Blast From the Past

For more than two decades, the filmmakers at one Hollywood studio shot multimillion-dollar epics that nobody saw.

And it wasn’t because the movies produced by Lookout Mountain Studios were bombs, either. They were about bombs--atomic bombs, in fact.

The supersecret studio, hidden in a residential neighborhood in Laurel Canyon, was run by the federal government to document nuclear blasts for the Department of Defense and the Atomic Energy Commission.

The studio’s 250 producers, directors and cameramen were sworn to secrecy about their work. And the 6,500 movies they made were locked away as soon as a handful of officials in Washington looked at them.

But the recent move to declassify Cold War-era archives has changed that. Tonight the former Lookout Mountain filmmakers will be honored at a mini-atomic film festival in Hollywood. It will be the first public recognition from federal officials about the work done between 1947 and 1969 behind the studio’s three-foot-thick concrete walls.

The 2 1/2-acre site on Wonderland Avenue is now a private residence--perhaps the only one in Los Angeles with its own personal bomb shelter, helicopter pad, two underground parking garages, three screening rooms and 17 climate-controlled film vaults.

It was a cinematic wonderland for filmmakers dispatched from there to remote South Pacific atolls and dusty Nevada ridge tops to photograph the power and fury of nuclear bombs. With the declassification, they are free to talk about their adventures for the first time.

“I could have gotten a job in TV and been bored to tears,” said former cameraman Doug Wood, whose exploits include flying directly over an exploding bomb in 1951--only to have his protective goggles fall apart at zero-minus-one.

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“I’d aimed the camera and I reached up to pull the goggles down and the lens came out. I said, ‘Oh, oh!’ ” said Wood, now 75 and a resident of the High Desert town of Phelan. “All I could do was put my hand over my eyes. The blast was so bright I could see my bones through my skin.”

Between the 331 bomb blasts it documented, Lookout Mountain Studio produced government training films. Its Hollywood location made it easy to recruit technicians from regular motion picture studios and to keep on top of the latest cinema techniques.

The 100,000-square-foot studio was originally built in 1941 as a World War II air defense center that coordinated radar installations on nearby mountaintops.

As the studio grew in the 1950s, there were occasional conflicts with the Laurel Canyon neighbors. Traffic congestion on the narrow hillside streets and a shortage of parking space forced officials to ferry workers in from Studio City and Hollywood on shuttle buses, according to Pierre Wilson, 73, a Woodland Hills film editor who rose to become director of operations at Lookout Mountain.

In 1954, neighbors complained that the armed guards who patrolled the studio and an electrified fence that ringed it ruined the residential feel of the neighborhood.

Air Force officials assured city officials that the guards had never had to draw their revolvers. They explained that the electric fence was designed only to sound a buzzer inside the guardhouse when touched, not to shock.

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Today, Wonderland Avenue residents know little about the studio’s history except that it is rumored to have secret tunnels.

Neighbor Alfred Bendixen said Tuesday that a previous owner tried unsuccessfully to turn the site into a senior citizens medical facility after the Air Force moved out. Resident Carol Laporta remembered real estate agents advertising it as a potential compound for “rock stars or royalty.”

Its current owners, Municipal Court Commissioner John Ladner and artist Mark Lipscomb, plan to attend tonight’s ceremony to talk to old-timers about the tunnel rumors. “We’ve heard all the legends,” Ladner said Tuesday. “If they’ve closed them off, they did it very skillfully.”

Tonight’s tribute, to be held at the American Film Institute, has been organized by filmmaker Peter Kuran, a Sylmar special effects expert. He learned of the Lookout Mountain cinematographers while producing a documentary called “Trinity and Beyond / The Atomic Bomb Movie.”

“I was amazed at their work. I just think they deserve their place in history,” said the 41-year-old Kuran--who is footing the $15,000 cost of tonight’s event.

Among those attending will be Byron Ristvet, dean of the Department of Defense’s Nuclear Weapons School, and Charles Demos, head of the Department of Energy’s secret archives declassification program. A commendation from Secretary of Energy Federico Pena will be presented.

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“Nobody on this earth is ever going to take pictures of nuclear weapons going off again,” Demos said.

Former Lookout Mountain cameraman Jack Cannon agrees.

“It was a time of history we should not look back in shame at,” said Cannon, 72, of Newport Beach. “It was a time when we faced a threat from the Russians with the most powerful weapon in the world.”

Lookout Mountain’s movies--which are being made available to the public by Demos’ group --might not have been artistic masterpieces, he said. But neither were the atomic blasts.

“They were not things of beauty, but technical accomplishments,” he said of the detonations. “Being out there and getting the picture was an accomplishment too.”