8MM | Sony Pictures Studios, Culver City — where the ugliness was built to order

Everything in 8MM that could not be found had to be manufactured, and it was manufactured here, on the sound stages of Sony Pictures Studios on Washington Boulevard in Culver City. The stages that once held Oz and the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer musicals gave Schumacher's crew the rooms where the film's worst business takes place — interiors with no address, no window onto a real street, no way for a viewer to orient themselves. That disorientation is the point. Welles is chasing something that exists only inside rooms nobody can find.

The lot itself is the opposite of secretive. The Culver Gate opens onto a boulevard of lunch spots and film-industry offices, and the studio runs a walking tour that takes visitors past stages, the scoring building and the commissary. Book it in advance; it does not admit walk-ups.

Stand on Washington Boulevard and look at the white wall running the length of the block. Ninety years of American film have been assembled behind it, some of it luminous and some of it, as 8MM insists, not. The wall gives away nothing either way.

Photo: Sony Pictures Studios Motor Gate, Wikimedia Commons.