Back in the 1920s, there were only five homes in what is now Studio Village, according to Ms. Lehman. Recently, she recalled how Lindberg Park got its name. Her uncle, Col. Evans, named the park after his friend, Charles Lindbergh, the Lone Eagle, who made history by flying solo across the Atlantic in 1927. But the colonel misspelled Mr. Lindbergh¹s name by leaving the "h" off. No one at City Hall ever bothered to correct it.
Ms. Lehman¹s father was John H. Lehman who served on the City Council from 1933 until 1940. She recalls that before there were telephones, her folks knew when one of the five homes was expecting company by the dust billowing down Overland Avenue, which was still a dirt road.
When art director Ben Carre rode the streetcar out past the tiny Main Street of Culver City to the Goldwyn Studios, which were surrounded by beanfields and swampland, he was puzzled. Why, he wondered, would anyone want to build a motion picture studio "out in the middle of nowhere." Mr. Carre, whose art direction and scenic designs would still be admired more than thirty years after his death, would work at that studio off and on until 1965, when he retired at the age of eighty-two.
He Found a Home
After working as art director on the Marx brothers’ Night at the Opera, Mr. Carre would work almost exclusively at the studio’s scenic design shop, painting backdrops for such memorable classic films as Marie Antoinette, The Wizard of Oz, Meet Me in St. Louis, An American in Paris and Gigi.
In researching Mr. Carre’s career, I recalled the famous line from John Ford’s classic, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, "When the legend becomes truth — print the legend." Mr. Ford has been given the credit in most film histories for having discovered Monument Valley when he made Stagecoach in 1939. Mr. Ford returned to Monument Valley to make several classic Westerns including My Darling Clementine, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon and The Searchers. No other American director would go near the location.
But back in 1931, Twentieth Century Fox remade Riders of the Purple Sage, starring George O’Brien. This was the second of three different versions of the Zane Grey novel. Mr. Carre, the art director, has been credited with building a Western town as location for Riders of The Purple Sage in Monument Valley. George O’Brien, the star of the film, had been the star of Mr. Ford’s silent epic The Iron Horse. He went on to appear in featured roles in several Ford films.
In his unpublished biography, The Sets I Remember, Mr. Carre also talked about constructing an entire Scottish village for a Mary Pickford epic, Pride of The Clan, off the rugged coast of Maine.