Burbank: The Media Capital of the World
California
The city you are entering was named for a dentist who ran a sheep ranch here in the eighteen sixties, and for most of its early history it was exactly what that biography suggests: agricultural, unremarkable, a flat expanse of San Fernando Valley between the mountains and Los Angeles.
Then, within the span of about fifteen years, it became something else entirely. Warner Bros. took over a seventy-eight-acre studio on Burbank farmland in nineteen twenty-eight, when it absorbed First National Pictures, which had built there two years earlier, drawn by the wide lots, cheap land, and reliable sunshine. Walt Disney moved his animation company to Buena Vista Street in nineteen thirty-nine after the success of Snow White made his old Hyperion Avenue building too small. NBC arrived from Hollywood in nineteen fifty-two, bringing its radio and later television operations to a sprawling facility on Alameda Avenue.
Suddenly the three institutions sat within a few miles of each other in what became known as the Media District, and the gravitational pull was immediate. Talent agencies, post-production houses, casting directors, prop suppliers, costume rentals, and recording studios all clustered nearby. Today more than a thousand entertainment and media companies operate inside Burbank city limits.
Lockheed had its own claim on the city. The aircraft company built its main manufacturing plant here in the nineteen thirties and produced hundreds of military aircraft during World War Two, including the P-thirty-eight Lightning fighter. The airport next to the plant became a hub for western aviation, running under various names before settling on Hollywood Burbank Airport.
The Tonight Show was taped here for decades, as were thousands of other television programs that shaped American popular culture. Burbank incorporated in nineteen eleven with fewer than two thousand people. It now holds around one hundred five thousand, most of them employed, in one way or another, by the image business that colonized this sheep ranch.
