Come View Hollywood's Humble Beginnings

The Hollywood Heritage Museum is a modest one-story yellow wooden building located about a stone’s throw away from where the annual Academy Awards ceremony takes place at the Kodak Theatre.

Throngs of Angelenos pass it while driving on Highland Avenue to the Hollywood Bowl or Highway 101, as do many tourists, some en route to Universal Studios.

What many people may not know is that almost 100 years ago, this former barn at 2100 North Highland Ave. played a major role in transforming Hollywood from a rural outpost of Los Angeles into the entertainment industry’s nerve center. Today it preserves much of Tinseltown’s motion picture patrimony as well as the history of Hollywood.

“The Hollywood Heritage Museum  is the oldest movie studio that still exists in Hollywood,” explains George Kiel, director of operations at the museum. “Around 1895 it started off its life a block south of what [became] Hollywood and Vine, in what was the middle of an alfalfa field, as a horse barn in the tiny little farm town of Hollywood, Calif."

According to Kiel, "Hollywood was founded in 1886 by Harvey and Daeida Wilcox, Victorian-minding teetotalers and Midwestern Methodists. Back then, it was a very conservative town to be named ‘Figwood.’ Fig trees grow wild here, but Wilcox’s wife hated the name because it had a pornographic suggestiveness—fig leafs and all that.

"While crossing the country on a train Daeida spoke with a lady who’d just built a Victorian estate called Hollywood. She prevailed upon her husband to name the town Hollywood instead of  Figwood, even though holly won’t grow here.

"There’s no holly in Hollywood,” quips Kiel, who adds that the community that would eventually become infamous for loose morals and nicknamed “Babylon” began with a ban on brothels, casinos, liquor, singing, dancing, theatrical entertainment and was segregated.

But in 1913, director Cecil B. DeMille plus producers Jesse Lasky and Sam Goldwyn played a decisive part in transforming the rural enclave they encountered when these New Yorkers fled West.

The city slickers were seeking scenery, sunshine and escape from inventor Thomas Edison’s onerous Motion Picture Patents Co., a trust trying to monopolize the burgeoning flicker business. DeMille, who envisioned shooting a feature length Western as opposed to the shorts then in vogue, “rented the barn for four months for $400 to be used as a studio,” says Kiel.

In his regular job, Kiel is a drapery man providing upholstery and carpeting for Tom Cruise films and such TV series as The Golden Girls and Hannah Montana.  

Kiel calls himself a neighborhood resident who “wouldn’t live anywhere but Hollywood."

“To be sure, some films had already been shot in Hollywood,” Kiel says as he gives a museum tour. “There was even a small studio set up in 1912 by Carl Laemmle’s Universal Picture Co. in an old inn at the corner of Sunset and Gower, where some insignificant shorts were shot. But The Squaw Man was the first feature length film and important movie made in Hollywood.”

To shoot The Squaw Man, a deck was added to the original barn for exteriors, while the stables were converted into actors’ dressing rooms. Many productions were shot at the barn, including some starring silent film star Mary Pickford, and it eventually became part of a much larger Paramount Studio complex. The barn was relocated via a semi-truck to its current location in 1983 and reopened as the Hollywood Heritage Museum in December 1985.

Also known as the Lasky-DeMille Barn, the museum “has state landmark status and is owned and operated by Hollywood Heritage Inc.,” according to Richard Adkins, president of its board of directors.

Kiel calls this nonprofit entity “Hollywood’s preservation organization. We were founded in 1979 by four ladies who were just horrified at the state of things in Hollywood, and that it didn’t have a preservation society [focusing on] Hollywood’s Golden Age. We’ve saved buildings, including the El Capitan Theatre from becoming a multiplex by Disney, and saved the original hat of the Brown Derby. We’re an important force in Hollywood, saving its structures and history,” asserts Kiel, the group’s treasurer.

The silver screen sanctuary is largely the repository of reel relics, mostly from those days before talkies. At the onetime barn’s entrance, DeMille’s old office is on the right, across from a gift shop selling movie books, videos and painted portraits of celluloid legends.

There’s a small screening room with authentic theater seats and galleries displaying photos redolent of Hollywood history: D.W. Griffith’s gargantuan sets for the Babylon sequences of his 1916 classic Intolerance, which inspired the architecture of the nearby Hollywood & Highland Center; posters of stars such as Rudolph Valentino; swords, shields, helmets and other props from DeMille’s biblical epics, such as 1923’s The Ten Commandments; and high tech equipment of bygone days, including an early Technicolor movie camera and enormous projectors. It’s nothing short of a La-La-Land shrine to motion picture pioneers, a love letter to cinema itself.

The Hollywood Heritage Museum offers an unforgettable trip down moviedom’s memory lane.

Hollywood Heritage also presents screenings of silent films, accompanied by a live pianist, at the Paramount Ranch in Agoura Hills and on Saturdays a three and a half hour Walking Tour of historic Hollywood. The Museum hosts movie-themed “Evenings at the Barn.” One such event will be a March 9 slide show and book signing with Hank Rosenfeld, author of The Wicked Wit of the West, about screenwriter Irv Brecher, whose screen credits include the Marx Brothers’ 1939 At the Circus and 1963’s Bye Bye Birdie. An April 13 birthday tribute to Charlie Chaplin features a screening of the 1975 documentary The Gentleman Tramp.

For more information and hours of operation, check out The Hollywood Heritage Museum.