As a follow up to John Aldred's account of his visit to Universal Studios, members may be interested in the following historical note about this long established Hollywood Studio.
In 1914 Carl Laemmle, founder of Universal Pictures, acquired 230 acres in the San Fernando Valley, California, and begin building what was in those days a giant studio complex.
On Monday March 34th, 1915, in front of a crowd of about ten thousand people Lura Oakley, a police woman, handed Laemmle a golden key. He unlocked the gate and declared Universal City open for business.
According to Laemmle's biographer, visitors found a city that had come into being within a few months solely and completely equipped for the large scale production of motion pictures.
There was a main stage 400ft x 100ft x 50ft in extent with every kind of natural scenery at hand for alternative use, plus a smaller stage for minor productions. Eighty dressing rooms and company offices were equipped with electric light and running water. There were three pumping stations, a great concrete reservoir, a hospital, two restaurants capable of serving twelve hundred people, and an exhaustive range of shops, forges, garages and mills - macadamised roads, a police department, fire brigade, public utility school - here was a community enjoying full municipal rights, supplied by a specially constructed spur of the Southern Pacific Railroad, self-sufficient, self-contained and ready to show the world what movies meant to do.