TRAVEL cargoshippingtimes 12/02/2025 0 Comments

How Hollywood helped shape the airports and air travel industry

Long before paparazzi shots at LAX and complaints about celebrity private jet use, Hollywood — and Los Angeles — played a key role in the rise of aviation.

Everyone knows the song “On the Good Ship Lollipop.” Shirley Temple’s signature tune has become a cultural touchstone, featured in Chicago Mob chronicles (it was the nickname of Cicero’s crew) and, of course, “The Simpsons.”

But if you haven’t seen the 1934 movie “Bright Eyes,” you may not know that the ship in question is an airplane or that this song for air travel was originally sung by Temple’s character taxiing around Glendale’s Grand Central Terminal from Los Angeles’ first commercial airport.

Which you can still see if you take a “sweet tour,” not to the candy store but along Grand Central Avenue, where it runs past Disney’s Grand Central Creative Campus.

Completed in 1929 and renovated by Disney in 2014, the beautiful Spanish Revival and Art Deco buildings are all that remain of the airport.

Mary Pickford at Chaplin Airport in 1921 at Fairfax Avenue and Wilshire Boulevard.

Here Charles and Anne Morrow Lindbergh made their record-breaking first regular LA to New York airport flight (only 50 hours!) and aviator Laura Engels became the first woman to fly solo from the East Coast to the West. Countless celebrities and titans of industry landed here when they came to or returned to LA, the airport was also the scene of many other early movies, including 1930’s “Hell’s Angels,” produced by Howard Hughes, and 1933’s “Lady Killer,” starring James Cagney.

However, this was not the setting of the famous airport scene in “Casablanca” – according to the best accounts, it was Van Nuys Airport.

That Grand Central Airport now houses Disney offices and event spaces (and is occasionally open for LA Conservancy or Art Deco community tours) marks a full-circle moment. From the short, funny films of the Wright brothers’ first flights to celebrities’ complaints about private jet emissions, Hollywood has had a deep, complex, mutually beneficial (and sometimes tragic) relationship with aviation.

Poster for the movie "Skywayman" Starring Ormer Locklear.

So as we enter the holiday season, in which millions will flock to both the airport and (one hopes) the multiplex, it seems appropriate to consider how Hollywood has literally and figuratively helped shape the airline industry.

With its mild climate and acres of vacant land, early 20th-century LA was perfect for two booming industries: aviation and film.

Hollywood power players and planes

Grand Central Air Terminal was not the first regional airport. Even before World War I, LA’s rich and innovative were transformed by flight. In 1910, more than 200,000 people attended the Los Angeles International Airshow at Dominguez Field, now Rancho Dominguez.

Men stand at Thomas Innes Airport at Vance Boulevard and Mildred Avenue.

As the small aircraft manufacturers that would eventually replace or replace Lockheed, Douglas, and Northrop established themselves on the West Coast, LC Brand—often referred to as the “Father of Glendale”—built an air shed in front of his hillside mansion (now Brand’s library) and silent film producer/future studio head Thomas Anisel’s base was built for Vincent Peslot Anisel. In 1914, the latter became the first airport on the West Coast to be officially named an airport.

By the end of WWI, airstrips and airfields dotted the LA area—by some accounts, there were 53 within 10 miles of City Hall. Hughes is the most famous bridge between film and aviation – producing films and later running RKO Pictures while the Hughes Aircraft Co. Founding, building and flying game-changing aircraft and eventually operating TransWorld Airlines. But he wasn’t the only one.

Cecil B. DeMille with his biplane at DeMille Field No. 2.

In 1918, Cecil B. DeMille founded the Mercury Aviation Co. – which became the world’s first commercial airline with regularly scheduled flights – and built an airport, Demel Field No. 1, at Melrose and Fairfax routes. The first passenger flight from New York to LA landed at Dimmel Field No. 2 at Wilshire and Fairfax.

In 1919, Sidney Chaplin (Charlie’s brother and business manager) built his airport on a parcel along the road that borders Fairfax, Wilshire and La Cienega. (Keep that in mind the next time you try to turn left on La Cienega.)

Chaplin and DeMille soon discovered that air travel was not as profitable as it first seemed – the runways of LA’s small airports were too short to accommodate the many large planes and as the city grew, the land was too valuable for real estate development. But the most important of these Hollywood-owned airports was the role aviation played in the burgeoning film industry, and vice versa.

Aviation in film

Many World War I aviators came to LA to become stunt pilots and sometimes movie stars. Former Royal Air Force gunner-turned-actor Reginald Denny played with 13 Black Cats at Burdett Field (located at 94th Street and Western Avenue in what is now Inglewood) and appeared in dozens of non-aeronautical films, including “Anna Karenina,” “The Little Minister” and “Rebecca.”

Carl Laemel on the wing of an airplane with aviator Frank Staats.

Being a stunt pilot, even for the movies, was a dangerous occupation. Frank Stits died while performing stunts during the 1915 festivities for the opening weekend of Universal Studios. (He is said to prevent retrogression.)

Five years later, the death of US Army veteran Ormer Lockyer made Hollywood history. Known for his ability to repair “wing drives” during his service in the Army Air Service, Lockyer left the Army after WWI to form Lockyer’s Flying Circus. Karl Laemmel made him a star with “The Great Air Heist” (which was filmed at Demmel Field No. 1). But Lockyer’s second film, “The Skyway Man” for studio chief William Fox, would be his last. The final stunt was filmed at night. Locklear asked that the lights be turned off in DeMille’s field so he could see when he had to get out of his dive. When that didn’t happen, Lockyer collided with his flying partner, Milton “Skeet” Elliott, and was killed. (Fox included the crash in the movie – no known footage exists today.)

According to LA and Hollywood historian Mark Wanamaker, the crash scared Denny so much that he began working on filming aerial stunts without putting the pilots in danger. “Danny built a small radio-controlled, remote-controlled aircraft that became the basis for drones in World War II,” says Wanamaker, and was used to train fighter pilots. “So you see how intertwined it all was—Hollywood and flying.”

Wanamaker says that early motion pictures were obsessed with animation. “It started with horses, then trains, then airplanes.”

“Bright Eyes,” in which orphan Shirley Black (Temple) was adopted by a group of her father’s pilot friends, was just one in a series of films that celebrated, and promoted, aviation and the miracle of flight.

After WWI, everyone, including women, wanted to fly and Hollywood encouraged it. Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy created a comedy of flight; Harry Houdini took to the skies in the “Grim Game.” Rudolph Valentino learned to fly like Mary Pickford and Ruth Rowland, who became the queen of stunt flying movies. Both women had their own airplanes, and Pickford, Wanamaker says, brought a “Dragon” plane to Grumman’s Chinese Theater, posing in front of it as a publicity stunt.

When the stars began traveling by air, they outlined their travel plans so that photographers could take them down the runway, with the name of the airport clearly visible. Some pose with their planes, others in various terminals or sometimes in aviation-inspired styles, including airplane-like hats. The studio’s costume designers, including Howard Greer and, later, Jean-Louis, combined flight attendant fashions.

Facing the airport

After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the studio’s production designers and artists chose to disguise Hollywood Burbank Airport (then Lockheed Air Terminal) as part of the suburbs. After it opened as a US airport in 1930, Burbank became Glendale’s main competitor in air travel and celebrity sightings (what Los Angeles International Airport would have been was still a mining area and acres of wheat and barley).

A silver airplane in the foreground, with the tiled roof of the Burbank Airport building in the background.

United Airport was purchased by Lockheed in 1940 and after the United States entered WWII, it was used to build and stage military aircraft. Concerned that Japan would attack West Coast targets, the military turned to the studios to help Lockheed.

Designers from Disney, Paramount and 20th Century Fox helped design the 1,000-acre canopy that would separate the airport from the neighborhood that surrounds it. According to the Lockheed Martin website: “The original plant was covered with chicken wire, netting and painted canvas to blend in with the surrounding grass. And the fake trees were made with spray-painted chicken feathers for leaves, some painted green for new growth and some brown to represent deca.”

No bomb was ever dropped on Lockheed Airport so the camouflage operation was a success, which is a good thing considering that even after commercial travel began at LAX in 1979, the beach often forced planes to land at Burbank.

That’s not to say LAX doesn’t have its own Hollywood history. Minefield, purchased by LA in 1937, is where Jimmy Stewart and other aviation enthusiasts, including Tyrone Power and Robert Taylor, learned to fly. Since LAX opened, it has been featured in countless movies, television series, music videos, songs and video games, from the opening scene of “The Graduate” to Miley Cyrus’ “Party in the USA” to the 2024 Netflix film “Carry On” takes place almost entirely at LAX, but LAX was set entirely on The Bachelor. New Orleans International Airport.

Alice White wearing an aviator hat in the 1930s.

Now, even as both the entertainment and air travel industries experience all kinds of problems in the modern economy, their symbolic relationship continues. Celebrities still patronize airlines (and continue to be photographed while traveling, albeit often by fellow fliers) and even though “Casablanca” set the bar pretty high, a good airport scene is still hard to beat. Film and flight are still touchstones of adventure and possibility, however.

https://www.latimes.com/