How Hollywood helped construct airports and air journey trade

Everyone is aware of the track “On the Good Ship Lollipop.” Shirley Temple’s signature tune has turn into a cultural touchstone, displaying up within the historical past of the Chicago mob (it was the nickname of the Cicero crew) and, after all, “The Simpsons.”

But if you happen to haven’t seen the 1934 movie “Bright Eyes,” you won’t know that the ship in query is an airplane or that this hymn to air journey was initially sung as Temple’s character taxied round one among Los Angeles’ first industrial airports, Glendale’s Grand Central Air Terminal.

Which you may nonetheless see if you happen to take “a sweet trip,” to not the sweet store however alongside Grand Central Avenue, the place it cleaves via Disney’s Grand Central Creative Campus.

Completed in 1929 and restored by Disney in 2014, the attractive Spanish Revival and Art Deco constructing is all that continues to be of the airport.

Here Charles and Anne Morrow Lindbergh began their record-breaking first common L.A. to New York airline flight (a mere 50 hours!) and aviator Laura Ingalls turned the primary girl to fly solo from the East Coast to the West. Here numerous celebrities and trade titans alighted as they got here, or returned, to L.A. The airport was additionally the location of scenes from many different early movies, together with 1930’s “Hell’s Angels,” produced by Howard Hughes, and 1933’s “Lady Killer,” starring James Cagney.

It was not, nonetheless, the setting for the well-known airport scene in “Casablanca” — by finest accounts, that was Van Nuys Airport.

That the Grand Central Air Terminal now homes Disney places of work and occasion areas (and is open for the occasional L.A. Conservancy or Art Deco Society tour) marks a full-circle second. From the temporary, hazy movies of the Wright brothers’ early flights to complaints about celebrities’ private-jet emissions, Hollywood has had a deep, sophisticated, mutually useful (and sometimes tragic) relationship with aviation.

So as we enter the vacation season, throughout which thousands and thousands will flock to each the airport and (one hopes) the multiplex, it appears becoming to contemplate how Hollywood helped construct, actually and figuratively, the air journey trade.

With its delicate climate and acres of empty land, turn-of-the-Twentieth century L.A. was good for 2 burgeoning industries: flight and movie.

Hollywood energy gamers and planes

Grand Central Air Terminal was not the primary space airport. Even earlier than World War I, L.A.’s wealthy and revolutionary have been transfixed by flight. In 1910 greater than 200,000 individuals attended the Los Angeles International Air Meet at Dominguez Field in what’s now Rancho Dominguez.

As the small plane producers that may ultimately turn into, or get replaced by, Lockheed, Douglas and Northrop planted themselves on the West Coast, L.C. Brand — typically known as the “father of Glendale” — constructed an airstrip in entrance of his hillside mansion (now the Brand Library) and silent movie producer/future studio head Thomas Ince constructed Ince Field in Venice as a base for stunt pilots. In 1914, the latter turned the primary airfield on the West Coast to be formally designated an airport.

By the time WWI ended, airports and airstrips dotted the L.A. space — by some accounts, 53 existed inside 10 miles of City Hall. Hughes is probably the most well-known bridge between movie and flight — producing films and later operating RKO Pictures whereas additionally founding Hughes Aircraft Co., constructing and flying game-changing planes and, ultimately, operating Trans World Airlines. But he was not the one one.

In 1918, Cecil B. DeMille established the Mercury Aviation Co. — which might turn into the primary industrial airline with frequently scheduled flights on this planet — and constructed an airfield, DeMille Field No. 1, at Melrose and Fairfax avenues. The first passenger flight from New York to L.A. landed at DeMille Field No. 2, at Wilshire and Fairfax.

In 1919, Sydney Chaplin (brother and enterprise supervisor of Charlie) constructed his personal airfield just about throughout the road on a parcel bordered by Fairfax, Wilshire and La Cienega. (Consider that the subsequent time you’re attempting to make a left on La Cienega.)

Chaplin and DeMille quickly found that air journey was not as worthwhile because it first appeared — the runways of L.A.’s small airports turned too quick to accommodate more and more giant planes and, as the town grew, the land was extra priceless for actual property improvement. But extra essential than these Hollywood-owned airfields was the function aviation performed within the burgeoning movie trade, and vice versa.

Aviation in movie

Many World War I airmen got here to L.A. to turn into stunt pilots and, often, film stars. Former Royal Air Force gunner-actor Reginald Denny flew stunts with the 13 Black Cats at Burdett Field (situated at 94th Street and Western Avenue in what’s now Inglewood) and appeared in dozens of non-aviation movies, together with “Anna Karenina,” “The Little Minister” and “Rebecca.”

Being a stunt pilot, even for the flicks, was a deadly occupation. Frank Stites died whereas performing stunts throughout the 1915 festivities for Universal Studios’ opening weekend. (He is claimed to hang-out the backlot.)

Five years later, the dying of American ex-serviceman Ormer Locklear made Hollywood historical past. Known for his skill to make “wing-walking” repairs throughout his stint within the Army Air Service, Locklear give up the army after WWI to kind the Locklear Flying Circus. Carl Laemmle made him a star with “The Great Air Robbery” (which was filmed at DeMille Field No. 1). But Locklear’s second movie, “The Skywayman” for studio head William Fox, can be his final. The last stunt was filmed at night time. Locklear requested that the lights at DeMille subject be doused so he may see when he ought to pull out of his dive. When that didn’t occur, Locklear crashed and was killed, alongside along with his flying associate Milton “Skeets” Elliott. (Fox included the crash within the movie — no identified footage exists at this time.)

According to L.A. and Hollywood historian Marc Wanamaker, the accident so appalled Denny that he started engaged on a means to movie air stunts with out placing pilots in peril. “Denny devised a miniature radio plane, remote-controlled, which became the basis for drones in World War II,” and was used to coach fighter pilots, Wanamaker says. “So you see how intertwined it all was — Hollywood and flying.”

Early movement photos have been obsessive about motion, Wanamaker says. “It started with horses, then trains and then planes.”

“Bright Eyes,” by which the orphaned Shirley Blake (Temple) is adopted by a bunch of her father’s pilot buddies, was only one in a string of movies that celebrated, and promoted, air journey and the miracle of flight.

After WWI, everybody, together with girls, needed to fly and Hollywood inspired it. Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy made aviation comedies; Harry Houdini took to the skies in “The Grim Game.” Rudolph Valentino realized to fly as did Mary Pickford and Ruth Roland, who turned the queen of stunt flying movies. Both girls owned their very own planes and Pickford, Wanamaker says, introduced a “dragon” plane to Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, posing in entrance of it as a publicity stunt.

When stars started touring by air, they made these journey plans identified so photographers may seize them disembarking on the runway, the airline title clearly seen. Some posed with their very own planes, others at varied terminals or, often, in flight-inspired kinds, together with hats formed like planes. Studio costume designers, together with Howard Greer and, later, Jean Louis, put collectively flight attendant style.

Camouflaging an airport

After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, studio manufacturing designers and artists got here up with a method to disguise Hollywood Burbank Airport (then Lockheed Air Terminal) as a part of the suburban neighborhood. After it opened in 1930 as United Airport, Burbank turned Glendale’s most important competitor in air journey and movie star sightings (what would turn into Los Angeles International Airport was nonetheless Mines Field and acres of wheat and barley).

United Airport was bought by Lockheed in 1940 and after the United States entered WWII, it was used to construct and stage army plane. Concerned that Japan would strike West Coast targets, the army turned to the studios to assist camouflage Lockheed.

Designers from Disney, Paramount and Twentieth Century Fox helped design a 1,000-acre cover that may make the airport indistinguishable from the neighborhood that surrounded it. According to the Lockheed Martin website: “The main factory was covered with a canopy of chicken wire, netting and painted canvas to blend in with the surrounding grass. And fake trees were erected with spray-painted chicken feathers for leaves, some painted green to represent new growth and some brown to represent decaying patches.”

No bombs have been ever dropped on Lockheed airport so Operation Camouflage was successful, which is an efficient factor contemplating that even after industrial journey started at LAX in 1979, shoreline fog typically pressured planes to land at Burbank.

This is to not say that LAX doesn’t have its personal Hollywood historical past. Mines Field, bought by L.A. in 1937, was the place Jimmy Stewart and different aviation-loving actors, together with Tyrone Power and Robert Taylor, realized to fly. Since LAX opened, it has been featured in numerous movies, tv sequence, music movies, songs and video video games, from the opening scene of “The Graduate” to the opening lyrics of Miley Cyrus’ “Party in the U.S.A.” The 2024 Netflix film “Carry-On” takes place nearly solely at LAX, however was filmed in a decommissioned terminal at Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport.

Now, at the same time as each the leisure and air journey industries expertise all method of difficulties within the fashionable economic system, their symbiotic relationship continues to thrive. Celebrities nonetheless endorse airways (and proceed to have their photographs taken whereas touring on them, although extra typically by fellow fliers) and although “Casablanca” set a really excessive bar, it’s nonetheless robust to beat airport scene. Film and flight are nonetheless touchstones of journey and chance, in any case.