Atlas Obscura Itineraries

Fade In: A Cinema History Road Trip Through Los Angeles

Los Angeles built itself around the act of making movies. Farms and orchards were cleared to build studios, and the rest of the city grew up in their shadow. A century later, the history is still readable in the architecture: in an alley behind Hollywood Boulevard where Chaplin, Keaton, and Lloyd all filmed within blocks of each other; in a Victorian office building that a mining mogul commissioned from a draftsman who consulted his dead brother before agreeing to the job; in a cluster of storybook cottages that gave Walt Disney the visual language of “Snow White.”