Burn Hollywood Burn ... The fire at the Universal film studios. Photograph:Graham Whitby Boot/Allstar/Sportsphoto
I came out of my hotel in Pasadena about nine in the morning on Sunday, and my first thought was that June 1st is a perfect moment in California. The full-blooming jacarandas melted into the mauve and gunmetal of the mountains to the north. The sprinklers were watering the flowers of Pasadena before the sun became too hot. Then I saw the billowing column of black smoke away to the west. It was more-or-less Burbank, and the Bob Hope Airport, where I was headed. But the smoke was too dark for a grass fire.
As we made the 20-minute drive to Bob Hope, it became clear that the fire was on the NBC-Universal lot, and by the time I was in the airport - watching the television news - it was clear what I had been seeing. A fire at Universal had already destroyed some standing city sets and the King Kong element in the ride that makes up a big part of the very popular Universal tour. Such things can be replaced. There was also grimmer news: that the vault storing some films and TV shows had suffered damage.
The Universal lot was closed for a day, Sunday - today it should be open again. For reasons no one yet knows, the water pressure was far too low when the firemen arrived - one reason could be that California is in one of its famous droughts. Ron Meyer, the president of Universal, tried to give a reassuring press conference. Yes, there had been losses in the vaults, but not to worry - "everything could be replaced".
Alas, film historians have heard such easy claims before. In their turn, they know the American picture business has been astonishingly casual with its treasury: about half the movies ever made in the U.S. have been lost forever. It's easy for the business to say, but those lost films were the rubbishy ones - not to worry. Worry is a very natural and proper state of mind in the US, and I'd just remind Universal that scaring people with King Kong and Jaws is fine, but don't forget the past behaviour of Hollywood management.
And that brings me to why I was in Pasadena, or, to be more precise, at the Huntington Library. Several agencies had come together for a week-end conference - the Huntington and University of Southern California Institute on California and the West, the Academy of Motion Picture and the good offices of Will Hearst. The subject was "Moguls, Millionaires and Movie Stars, Hollywood Between the Wars, 1920-1940". The contributors - as far as I could tell (and I was one of them) - were pretty good, and the panel that delighted me was one that explored William Randolph Hearst, his art collecting and his sense of architecture.
The high point of that panel was the great mansion (415 Pacific Coast Highway) that Hearst built for himself and Marion Davies, the movie star and his mistress, on the beach at Santa Monica in 1915. We saw splendid photographs of the interior and exterior of a building that would be less than a hundred years old still, but - yes, you've guessed. This modern palace, this outstanding piece of Hollywood history, was bulldozed away. The site will be opened next year as a visitors' centre, and there are a few relics of the Hearst house left . But the real thing is gone.
That's the lesson: Hollywood and its history are ploughed back into the land to make the future. At the conference, I spoke about Citizen Kane and referred to the way at the end of that film that the crew moved in to burn Kane's collection of art and junk - very much based on Hearst's real collection. The archivists in the audience shuddered to think of that attitude. And a day later there was fresh smoke in the sky.
