There's a stretch of Lankershim Boulevard in Universal City where the ground has a long memory. Fires ripped through it in 1990, again in 2008, and — if you count the original silent-era blaze — three times in roughly a century. Each time, the studio rebuilt. Each time, it came back bigger and, frankly, stranger than before.
Universal Pictures is the oldest Hollywood studio still operating under its original name. That's not trivia. That's a survival story that would get laughed out of a pitch meeting for being too unbelievable. It started on a chicken ranch in the San Fernando Valley, outlasted the nickelodeon era, survived the talkies, dodged bankruptcy more than once, and is currently one of the most profitable entertainment operations on earth. Most companies that old are museums. Universal is still making movies.
The story of how it got here is wilder than most of the films it's produced — and it tells you more about the California film industry than almost anything else does.
Carl Laemmle's Chicken Farm
In 1912, a short, relentlessly cheerful German immigrant named Carl Laemmle consolidated several small production companies into something he called Universal Film Manufacturing Company. He needed land cheap enough to shoot on. What he found was a 230-acre poultry ranch in the hills north of Hollywood, a few miles up from the sleepy rail stop at Cahuenga Pass.
Laemmle didn't just build a studio. He built a town. Universal City was incorporated as its own municipality in 1915, complete with a post office, a justice of the peace, and a sign on the gate. He also had a genuinely bizarre idea that turned out to be the first theme-park instinct in Hollywood history: he charged the public 25 cents to sit in bleachers and watch movies being filmed. Thousands came. The chickens were gone by then, but Laemmle had essentially invented the studio tour before the studio was even finished.
The first fire came in 1920. A blaze tore through a major portion of the backlot. Laemmle rebuilt without much fanfare. He had other problems, like his habit of hiring virtually every member of his extended family, a practice the industry mocked so relentlessly that a Variety columnist coined the word "nepotism" partly in his honor.
The Monster Years
Laemmle's son, Carl Laemmle Jr., took over production in 1928 at age 21 and immediately did something nobody expected: he made great movies. "Dracula" in 1931. "Frankenstein" that same year. "The Mummy" in 1932. "The Bride of Frankenstein" in 1935. The Universal monster cycle didn't just save the studio financially during the Depression. It permanently wired Universal's identity to horror and creature features in a way that still echoes in every "Halloween" sequel the studio releases today.
Boris Karloff. Bela Lugosi. Lon Chaney Jr. They all walked those same North Hollywood hills. The backlot sets built for those films — the European village, the foggy moors, the crumbling castles — became so iconic they were recycled in dozens of subsequent productions, saving money and accidentally creating a visual grammar that audiences still recognize as quintessentially "Universal."
The Laemmles lost control of the studio in 1936 when they couldn't service a loan. That was the end of the family era. The monsters lived on.
Fifty Years of Getting Bought and Sold
The decades between the 1940s and the 1990s read like a corporate relay race. Decca Records bought Universal in 1952. MCA, the talent agency turned entertainment conglomerate run by the famously formidable Lew Wasserman, acquired Decca and with it Universal in 1962. Wasserman ran the place like a private duchy for three decades, building it into a genuine industry powerhouse and making Universal the go-to studio for directors like Alfred Hitchcock and, later, Steven Spielberg.
Then in 1990, the second fire. A massive blaze on June 1 destroyed several acres of backlot, killed the clock tower set from "Back to the Future," and demolished a historic New York street. The studio had been charging tourists to ride past that clock tower just days before. The rebuild took years and cost tens of millions of dollars.
Matsushita bought MCA and Universal in 1990 for $6.6 billion, a number that stunned Hollywood. Then Seagram's bought it from Matsushita in 1995. Then Vivendi acquired Seagram's in 2000. Then GE's NBC acquired Universal from Vivendi in 2004, creating NBCUniversal. Then Comcast bought controlling interest in NBCUniversal in 2011 and completed its acquisition two years later. By any measure, one of the most passed-around properties in entertainment history.
Through all of it, the lot in Universal City didn't move. The address stayed the same. The tourists kept coming.
The 2008 Fire and What Was Lost
Then came June 1, 2008. Eighteen years to the day after the 1990 blaze, and nobody who noticed that coincidence found it funny. A fire started in the early morning hours on the backlot and burned for hours before it was contained. The "King Kong" attraction was destroyed. The New York Street set, rebuilt after 1990, burned again. A significant portion of the Universal Music Group archive, master recordings stored in a vault on the property, was lost. The full scope of that music loss wasn't publicly confirmed until years later. It remains one of the most significant cultural losses in American recording history.
Once again, Universal rebuilt. The theme park expanded. New attractions replaced old ones. The studio kept making movies through the smoke.
The Lot Today
Universal City sits on roughly 415 acres today, nearly twice the size of Laemmle's original chicken ranch. The theme park draws millions of visitors a year. The studio lot still functions as an active production facility, shooting film and television simultaneously with tourists riding trams 50 feet away. It's a genuinely strange arrangement that somehow keeps working.
The Spielberg connection never really severed. "Jaws," "E.T.," "Jurassic Park," the "Back to the Future" trilogy: the biggest Universal titles of the modern era carry his fingerprints or his direct involvement, and Amblin Entertainment has been headquartered on the lot for decades. That creative anchor gave the studio a continuity that the corporate reshuffling upstairs couldn't disrupt.
Three fires. Nine or ten owners depending on how you count. One address on Lankershim Boulevard. Carl Laemmle would probably recognize the tram.