Walt Disney in Burbank: The Factory Behind the Fantasy

The Hollywood Sign is in Hollywood. Grauman's Theatre is in Hollywood. The Walk of Fame is in Hollywood. The actual film and television industry is in Burbank.

Walt Disney moved his studio from Hyperion Avenue in Silver Lake to a new fifty-one-acre lot in Burbank in nineteen forty, the year after Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs earned enough to fund the move. The Burbank lot was built as a working factory for animation production: dedicated buildings for story development, ink and paint, camera work, and sound, arranged in a campus layout that Walt had designed himself. There was a commissary where Disney ate lunch with his staff and walked the tables listening to complaints and ideas.

Fantasia was produced here. So was Pinocchio, Bambi, and Dumbo. The studio is fifty-one acres in the middle of Burbank and is not open to the public. The Hyperion Avenue building in Silver Lake, where Snow White began, is now a commercial strip. There is a plaque.

Warner Bros. has been in Burbank since the late nineteen twenties. NBC is in Burbank. Universal Studios is over the hill in Universal City. The geography of American popular culture is not where its mythology says it is, and has not been for a very long time. Hollywood is a word for something that happens somewhere else.