#studio fire

[babygruenwald]

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.

[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.

[chaplinfortheages]

As reported in “Variety” newspaper,  Wednesday October 6th 1926.

Fire broke out September 28th.

$40,000 in 1926 = $563,000 in 2018