2001

Warner Brothers Visit

With the AOL-Time Warner merger complete, the Carlton, the VP of Internet Services, my boss Brayton and I flew out to Warner Brothers for discussions about moving their computer systems and websites to AOL. We left conveniently from Dulles Airport which was only a three miles from where I lived in Reston.  We arrived five hours later in Los Angeles, rented a car and drove to our hotel in Burbank where Warner Brothers Studio is located.  I had never been to LA before and fortunately Carlton drove allowing me to look around on the way to Burbank. I have to say I was not impressed by the sprawling suburbs of LA.

The following day we met with the Warner Brothers technical and management on “The Lot” as they called Warner Brothers Studio operations in Burbank. During the meeting there seemed to be some resentment and resistance from the WB staff about moving their systems to AOL.  It was something we would experience more in the coming months from other TW divisions. Generally, the Time Warner divisions resented what they considered interference in their business. But orders came down from the top and they were directed to cooperate with AOL. We were not impressed with the very small datacenter which was nothing more than large room in a building on The Lot, it didn’t even have full UPS power backup. 

After the morning meetings were over they took us to the café on The Lot, telling us that you could often see famous movie stars eating there. The only people we saw were other tourist looking around for famous movie stars.

The Lot

After the meeting they gave us a VIP tour taking us around The Lot in a golf cart.  They took us first to the movie set for the TV show Gilmore Girls.  We entered one of the huge movie set building on The Lot through a side door into the cavernous building with complete movie sets. It was like a giant doll house, six or eight rooms with only three walls, the fourth open for cameras and the ceilings open for lighting. Each of the rooms was for some scene in the show, living room, bedroom, café. There was no filming that day so they let us walk around and look at the sets.   I had never seen the Gilmore Girls TV show before so when I got home I watched it for the first time and really liked it, the daughter Rory in the show reminded me of my daughter Anne and the character Luke reminded me of myself. I watched the remainder of the seasons that the show was on.

The Mid-west town on the Warner Brothers Lot

Lorelai Gilmore  and her boyfriend Luke
The red brick building is the second from the left in the town photo.

From there we went to where they had a complete movie set town with a main street, center park with gazabo and several store fronts. The town had been used for a number of movies and TV shows including the Gilmore girls. It was interesting to see the buildings up close, some were nothing more than a façade, if you looked through the windows there was just a wall. A couple of the buildings you could walk into the front door to some lobby or room but that all there was.

The ER characters at the ER entrance.
(there were not there when we visited the set)

From there we drove the golf over to the Emergency Room entrance for the TV show ER.  I had seen ER a few times and recognized the scene. What I found interesting was that from 20 or30 feet it all looked so real but when you go up close you could see that much of it wasn’t real, it was just painted. TV at the time was such poor quality, you never noticed it on TV. With the advent of high-definition TV a few years later they would have to improve the quality of the sets. An interesting thing they told us that for winter scenes with snow, they used instant mash potatoes for snow since it was non-toxic.

Drew Carey Show