When you hear the words “Universal Studio Tour” it probably conjures up visions of
the shark from Jaws or the house from Psycho or King Kong.
You know, Fast and the Furious if you’re looking for negative association.
The tour has not only been a staple but the core anchor of Universal Studios Hollywood.
Did you know that it wasn’t the first Universal Studios Tour though?
The earlier history is a bit messy, but the short version is that a man by the name of
Carl Laemmle formed one of the many film studios that sprung up in the early 1910s in an effort
to cash in on the growing popularity of the brand new medium of film.
A lot of these little studios sprung up, went under, merged, were bought out, you name it.
When the dust settled he was the president of the Universal Film Manufacturing Company
Now, at that point, “Hollywood” wasn’t actually in Hollywood.
The industry initially started in the New York/New Jersey area, mainly due to Thomas
Edison’s New Jersey lab being at the forefront of the whole medium.
Eventually, these studios started to realize that for the industry to grow, they had to move.
Early film required a lot of light and so the standard was to film either outdoors or
on exposed sets without ceilings in order to use the brightest light available: the sun.
On a sunny summer day, it was a wonderful solution, but the New York region had plenty
of gray cloudy days, and there was that whole winter thing they had to deal with.
All in all, it limited how much could be filmed during the course of the year.
On top of that, Edison was very litigious when it came to all of the patents he had
on film equipment.
He essentially held a monopoly on the industry in New York.
So studios began to set their sights on somewhere where the weather was warm and accommodating
nearly all year round.
Where the cities were underdeveloped and the land was still cheap.
Somewhere far from Thomas Edison and his legal team.
Enter: Los Angeles.
Carl Laemmle, already toying with the idea for a few years, had purchased 230 acres of
land just outside of LA for $165,000.
And since we’re all thinking about it, I looked it up, and if you wanted to buy just
a house in that area today you’d be looking at two to four million dollars.
So good job, Carl.
His idea was simple: centralize all of the various aspects of filmmaking into one location
so that you didn’t have to run around town to write and film and edit a movie.
With on-location housing, you didn’t even have to worry about cast and crew commuting
to work every day.
It wasn’t a wildly new idea.
Company towns and mining towns had been around for a while, it just was new to the industry of film.
He called his film wonderland Universal City.
Now, Universal City was called Universal City, and in a lot of ways it was like a city, but
technically on paper, Universal City was not a city.
In other words, it wasn’t an officially recognized municipality.
It was just a bunch of unincorporated land in the county that he called a city.
That said, Universal City featured its own hospital, fire department, police department,
employee housing, administrative and production buildings, and a stage big enough for 16 film
shoots at a time.
And all of this was connected by a private road system.
It was a grand experiment, and it was one that called for a grand opening.
So on March 15th, 1915, Universal and Laemmle hosted that grand opening.
It was to be a week-long celebration that was kicked off with an opening day that saw
somewhere between ten to twenty thousand members of the public visiting the studio.
Big stunt spectaculars took place to wow the visitors and give them a larger than life
taste of what filmmaking was like.
Laemmle noticed how much people enjoyed watching the process of filmmaking, so he decided to
keep Universal City open to the public, for a fee.
For just 25 cents, which today would amount to about $6.50 Universal… in case you’re
watching this and want to tweak your prices, guests could explore the studio and watch
films as they were being made.
Eventually Universal built a viewing platform so that guests could get a better view of
the films as they were being shot, and since the sets were out in the open and on this
big central stage, they could watch multiple films being made at once.
They also occasionally made events out of tentpole films.
In some cases, literal tentpole films.
In 1920 Universal was producing two circus-based projects at the same time: Circus Life and
Out of the Sky.
Having the two circuses set up along with the performers, Universal decided to open
them to the public for the 4th of July free of charge.
It was all a pretty brilliant idea at the time.
For one, it was essentially free money.
Universal would be producing these films regardless of whether or not the public was visiting,
so outside of the cost to throw up a few spectator stands and putting some ads in the paper,
it was just easy profit.
Beyond that, it served as a great way to advertise their films.
People visiting the studio who would watch the films getting made would be tempted to
see the final products when they were released.
There’s a novelty to it that has survived to this day.
Over the course of its operation, it was estimated that around 500 people a day were visiting
the studio for the experience.
Compared to the theme parks of today that’s nothing, but at a time where long-distance
travel was a hassle and the film industry was still in its infancy, it was a promising sign.
However once the late 1920s rolled around, something happened.
Al: Wait a minute! Wait a minute! You ain't heard nothing yet!
Al: Wait a minute, I tell ya! You ain't heard nothing!
The introduction of synced sound to film was a game-changer.
Studios eventually began to adopt the new technology to keep up with the competition.
With the advent of sound came the need for quiet on set.
The need for quiet on set meant no more members of the public on set, and so despite its popularity,
the Universal Studios tour experience was unceremoniously ended.
I couldn’t pinpoint the exact date it ended, what with the whole unceremonious closing
and all, but the best I can guess is the first quarter of 1930, which is when Universal really
started to adopt the sound technology, most notably with All Quiet on the Western Front.
The original Universal Studios Tour wasn’t complex.
It wasn’t really meant to be.
It arrived as a novelty on top of a novelty and quietly disappeared 15 years later.
It’s the kind of attraction that would normally be a quirky footnote in a larger history.
Yet behind that simple short-lived concept laid the foundation for something larger.
Something that would resurface over thirty-years later and transform the idea of theme parks.
Sometimes that’s all it takes: a simple novel idea.
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