Before there were klieg lights, studio gates, or scores of hopeful extras waiting on Hollywood Boulevard, the northwest corner of Sunset Boulevard and Gower Street held a far humbler landmark: a shuttered roadside bar known as the Blondeau Tavern. When filmmaker David Horsley arrived in Los Angeles in 1911, this deserted watering hole—closed, quiet, and gathering dust—was hardly an obvious birthplace for an empire. Yet it was here that Hollywood would take its very first bow.
By Allan R. Ellenberger for The Hollywoodland Revue
Above: The Nestor Film Studio / Christie Films at the northwest corner of Sunset and Gower Street
Below: The original Blondeau Tavern at the same location
On October 27, 1911, Horsley opened the Nestor Film Company inside the abandoned tavern, converting its dim interior and empty backrooms into the first motion picture studio ever established in Hollywood. What had once been a place for late-night revelry became, almost overnight, a workshop of dreams and shadows. Tables and bar fixtures were hauled out; makeshift sets and desks were carried in. The old saloon’s wide windows became ideal for capturing the California sun, while the yard behind the building became an instant backlot.
Hollywood, at that moment, was still a rural hamlet—its main roads dusty, its farms booming with citrus and poultry. The idea that films would one day define the neighborhood would have seemed laughable. But Horsley, drawn westward by the promise of year-round sunshine, saw potential where others saw only fields.
A Tavern, and a Beginning
Nestor Studios began as a modest affair built atop the shell of the Blondeau Tavern, with a hastily constructed glass-roof stage, a few dressing rooms, and outdoor dirt patches that stood in for everything from frontier towns to city streets. But the studio’s simplicity belied its impact. From this unlikely outpost flowed a steady stream of one- and two-reel comedies, dramas, and westerns—films destined for nickelodeons around the country.
Within months, the studio’s success caught the attention of other filmmakers. In 1912, Horsley merged Nestor with the burgeoning Universal Film Manufacturing Company, led by Carl Laemmle. That merger marked the first major consolidation of the Hollywood industry and helped transform the old tavern corner into one of the most important crossroads in filmmaking history.
A Neighborhood Awakens
As cameras rolled inside the former saloon, the surrounding area began to change. Horses passed wagons loaded with props; actors in full costume darted across Sunset Boulevard; neighborhood children watched from the sidelines as movie magic took shape before their eyes.
By the mid-1910s, the once-sleepy intersection was abuzz with new studios and storefronts. Locals dubbed the area “Gower Gulch,” a nod to the struggling cowboy actors who congregated there in search of work. But decades earlier, before the cowboy hats and casting calls, the spark had started with that single abandoned tavern.
From Tavern to Studio Lot
The original Nestor buildings—and the Blondeau Tavern beneath them—are long gone, replaced by a succession of studios that continued the legacy of filmmaking on that historic corner. Today the site forms part of Sunset Gower Studios, a working production lot that carries on the tradition begun in 1911.
Modern visitors walking past the studio gates may never guess that the entire machinery of Hollywood began not with grandeur, but with a shuttered bar repurposed by a visionary filmmaker. Yet beneath the concrete and soundstages lies the ground where Hollywood first learned to call “Action!”
Legacy of the Blondeau–Nestor Corner
Nestor Studios may have operated only briefly at the old tavern site, but its legacy is foundational. It was here that Hollywood shifted from a rural suburb into a thriving film district; here that the first real foothold of the motion picture industry was planted.
The story of the Blondeau Tavern’s transformation into Nestor Studios captures the spirit of early Hollywood perfectly: improvisational, scrappy, opportunistic, and endlessly optimistic. It is a reminder that film history was not born in palaces—but in the repurposed corners of Los Angeles where imagination found room to grow.
The tavern is gone. The dream is not.