This promotional film for Century City dates to the early 1970s, when Los Angeles' "city within a city" came into its own. It features a futuristic score by Mort Garson and was produced by John McComb and written, photographed and edited by Lee Chaney and Filmagic. Century City is actually a 176-acre (71.2 ha) neighborhood and business district in Los Angeles County's Westside. Outside of Downtown Los Angeles, Century City is one of the metropolitan area's most prominent employment centers, and its skyscrapers form a distinctive skyline on the Westside. As the film shows, the district was developed on the former backlot of film studio 20th Century Fox. The demolition of the lot is seen in the film's opening, with movie set after movie set being bulldozed, and "celluloid dreams crumbled". At 1:37, some of the world's foremost architects arrive to plan the development, dominated by the Century Plaza and the Avenue of the Stars.
The land of Century City originally belonged to cowboy actor Tom Mix, who used it as a ranch. It became a backlot of 20th Century Fox, which still has its headquarters just to the southwest. The area is named for the 20th Century Fox's Century Property.
In 1956, Spyros Skouras (1893-1971), who served as the President of 20th Century Fox from 1942-62, and his nephew-in-law Edmond Herrscher (died 1983), an attorney sometimes known as "the father of Century City," decided to repurpose the land for real estate development. The following year, in 1957, they commissioned a master-plan development from Welton Becket Associates, which was unveiled at a major press event on the "western" backlot later that year.
In 1961, after Fox suffered a string of expensive flops, culminating with the financial strain put on the studio by the very expensive production of Cleopatra, the film studio sold about 180 acres to developer William Zeckendorf and Aluminum Co. of America, also known as Alcoa, for US$300 million (US$2.4 billion in 2014's money). Herrscher had encouraged his uncle-in-law to borrow money instead, but once Skouras refused, he was out of the picture.
The new owners conceived Century City as "a city within a city". In 1963, the first building, Gateway West Building, was completed. The next year, in 1964, Minoru Yamasaki designed the Century Plaza Hotel. Five years later, in 1969, architects Anthony J. Lumsden and César Pelli designed the Century City Medical Plaza.
Much of the shopping center's architecture and style can be seen in numerous sequences in the 1967 Fox film, A Guide for the Married Man, as well as in a sequence in another Fox film of the same year, Caprice. Century City's plaza as it appeared in the early 1970s can be viewed in several scenes of still another Fox film, Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (1972)
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This film is part of the Periscope Film LLC archive, one of the largest historic military, transportation, and aviation stock footage collections in the USA. Entirely film backed, this material is available for licensing in 24p HD, 2k and 4k. For more information visit www.PeriscopeFi...
26 авг 2024
