Adventures in Dreamland
A.O. Scott, The New York Times's chief film critic, does a Griswold and tours Hollywood with his wife and two kids in this travel piece last Sunday. They stopped by Warner Bros. Studios in Burbank. Excerpt:
The tour, in keeping with the endless scrambling of past and present, was less about Bette Davis than “The Gilmore Girls.” We stopped in Stars Hollow to take permitted photographs, and wandered through the Gilmore mansion, which is housed in a sound stage. But Stars Hollow used to be Walton's Mountain, and before that, part of it was Kings Row, where Ronald Reagan lived before he went into politics. And the “Gilmore Girls” sound stage used to be “Casablanca.” Much of the lot was built in the early years of the sound era, and its city streets and country towns have been used hundreds of times — in bad and good movies and (more frequently now) in television shows — ever since.