hollywood

i've been scanning and reformatting and editing some of my old building histories, including tara----all of them i did in the last century before internet research really amounted to much, and it's amazing how much more you can get at now ten years later----like this excellent site, retroweb.com, that has all sorts of stuff, including bunches of images of rko studio's "back forty," which was actually 29 acres in culver city where they built sets for cecil b. demille's king of kings in 1926 and king kong in 1933----the first scenes filmed for gone with the wind in december 1938 were the burning of atlanta, which was actually the old sets from king kong and king of kings going up in flames so they could clear the site and build tara and downtown atlanta----after world war ii, the tara and atlanta sets were continuously adapted and remodeled and, along with new construction, were used for a whole bunch of teevee productions---yancey derringer's new orleans, andy griffith's mayberry, and the cartright's bonanza were all created on this back lot----in at least one scene from the 1960s batman series, the batmobile can be seen racing past the ruins of the atlanta depot set----that's the tara set at right in 1958 not long before it was taken down----the entire lot was sold and cleared for redevelopment in 1976