Bright Lights, TV City
Another sign of Hollywood’s changing times
A long time ago on a TV network far away — CBS, during the 1970s — one of its most popular series was The Carol Burnett Show.
Broadcast starting in 1967, the variety showcase was produced at CBS, too. On a soundstage at its west-coast headquarters. In a place called Television City.
Really: Television. City.
Watching the show back then as a TV-entranced kid in Philadelphia — I watched every one of its 279 episodes through 1978 (though, for perspective, it should be noted that I watched every episode of everything back then) — I liked it because it was funny and entertaining. But I was compelled by it because of how the announcer first introduced it: “From Television City, in Hollywood!”
Man oh man. The very idea.
In its early years on the air, there was even an animated main-title opening that showed the exterior of the CBS building, the network’s iconic eye-and-three-letters logo affixed high on the wall, with a Burnett avatar seen going through the door marked Artists Entrance.
I watched (and watched and watched and watched), telling myself that someday I had to get there, to this city of television.
Someday happened in April of 1993, when I got a job at CBS Television City (TVC). And for the thirteen years that followed I parked my car beneath that logo, which had first gone up on the wall in 1952. An iconic sign for an iconic place, devoted to TV.
Earlier this summer, the sign came down — seven months after Television City was sold to developers. (Most everyone connected to the network had relocated 17 miles north a decade earlier, to newly built headquarters in the L.A.-area community of Studio City.)
The new non-show-business owners said the removal was only temporary, for cleaning. The betting money, though, is that it’ll never come back. That the cleaning explanation was spin cobbled together to address an unexpected public outcry when the logo came down. (To be fair, other CBS signs on other parts of the building remain.)
No matter: The place seems little more than real-estate now. History has become history.
Television City was conceived in the early 1950s at a time when the newly introduced and mostly NYC-based television industry had begun to flourish. (NBC was seeing a need for its own headquarters, which opened in Burbank in 1955.) The site chosen for it was at the southeast corner of the intersection formed by Beverly Boulevard and Fairfax Avenue, in the Fairfax District of Los Angeles (alas, technically not “from Hollywood” at all). It was part of a massive tract of land extending south and east that was home to Gilmore Stadium (football), Gilmore Field (baseball), a drive-in/car-hop restaurant (Dolores’, among other names), the 650-car-capacity Gilmore Drive-In Movie Theater (1948–1978), and the already landmark Farmers Market (a local draw since 1934).
The football stadium, sitting atop an old oil field, is what was razed for the CBS campus, though ultimately of the above list only the Farmers Market survived.
Originally envisioned as home to no fewer than 24 stages, CBS Television City was officially unveiled in November 1952 with just four, each state-of-the-art. (Other stages were added to the east side of the complex in the 1980s.) Grand Opening festivities — footage of which can still be screened in my garage, for the curious — attracted an eclectic mix of celebrities and civic leaders. The inaugural filming was a month earlier, on October 3, 1952, for My Friend Irma. The admission-ticket imprint: “CBS invites you to the first origination from Television City, the world’s first plant designed and built exclusively for Television.”
Overnight TVC found itself at the nexus of what would be called the Golden Age of Television, chiefly due to the live dramas broadcast from there as part of the many dramatic anthology shows that made up 1950s prime-time schedules. In the 1960s, TVC was home to tons of variety-series; and in 1970s, game-shows and sitcoms ruled the roost, some of the latter beginning with that familiar “From Television City, in Hollywood!”
TVC was where much of TV was born and grew up.
When I worked there years later, I made it a point to explore the place often — during daytime hours, when I was one of many under the roof, and at nights and on weekends when I invented reasons to be there alone and treated myself to private tours. Tours of that still-active Artist Entrance area, through which so many bold-faced names passed, none bolder than Elvis Presley for his first Ed Sullivan Show appearance in 1956. Of the nearby ground-floor Executive Screening Room, the tiny theater where thousands of new-show pilots had been evaluated since the 1950s. Of the carpentry and construction area on the floor above it, where sets after sets had been built and where an equipment-cart still bore an age-old Jack Benny stenciling. Of rehearsal halls, silent in these off hours, inside of which so much music was heard and dance was mapped out during the variety-show genre’s 1960s heyday, the walls along the long and narrow hallway leading to them filled with hand-drawn star-face murals.
And especially of the heavily trafficked extra-wide hallway in the rear of the building, adjacent to both the cafeteria and the loading-dock, a hallway that cut a line between the two pairs of those four original stages — 41 and 43 on one side (used for the old live-dramas and the currently airing soaps), and 31 and 33 on the other (home to scores of game- and variety-shows then and still, including Burnett’s and The Price Is Right).
In my exploration, I’d hear the whispers of hundreds of TV ghosts connected to thousands of hours of programming that had been part of decades of prime-time entertainment. From movie stars like Lon Chaney, Jr. and Jack Palance and Angela Lansbury and others, who acted in live presentations like Requiem for a Heavyweight and Casino Royale and The Caine Mutiny Court Martial and Brigadoon and Cinderella. From performers like Garry Moore and Glen Campbell and Ann-Margret and Sonny & Cher and the Smothers Brothers and Sid Caesar and Red Skelton and Jim Nabors.
Or Judy Garland, whose disastrous one-season variety series came to life and early death on Stage 31, a show more famous for its behind-the-scenes misery than its on-camera achievements, including but not limited to the yellow brick road painted on the floor early on as a welcome for its emotionally fragile star and which reportedly was cleaned right off soon after by an absent-minded janitor.
From CBS sitcom casts (All in the Family, Good Times, Maude) and even from ABC hits that were done there (Welcome Back Kotter and Three’s Company) whose envelope-pushing work pushed my nightly TV viewing to the family basement and away from my parents’ scornful eyes.
From the comedic regulars who populated game shows like Match Game and Card Sharks and Tattletales.
Ghosts of TV’s past, their specters circulating like a fine cool mist.
Several months before the December 2018 announcement that CBS Television City had been sold, the “world’s first plant designed and built exclusively for Television” — designed in the International Style, from midcentury-modern architectural firm Pereira and Luckman — was granted landmark status by city officials. So presumably any significant change planned for the historic building will require approval.
The familiar three-letter CBS logo may or may not be re-mounted after its cleaning. (Show-tapings are to continue at TVC for at least another five years, we’re told.) But even if it is, it’ll seem more decorative than anything else. There’s really no CBS there anymore. Time marches on and all that.
I try to march with it. I’m mostly okay with change these days. I have the resected prostate to prove it. Network television, like television itself, has understandably changed since 1952. Light-years from what it was, in fact. As it should be, I guess.
Still, much of it today seems heartless, devoid of the passion for or interest in or awareness of what first made TV such a national focal point back then. What made it work for and speak to us in our homes. Its pull and its power.
Thats why I for one mourn the loss. The missing logo is less about a marker on a building and more about a sign of the times.
Except where noted, all photos courtesy of CBS and Jim Hergenrather.
