Warner Bros. Ranch

A view of Brownstone Street on the former Columbia Ranch, Burbank

The Warner Bros. Ranch is located at 411 North Hollywood Way in Burbank, California and was formerly called the Columbia Ranch. It was the backdrop for many of the Columbia Pictures movies and Screen Gems/Columbia Pictures Television shows, including Father Knows Best, The Donna Reed Show, Dennis the Menace, Hazel, Bewitched, Gidget, I Dream of Jeannie, The Monkees, The Flying Nun, Here Come the Brides, The Partridge Family, The Hathaways, The Waltons, Lost Horizon, High Noon, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, You Were Never Lovelier, The Wild One, The Wrecking Crew, and Autumn Leaves. Only the front facades of the houses and buildings were built; the interiors were always shot at other locations or studios. The streets were constructed and arranged in such a way as to allow shooting at multiple angles to create the illusion of a much larger area, though the lot only spans across about six city blocks.

History

The ranch started in 1934, as a 40-acre (160,000 m²) plot purchased by Harry Cohn head of Columbia Pictures Corporation. The studio, with its headquarters located at Sunset & Gower, in Hollywood, made numerous movies, but had to rent neighboring movie studios’s backlots for outdoor shooting due to the lack of space at the Sunset lot. By the end of 1934 this problem was solved as Columbia had acquired a 40-acre (160,000 m²) lot in Burbank, at the corner of Hollywood Way and Oak Street, on what is said to have been the Burbank Motion Pictures Stables. It was the perfect movie ranch as it was still rural enough to be landscaped as the studio needed it to be.

Gate 12 of the lot in 2015

Columbia Pictures used the ranch as a backdrop for almost all of their outdoor scenes. Many serials such as the original Batman, Superman, Captain Midnight, Blondie and The Three Stooges were filmed on the lot. In the 1960s, the ranch was booming with business. Not only were movies being filmed on a regular basis, Columbia's television division (Screen Gems) used the ranch to film these shows.

In 1970, a catastrophic fire destroyed a quarter of the lot. Half of the Western set, the Colonial/European set and parts of Blondie street burned, including Blondie house (which was also used as the Father Knows Best home). Although quickly rebuilt, two additional fires destroyed much of what was original at the Ranch, including New York Street, Modern Street, and half of the Boston townhouses.

By mid-1972, Columbia and Warner Bros. studios combined forces to combat the financial troubles each encountered, and merged under the name The Burbank Studios. Thus the ranch became a "back-backlot", as Warner Bros already had a massive backlot.

In 1990, Columbia Pictures moved its production facilities to the historic Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer lot in Culver City. As a result, Warner Bros. gained ownership of the lot and renamed it Warner Ranch. The ranch, now containing additional soundstages, remains in use. Its permanent fountain in the park, built around 1935, was seen in the opening credits of Friends, as well as in Hocus Pocus, in 1776, the musical, in the scene "The Lees of Old Virginia"; and various TV shows from the 1960s.

On April 15, 2019, it was announced that Warner Bros. will sell the property to Worthe Real Estate Group and Stockbridge Real Estate Fund as part of a larger real estate deal to be completed in 2023 which will see the studio get ownership of The Burbank Studios in time to mark its 100th anniversary.

External links

• The Unofficial Columbia Ranch site
• Behind-the-scenes photos from the collection of Stephen Lodge, film industry crew member