#backlot fire

[babygruenwald]

Hardback cover for Baby Gruenwald’s, “100 Best Studio Backlot Fires of 1947,” published by Martin Poppleford & Co in 1948.

In a book to rival the drama of “100 Best Studio Backlot Fires of 1946,” Baby Gruenwald, a veteran of countless studio backlot fires, takes us inside some of the most spectacular fires to ravage 1947 Hollywood.

Looking back, 1947 seems to have been the pinnacle of the golden era of studio backlots bursting into flame.

Thanks to this wonderful volume we don’t have to simply imagine what it was like to have been there when fake New York streets and fake western towns burned, were rebuilt, then somehow caught fire and burned again.

[babygruenwald]

Silk postcard from the 1930s of the famous Moorehead Gate to the Gruenwald-Woolforge Motion Picture Factory in Winter Garden (though the card erroneously says Orlando), Florida.

One of the first motion picture studios to employ a gris-gris woman alongside traditional fire services, it didn’t reduced the number of studio fires, but it minimized their severity and their ability to spread, as the fires were ritualistically cocooned in a slowly flickering stasis jelly.

Though the studio closed in the late 1980s, several dozen of these incredibly slow-burning fires burn to this day, making sale of the property a hard slog.