The Adventures of Robin Hood | Warner Bros. Studios, Burbank — Nottingham built on a back-lot street

Everything Chico could not supply was built in Burbank. Nottingham's streets were dressed on the back lot's Dijon Street. The great hall where Robin drops a poached deer on Prince John's banquet table, the castle corridors, the spiral stairs and the vast thrown shadows of the final duel with Guy of Gisbourne — all of it went up on soundstages here, and shooting ran from the autumn of 1937 to 14 January 1938. Carl Jules Weyl took an Academy Award for that art direction. Ralph Dawson took one for cutting it. Erich Wolfgang Korngold, who accepted the assignment reluctantly and then wrote the score that taught Hollywood how an adventure film should sound, took the third.

The lot is still a working studio with period streets standing. The Studio Tour leaves from 3400 West Riverside Drive, runs onto the back lot and through the mill, the prop houses and the costume stock, and passes soundstages that were new when this film was made. Book ahead; there is no walk-up gate.

What lands, standing on the asphalt between the stages, is the scale. A castle hall that fills the frame is maybe eighty feet of plaster and a matte painting, and the forest around it in the cut is four hundred miles north in a municipal park in Chico. The film is a seam between the two, and after ninety years you still cannot find it.

Photo: Warner Bros. Studios, Burbank, Wikimedia Commons.