Sorry to hear that the Henson Lot in Hollywood (aka The Chaplin Lot, The Red Skelton Lot, The CBS Lot, The A&M Records Lot and a few other names) is for sale. And I'll be even sorrier if the purchaser rips the whole thing down and puts a shopping mall in its place, which sadly may make the most financial sense.
This article will give you a good overview of the history of the facility which was, as you'll see, built in 1919 to serve the needs of Mr. Charles Chaplin. Located on La Brea Boulevard near Sunset, it's in a spot where you wouldn't expect a studio with all that history to be…and there's a lot more of that history than is commonly known. For instance…
When Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera left MGM and set up their own studio to make cartoons, that's where they first rented offices. They later housed artists in buildings across the street and produced their first TV shows from both locations before building their big building up on Cahuenga Boulevard.
I've visited that lot many times — sometimes for business-type meetings because a number of producers rent space there, sometimes because that's where they do Puppet Up! That is, of course, the adult/improvised puppet show that The Henson Company puts on now and then in the big studio there. Tickets are now on sale for performances in late July and early August and I'm curious how and when a sale of the studio will affect Puppet Up! That of course may depend on whether there ends up being a Target store, an Olive Garden and a Sephora on that hunk of real estate.
There are just so many great stories about that lot. For instance, the linked article says that "Red Skelton bought the studio in 1960 and dubbed it Skelton Studios…Skelton sold the studio in 1962 to CBS, which shot Perry Mason there from 1962 to 1966."
That's true but there's more to the story. Skelton reportedly bought the place over the warnings of his financial advisers because he just couldn't resist owning — and putting his name on — the place where Chaplin made Modern Times and other classics. Obsessed with the idea that the future of television was in color, he also purchased three rental remote vans which had full color videotape capability.
It was only after they were delivered that a problem turned up: Because they were so long, there was no place to park them on the studio lot. They had to be parked on La Brea Boulevard, each occupying two or three parking spaces, and during the hours that the parking meters were in operation, someone at the studio — it was occasionally Red himself — had to go out and put coins in those meters every two hours.
Mr. Skelton was losing a fortune on the place and facing the very-real possibility of being the only person starring in a popular weekly television series to go broke. He was also fighting with CBS.
They wanted him to do his weekly half-hour show from Television City at Beverly and Fairfax for better production values. He wanted to do it from his studio because…well, because it was his studio and that saved him money. Finally, they solved the problem thusly: To keep him on the air, CBS bought the studio from him and to justify and recoup the expense, his show went from a half-hour to an hour. He thereafter did it from Television City and they put Perry Mason (and other shows) into what had been the Chaplin/Skelton lot.
There are a lot of stories like that and I suppose they'll survive even if the studio doesn't. But it would be nice if the studio did.