Opposite the Hollywood Bowl, in an unpromising clump of tour buses and parking-lot traffic, is a small wooden building whose importance far outweighs its scale. These days it's a museum, known as the Hollywood Heritage Museum, but for many years it was known as the Lasky–DeMille Barn. It's one of the few places in Los Angeles where legend and geography match exactly, with a precision that's not metaphorical or made retroactive. It's the place where Hollywood, as a working motion-picture industry, first began to come into being, in a sustained, organized way, and take a more or less permanent shape.
By Allan R. Ellenberger
Jesse L. Lasky looks out at the barn where he started an empire.
The barn actually has a history that predates the birth of cinema by some years. Constructed in 1895, it originally stood on the southeast corner of Selma Avenue and Vine Street, out in what was then an open grove of orange and lemon trees, when Hollywood was still just a rural backwater sparsely populated. The barn was part of the estate of Colonel Robert Northam, a large landowner whose sprawling mansion stood directly across the street on the future site of the Broadway Building. The barn itself was used in a strictly utilitarian fashion, as a stable and storage place for horses, wagons and equipment, out in what was then an agricultural rather than entrepreneurial landscape.
In 1904, Northam sold the estate to Jacob Stern, a realtor active during Hollywood’s early real-estate boom. That same year, Stern sold the barn to Harry Revier, a producer-director already involved in the nascent motion-picture business. Under Revier, the building remained adaptable—still a service structure but now owned by someone alert to its potential in a rapidly changing town. That adaptability would prove decisive.
By the early 1910s, motion-picture companies were drifting westward in search of sunlight, open land, and relief from East Coast patent enforcement. Hollywood did not yet possess studios in any formal sense. Filmmaking was conducted wherever space could be found and reshaped. In December 1913, Harry Revier rented the barn to Cecil B. DeMille, who had arrived in California as part of the newly formed Jesse L. Lasky Feature Play Company. The decision would permanently alter the building’s meaning—and Hollywood’s future.
Remodeling began immediately. The barn was stripped of its agricultural identity and refashioned with remarkable speed and ingenuity. Horse stalls were removed to create storage space for equipment the company hoped soon to acquire. The carriage stand was converted into offices, a projection room, and a primitive laboratory. The washing block was enclosed and designated as a vault. The former hay and feed section became an office shared by DeMille and Jesse Lasky himself. Every inch of the structure was repurposed, not for comfort or prestige, but for survival.
A 30-foot-square platform was constructed, attached to the barn on its south side. This was the company's first stage. It was roofed with a sail rigged to a mast that could be raised or lowered to control sunlight – a sensible workaround in a day before reliable studio lighting was available. The set-up reflected the scrappy, pioneering spirit of early Hollywood: improvisational, experimental, and unconcerned with appearances, so long as the work could get done.
Production moved quickly. Shortly after the remodeling began, DeMille wired Lasky to inform him that filming would start the following day. On December 29, 1913, DeMille called “camera” on the first scene of The Squaw Man. The moment marked more than the start of a film. It marked the beginning of sustained feature production in Hollywood itself.
The excitement convinced Lasky to join DeMille in California. His journey west would later become one of Hollywood’s most telling origin anecdotes. Arriving at the old Santa Fe Station in Los Angeles, Lasky asked a taxi driver to take him to Hollywood. The driver looked puzzled but agreed. After consulting other drivers at the Alexandria Hotel, they navigated dirt roads, passed endless orchards and scattered farmhouses, and eventually reached the Hollywood Hotel. There, Lasky introduced himself to the clerk and asked for directions to his studio.
The Barn on the Lasky lot at the corner of Selma and Vine
A different angle of the Barn at Selma and Vine. Notice the Taft Building, at Hollywood and Vine, in the background
The clerk had never heard of it. Lasky's elaboration that the company's director-general was Cecil B. DeMille was of no avail. As Lasky began to turn away, the clerk grabbed his sleeve and offered a suggestion. He pointed down a dirt road, pepper trees on either side of it -- Vine Street -- and told him to follow it until he came to an old barn. "There's some movie folks working there," he said, "that might know where your company is."
When Lasky heard the word "barn" he knew he had arrived.
At Selma and Vine, he found the structure bearing a sign that read: The Jesse L. Lasky Feature Play Company. Outside stood a two-ton Ford truck with the company’s name painted on its side. Inside, someone announced, “There’s the chief.” DeMille greeted Lasky warmly, gathered the small company together, and delivered a welcoming speech. A photographer was summoned, and Lasky and the assembled filmmakers posed against the truck—an image that would later take on near-mythic status as one of Hollywood’s first official group portraits.
Looking south on Vine Street at the corner of Selma Avenue. The Barn is on the left.
The Squaw Man was completed in just three weeks. Its success confirmed that Hollywood could sustain feature-length production and that the barn was more than a temporary shelter. Almost immediately, Oscar Apfel took over the single stage to direct Brewster’s Millions, adapting another popular stage play. Edward Abeles, who had starred in the theatrical version, was brought west for the film. More productions followed in rapid succession, including The Master Mind and The Only Son, all emerging from the same humble base.
As production intensified, so did improvements to the barn and its surrounding lot. In May 1914, electrical illumination was used for the first time to supplement sunlight when two spotlights arrived from the East for the filming of The Call of the North, adapted from a story by Stewart Edward White. This marked a technical turning point. The barn was no longer just improvising—it was modernizing.
Above: The Barn on the Paramount lot. Below: The Barn moving to its new location.
The original platform soon proved insufficient. A larger open-air stage was constructed and designated Stage Number One. When one end of this stage was eventually enclosed with glass, it became the pride of the studio and a subject of fascination throughout Hollywood. Sheds extending from the Selma Avenue side of the barn housed cutting rooms, carpenter and paint shops, and the first dressing rooms. What had begun as a rented stable in an orchard was rapidly transforming into a functioning studio complex.
That transformation signaled something larger. The barn was not merely accommodating filmmaking; it was anchoring it. From this site, Hollywood shifted from a convenient backdrop into a permanent production center. As the Lasky organization grew and ultimately became Paramount Pictures, the barn’s trailblazing function gave way to more ordinary studio use. After Paramount acquired and moved into its permanent lot in June 1926, the structure was relocated there as well, and by 1929 it had been converted into a gymnasium, quietly folded into the everyday operations of a now fully industrialized studio system.
The Barn during its time as a gym on the Paramount lot (Photo Credit: Author's collection)
Its historic significance could not be denied forever. In 1956 the barn was designated California State Historic Landmark No. 554 with a formal recognition of its significance to the beginnings of the motion-picture industry. Saved from redevelopment in 1979, Paramount donated the building to the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce's Hollywood Historic Trust. It was relocated to a parking lot on the west side of Vine Street while preservationists found a long-term solution.
Hollywood Heritage founder Marian Gibbons (left) and a group of volunteers.
In 1980, Hollywood Heritage, Inc. was formed by Marian Gibbons, Christy Johnson McAvoy, Frances Offenhauser McKeal, and Susan Peterson St. Francis, and the barn was later transferred to the organization. During this transitional period, it was relocated again, briefly stored in the parking lot of the Hollywood Palace Theatre, boarded up and fenced while plans took shape.
Hollywood Heritage soon aligned its efforts with a long-dormant plan for a film museum on Highland Avenue, land that had been designated for that purpose in 1960 but never developed. In February 1982, the barn was moved to the Highland Avenue site, where three years of restoration followed, funded through donated materials, services, and volunteer labor. The building officially reopened as the Hollywood Heritage Museum in December 1985. A fire forced its closure from September 1996 to 2003, but while a small portion of the structure was damaged, the museum’s permanent collection remained unharmed.
Left and above: Displays from a recent celebration of MGM Studios.
The barn remains to this day - faded, refurbished and stubbornly silent in a city with a notoriously short memory for its history. There are photographs of every stage of its life: as a country stable, as an untried studio, as a house on wheels trundling across Los Angeles on a flatbed truck, and as a museum. Few Hollywood icons have such a legacy.
The Lasky–DeMille Barn matters not because it is grand. It matters because it is real. Hollywood did not start with spotlights or red carpets. It started in an orchard, in a barn, with borrowed equipment, a canvas sail for a roof and a few people who believed that motion pictures could be something more. This building is where that belief first took root—and where Hollywood, quite literally, found its footing.
Be sure to check out...
The Barn that Made Hollywood: 40 Years of the Hollywood Heritage Museum
In celebration of the 40th anniversary as an early Hollywood history museum, the museum presents "The Barn that Made Hollywood," a look at both Hollywood Heritage's history as a preservation advocacy group founded by four women intent on protecting historic Hollywood and the Lasky DeMille barn.
Time & Location
Saturday, January 10, 2026, 11:00 AM – 3:00 PM
2100 Highland Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90068
CLICK HERE FOR MORE INFORMATION
I invite readers to share their thoughts, memories, or favorite early Hollywood stories sparked by this piece—and to join the conversation about the humble barn that helped launch an industry.
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