A dive into the history of what started as an old wooden barn on the Paramount Pictures lot
For decades, an old wooden barn on the Paramount Pictures lot was the studio gymnasium. Today it is the Hollywood Heritage Museum, where you can pose with a vintage medicine ball and ancient workout gear.
The 125-year-old clapboard landmark was originally built near Selma and Vine as a shelter for horses and lemons. In 1913, legendary director Cecil B. DeMille and producer Jesse L. Lasky rented it to set up a studio where they could make their first feature film, a silent western called The Squaw Man. The American Film Institute calls it “The very first feature-length motion picture made in Hollywood.”
Not long after the film was released, the hot company was merged into what would become Paramount Pictures. I guess mergers and acquisitions are nothing new for the company, which recently bought Warner Bros.
In the 1950s, the sentimental founders lobbied the state to recognize the barn as
Hollywood’s first film-related landmark. The turn-of-the cen- tury relic had been moved to Paramount’s Western backlot, where it fit right in. Movie cowboys on horseback rode down Bonanza Street outside while stars worked out inside.
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“Most of the photos of women in the gym look like they are posing while the guys were working out,” says Mary Mallory, on the museum’s Board of Directors. “The first trainer was Richard Kline, who taught classes on the beach. You can tell he worked out with weights. He was nice-looking but he wasn’t going to give Gary Cooper a run for his money.”
By 1979, the old guard was long gone and, shortly after filming the bizarre Henry Winkler/Hervé Villechaize wrestling epic The One and Only inside, the barn/ gym/museum was gifted to Hollywood Heritage, who moved it up Highland Avenue across from the Hollywood Bowl. The original site on Vine now houses one of those anonymous five-over-one apartments and what’s on the ground floor? An Equinox gym.
