KCET Lot Part 2

I still think about the “old” location for KCET. I have been to the new studio facility and it will really do the job for the next generation of technology and it will work out better than the old lot in most respects. It will not have the history or the feeling of the old lot. Many things have been done that will make the work easier and will make the communications between the varied departments similar and will allow for a smother work flow.

There is no way that the new facility will have the classic look or feel of the old lot. The fact that the old lot had very large studios, is hard to replicate and in most cases not needed in today’s electronic age. The classic look of the lot with the old brick buildings and the original entrance off of Sunset Blvd is what has made it popular with not just the people who work on the lot but as a backdrop for many movies and television shows that have no direct connection to the lot or even to Los Angeles.

Let us start with the fact that many shows have used the lot as a television station(big stretch) not just in Los Angeles, but as stations in other cities. For example, one show used it several times to portray a station in Atlanta. They also blew up a car in the parking lot, for a cop show what was set in LA. Movies have also used the lot and parts of the interior, not just to shoot movies, but as a television show itself. Because of union contracts, the television technicians shown on screen are generally real technicians. I saw one movie on a red eye flight to New York and at the end, you can see people sitting on a stage with people working in the background. These are real KCET people doing what they normally do for work. TV people will recognize the Grass Valley Switcher in Star Wars and the hand that destroys that planet, is a tech person operating a slider switch. He is the only person I have ever known who could destroy a planet with just one hand.

I have worked in several parts of the lot. When you are in the old section you tend to be more aware of the sounds and the shaking. The fact that it is in Hollywood, you tend to have helicopters around most of the time. The fact that they tend to fly children to close neighbor, Children’s Hospital all the time, does increase the sounds of the choppers over the lot. The fact that they make their final turn to get onto the heliport by flying over the lot, was not one of the more fun things about working there. When they came in low, it shook the old buildings and you had the feeling that they were landing on the roof of the building that you were stuck in. If you were working on the bottom shelf of a book case filled with video tapes, you just wanted to move out of the way of anything that could happen.

Many disasters have happened on this lot, besides "normal" earthquakes. An August rain occurred while the roof on the old Telecine was being redone. That caused a flood, not only in the upstairs edit bays, but in the downstairs room with all the recording and transmission equipment.
An extremist group did try to bomb the place, but threw the bomb into a room that was designed to contain a fire. Since this is a very old studio they did build it with old style flammable nitrate film, in mind. So when the fire bomb was thrown into the room, it was contained in there.

This is a place that has a history and some of it is actually repeatable.