Inside the Enigmatic World of Film Set Adventures

Your Mission-if you choose to accept, involves slave trade in a foreign land. Follow maps pictured. Mine is the elaborate one involving chases and fires. This village featured today burned to the ground in 1976.

Rather amazingly, this I.M F map looks very akin to my chase map I drew at school one “one- day dreaming afternoon.” I made my map in 1975, having never seen this episode at that time. Me and my merry band of trespassers were “our own” I.M.F force.

A Mosque where women are bought and sold as slaves…

Roof top reconnaissance vantage point, arch entry way. Picture taken 1973

Neighboring sets include the Tara Plantation and a trackless train depot, both built in 1938. This village featured is the oldest set on 40 Acres, built in 1927 by Cecil B. DeMille.

This is a job for Cinnamon Carter…

A deal is being structured in a village where anything can happen…trust me on that!

A roadblock on Freedom Road.This dirt highway actually connects Mayberry to Stalag 13.

“We sure bluffed those guys !”

“A prize potential slave has arrived in our village. Go grab her!”

Dirham and dinar will be offered in abundance is this Islam State for this slave.

More I.M.F has arrived in force for the upheaval to come…

The I.M.F has multiple disguises. Cinnamon is being offered up for slavery. “This where the rubber meats the dirt!”

A Goat is offered as trade. There will be no more human slavery. This decision was made after a brief but powerful meeting with the cleric in charge. The goats name is now…Cinnamon.

A “happy ending” indeed as the I.M.F exits this Desilu Mosque.

Turn your television to 1967…

I’ve spent a lot of time in this middle eastern village. This was the oldest set on the back lot. Built in 1927, and it survived everything this studio could dish out until a fire in 1976.

A land of Kings, Wayfarers, and Gypsies proceeded the even more turbulent 1970’s. Marines, Trespassers, and scantly clad Winches walked in the same footprints in exactly the same fashion. The last film ever made in this section was an “adult movie.” I stumbled across it one afternoon while ditching school. I was pleasantly flabbergasted. Women were topless as they pulled buckets of water out of a fountain positioned center of town.went Provocative hunter-gatherers lined every awning and doorway in this outside Bazaar.

The deal orchestrated by the I.M.F no longer was in place in 1976. The haram has changed in this topless village, now void of rules involving body cover. “Allah” would punish this village only two months later with a devastating fire that obliterated this ancient village. It spread to another famous set-Goobers Gas Station, as fire and ash reigned supreme. I was there as wood crackled in an orange blaze before collapsing in a volcano of sparks.

I could not help to shed some tears. My upstairs fort collapsed in a plume- gracing the night sky. It was once used by Elvis Presley in Harum Scarum. Millions of sparks became airborne, blowing in every direction, like translucent orange butterflies. The challenge for the fire department was limiting this blaze to just backlot and not surrounding hillside and neighborhoods.

The end of a kingdom that stood fifty years was taking place this evening. This was the hub of this backlot, it stood in the skyline for every classic film ever filmed here. This set was a close as could be for the Burning of Atlanta sequence in Gone With the Wind. Fire equipment was everywhere on the backlot and the Baldwin Hills that look down from above. This village was so close during the filming of that iconic moment that fire and effects were stationed here. The heat spread intensely like a solar flare. Everyone involved could feel it while capturing Hollywood’s most legendary night, December 10, 1938 to film.

In 1938, this scene was filmed. The village in our story lies directly behind this special effects fire. One of the first scenes filmed in the classic film. This was a harbinger of the future involving this studio. No studio in Hollywood had more fires. Almost every set burned here. The backlot was similar to a war zone in the civil war, especially in the 70’s.

Being so old, rooftops became perilous, friends of mine have fallen through through to the floors below. Perils exist everywhere. This village, even when not being used in a particular show, was a cornerstone of R.K.O / Desilu history. It was also the longest lasting fort on this backlot built in the oldest set of all.

We lived among...Spirits in the Night

This area could not be more pitch black at night. No city lights, no studio lights here, just…50 Shades of Black. Briefly, we could see our images. Navigate by moonlight, like owls. We flicked our Bic lighters while we smoked hashish. We were in a land very much akin to where this Moroccan waterbased hash was compressed for export. After ignition, we took a deep inhalation from our Hookah pipes. Our images transformed into figures from films of the past. Coming alive all but briefly, yet eternal, as to never leave.

Like we possessed the keys to this ancient kingdom. We became teenagers from the past living in the future.

I spend more time on these backlots then I do at school. This is fine because I’m getting a specialized education in film history. A class not offered in my schools. I was my own professor of movie making, my students were required to trespass, risking, capture, incarceration, and worse…injury. No guarantees on how “class” would finish once you’re inside. We have no clocks, just never ending blowing sand. Your here until your not…

We didn’t have books, We had T.V’s…

Reruns were scriptures of the events that took place before us. Dial in those “rabbit ears” to distant decades. The Outer Limits is reachable here. Like being an electron inside an atom. Anything is possible. Look about the landscape, things still exist and those that don’t…reappear. Powerful stuff-TV’s become “Time Machines.” We transport ourselves with help from a rotary channel changer and a rooftop antenna. Channels 2-13 and many in between, constantly replayed Desilu’s glorious past.

We all grew up here, I was just became the caretaker, or steward if you prefer. You didn’t need to set foot in here because your penetrated this backlot with episodes and images of your childhood. A fascinating place for kids to stumble into. We actually live …our T.V sets in ways unimaginable. In someways, it’s like finding out there is no Santa Clause and the North Pole is just a set!

We progressed. We started taking the most beat up television you have ever seen into sets on the backlot. These sets had “utility convenience outlets” for powering up our Time Machine. An extension cord was like an umbilical cord. Creating one dimensional life in a three dimensional setting. Channels changing required a pair of pliers. The antennas were broken also, you carried it with one hand, like football. We had to climb fences with this five pound box full of transistors and tubes. Always being on guard for “guards.” This magic-portal resembled a football helmet with dings all over it. It never refused to pull in a picture…

Time for Rod Serling wisdom; “You’re about to enter another dimension. It is a dimension not only of sight and sound, but also of mind. A journey into a wondrous land of imagination.You’re moving into a land of both Shadows and substance of things. And ideas- you have just crossed over into the Twilight Zone”

No truer words, put out your cigarette Rod, this a place best known for fires.

Televised segments from long ago, sparks from the past so to speak. In then sets they were created at years and decades before. Even Rod would have appreciated the extent we went to journeying …Back to the Past.

Written and lived by…Donnie Norden