Blast From the Past

For more than two decades, the filmmakers at one Hollywood studio shot multimillion-dollar epics that nobody saw.

And it wasn't because the movies produced by Lookout Mountain Studios were bombs, either. They were about bombs--atomic bombs, in fact.

The supersecret studio, hidden in a residential neighborhood in Laurel Canyon, was run by the federal government to document nuclear blasts for the Department of Defense and the Atomic Energy Commission.

The studio's 250 producers, directors and cameramen were sworn to secrecy about their work. And the 6,500 movies they made were locked away as soon as a handful of officials in Washington looked at them.

But the recent move to declassify Cold War-era archives has changed that. Tonight the former Lookout Mountain filmmakers will be honored at a mini-atomic film festival in Hollywood. It will be the first public recognition from federal officials about the work done between 1947 and 1969 behind the studio's three-foot-thick concrete walls.

The 2 1/2-acre site on Wonderland Avenue is now a private residence--perhaps the only one in Los Angeles with its own personal bomb shelter, helicopter pad, two underground parking garages, three screening rooms and 17 climate-controlled film vaults.

It was a cinematic wonderland for filmmakers dispatched from there to remote South Pacific atolls and dusty Nevada ridge tops to photograph the power and fury of nuclear bombs. With the declassification, they are free to talk about their adventures for the first time.

"I could have gotten a job in TV and been bored to tears," said former cameraman Doug Wood, whose exploits include flying directly over an exploding bomb in 1951--only to have his protective goggles fall apart at zero-minus-one.

*

"I'd aimed the camera and I reached up to pull the goggles down and the lens came out. I said, 'Oh, oh!' " said Wood, now 75 and a resident of the High Desert town of Phelan. "All I could do was put my hand over my eyes. The blast was so bright I could see my bones through my skin."

Between the 331 bomb blasts it documented, Lookout Mountain Studio produced government training films. Its Hollywood location made it easy to recruit technicians from regular motion picture studios and to keep on top of the latest cinema techniques.

The 100,000-square-foot studio was originally built in 1941 as a World War II air defense center that coordinated radar installations on nearby mountaintops.