Culver City, California recent comments:

Interesting comment about keeping a building as a Museum. I worked at Roach for 12 years,in the 50s. it was a booming factory of TV. I was in the military in 1963 during the demolition, but my father, "Bones" Vreeland was the CEO and I kept up on the demise of the Studio, which he tried to slow down, but Hal Roach Jr. had financially ruined the Company and there was nothing left at the end to do but walk away from the wonderful place. Nobody was interested in any Remembrances of it. There were just the vultures ready to turn it into a car lot. bvreeland@roadrunner.com

Now the Akio Morita Building

Nasa Vlachou (Athens Greece) The demolition of the Hal Roach studios in 1963 has always been, in my opinion, such a sad affair. I'm so sorry that this had to be the end of them and, at the same time, I feel deeply disappointed, because I believe that no efforts were made to preserve at least the administration building, which could have been turned into a museum as a tribute to all the personnel (actors/actresses, technicians etc) who worked there and gave us so much joy and pleasure.

I agree with you 100%!

I was born in Culver City, live there now (after living in many other places within California), and am very proud of my home town's history. The very FIRST motion picture ever made west of Chicago was filmed by Thomas Ince, builder of The Culver Studios. It was a silent Western (sound movies didn't yet exist) and was mostly filmed in the Ballona (pronounced BY-Oh-na) Creek area of Culver City. Ince went on to build Triangle Studios (which became MGM, and later Sony) and The Ince Studio (which became, after MANY name changes, "The Culver Studios").

Tosh.O studio

Yes, you are right. The 37 acres is a typo-now corrected. However, if you zoom in closely you will see that the the northwest boundary does not include the northwest residences on Arizona, but bounds the southeast side of Arizona. This depiction comes from both official MGM sources and plat maps of the of Culver City.

Minor corrections. MGM Lot 2 was only 27 acres in area. Lot 1 (Main lot across Overland Avenue, now Sony Pictures) is the 37 acre parcel. Also, the yellowed map area includes the residential property on the north side of Arizona Avenue which was never part of the studio lot.

Culver City is related to Hollywood.

I met michael oshea on the lot in 1955 he had a 55 mersedes gullwing i was 18 years old what a nice person never forgot him.

No, actually the plaque is off the lot. The plaque is at the corner of Washington and National, just outside the lot border. The edge of the lot ran where the railroad tracks now run. The admin building and the two original sound stages were immediately south of the tracks.

My parents bought the last house on the end of Hubbard Street in 1957 just before I was born. There was just a big lot next door. When I was about six or seven, the property was going to become an "industrial business park". They came and paved the area and put up the pink concrete block wall that separated the lot from all the residences and dead-end streets that bordered it. In the late sixties or early seventies, the warehouse across the parking lot from our house was an Hare Krishna incense factory or storage. It really stunk the place up. It was kind of sad having a bunch of barren-feeling industrial lots next door. In Jr. High, I saw an old film (with a young Mickey Rooney I think) where a boy is lying in the grass while a train crosses the field diagonally. It was a Hal Roach film and I figured by the angle that it must have been shot practically in my back yard! As a kid, I was used to hearing the train go across by Robertson Blvd and on through Culver City. When I was small, my older lady neighbor told me that before the studio, there had been bean-fields there! And I knew that two blocks away--where Hubbard Street ran into another studio--was the Culver Studios, which had gone through several names, including Desilu Studios, owned by Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz.

Are you related to Vreeland who worked at the studio until its demise? He told Stan laurel he wa going to get the Lake Laurel & Hardy plaque, but it didn;t happen, and Vreeland never even had the courtesy to write back and explain what had happened. Do you know what happened?

It is a shame that Culver City did not realize what this studio would have meant in terms of history and profit in the years to come. It would have certainly been a major tourist stop. Just imagine the historical significance today. George Vreeland Hill

It's actually filmed across the way in the Ed Hardy Outlet building.

They also film Hell's Kitchen here.

Is this where they tape Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?

This was David O. Selznick's office.

Also, some scenes of episodes of Mission Impossible, Land of the Giants and Bonanza were also filmed at the "Forty Acres" backlot, as it was officially referred to back then.