital of Southern California, The Forgotten Major Studio and Movie Madness.  The architecture from the glory days was covered in Good Old Buildings, with the subsidiary pages, Renaissance Revival in the Roaring Twenties, Mission Revival, Revived, Zigzag Moderne Repurposed and Beaux Arts meets Art Deco.  The contemporary architecture was covered in Spatial Ambiguity.

But none of that gets the feel of the place. It's not a place for tourists. There's not much glamour.  People work here.  People live here. They make movies.  Let the tourists flood Universal and take their tours of Paramount and Warner Brothers, and walk along Hollywood Boulevard.  Fine – Culver City is a working town.

If you wish to use any of these photos for commercial purposes I assume you'll discuss that with me. And should you choose to download any of these images and use them invoking the "fair use" provisions of the Copyright Act of 1976, please provide credit, and, on the web, a link back this site.

Technical Note:

Most of these photographs were shot with a Nikon D70 - using lens (1) AF-S Nikkor 18-70 mm 1:35-4.5G ED, or (2) AF Nikkor 70-300mm telephoto, or after 5 June 2006, (3) AF-S DX Zoom-Nikkor, 55-200 mm f/4-5.6G ED. They were modified for web posting using Adobe Photoshop 7.0.  Earlier photography was done with a Sony Mavica digital still camera (MVC-FD-88) with built-in digital zoom.

All text and photos, unless otherwise noted, Copyright © 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010 - Alan M. Pavlik