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Film Freak VS The Riddler
Film Freak VS Batman
Film Freak VS Poison Ivy
Film Freak VS Batwoman
Film Freak VS Lady Shiva
Film Freak VS Onyx Adams
Film Freak VS Roxy Rocket
Film Freak VS Katana
Film Freak VS Harley Quinn
Film Freak VS Nocturna
Film Freak VS Gentleman Ghost
Film Freak VS Two Face
Film Freak VS The Tally Man
Taking a break from the strain of the Cuban Missile Crisis ®, President Kennedy enjoys an anniversary reprinting of Baby Gruenwald’s best-selling real-life drama “100 Best Studio Backlot Fires of 1947.”
ONSET SURPRISE
After luring Roxy Rocket and The Cavalier to one of Monoscope Pictures' backlots, Film Freak gives them something they hadn't expected...something sentimental and almost kind.
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.
Line drawing of Gruenwald-Mondrian studios used in advertising and on stationary in the 1940s. The clouds looming in the background represent the ever-present threat of a horrific studio fire.
In a bitter irony, it wasn’t a backlot fire but a dark cloud of lackluster film product that eventually doomed the studio - along with a mudslide and then a fire.
Built to serve as only a decorative element, the iconic water tower on the southwest corner of Baby Gruenwald’s Greenwood Studios lot in Pasadena, California contained no water, and so was of no help in fighting the fire that ripped through the small studio on June 3rd, 1933.
FUN FACT: The many DuGas dry-chemical fire extinguishers scattered strategically about the Greenwood Studios backlot were also purely decorative, and yet filled with chlorine trifluoride, a liquid so flammable that it can quickly burn through a foot of concrete and set fire to ghosts.
Postcard of Stage 11 on the Gruenwald Babychrome Studios lot in Santa Clarita, California.
At 300,000 square feet, upon it’s opening in 1932 it was the largest motion picture sound stage in its postal code.
The stage was quickly nicknamed “The Blimp Hangar,” for obvious reasons, and “The Sermon,” as it seemed to go on forever, and “The Shack,” in an ironic bowler’s nickname kind of way.
It was also called “Satan’s Blue Shoebox,” because references to hell and Satan are always encouraged, and “The California State Livestock Pavilion,” because cows.
