Along the hallway on the 1st floor in the Maryland building you will find alcoves that serve as mini museums dedicated to the history and of the property and building the studio that you see today. Below includes what is in the alcoves and a little more backstory.
Located in the Westlake District of Los Angeles, Los Angeles Center Studios is a multipurpose facility that includes the former Unocal Center building (opened as Union Oil Center in April 1958) and the surrounding area. Architects William Pereira and Charles Luckman designed the Miesian-style hexagonal tower as part of a complex including a rectangular inner courtyard, two low tower-adjacent wings, a large subterranean parking garage, and elevated pedestrian bridges connecting to an auditorium and cafeteria building. The tower has distinctive angled front and rear façades covered with a grid of thin aluminum louvers protecting the offices within from the sun. When the building was designed there was a moratorium on the height of the buildings in downtown Los Angeles. A municipal ordinance, intended to give the city "harmonious lines", prohibited the construction of buildings taller than 13 stories or 150 feet in height until the late 1950s—allowing LA’s City Hall to tower over the rest of the city. Upon its 1958 completion, the Union Oil Center added its twelve stories to its already-lofty site at the corner of Fifth and Boylston Streets. Since the site was on a hill, it became the highest building in downtown Los Angeles.
The headquarters of Union Oil foresaw the vertical growth of downtown's office buildings, as well as the expansion of the city's central business district west of the 110 freeway. In 1996 the company moved to El Segundo, leaving the building to an uncertain fate. A group of developers purchased the complex, which was facing demolition, and tried to achieve what many real estate professionals considered near impossible: putting downtown on the map of the entertainment industry.
Construction on the six large sound stages and renovation of the Unocal headquarters started October 1998 and were completed in 1999 . The new 20-acre entertainment campus included 10 buildings and 3 streets. The studio itself opened in 1999, only three years after Union Oil Company of California vacated the premises. The successful adaptive reuse of the Union Oil Center, including the "vertical backlot" of its original tower, paved the way for new uses of historic buildings. The whole campus is available for filming – in the sounds stages, on the streets, in the offices, and in the dressed sets. Production of major features such as Oscar winner “The Jungle Book”, “Straight Outta Compton”, “Mocking Jay”, “ Inception” “Dark Knight Rises”, “Planet of the Apes” , and "Mission: Impossible 2," happened on site. Long running and acclaimed television shows such as “True Detective”, “Good Luck Charlie”, “You’re the Worst”, “Drunk History”, “Mad Men”, “RuPaul’s Drag Race”, “Family Feud”, “Hannibal”, and “American Gods” all made a home for their shows at the studio. Los Angeles Center Studios is one of the only filming facilities actually located in downtown L.A. Situated on the west side of the Harbor Freeway, at 5th and Bixel streets, the studio has the amenities of a full-scale Hollywood studio, including a 350-seat theater, production office space, a commissary, fitness center, car wash, electric car charging stations, and private park. The story of this site started long ago, and it’s only going to get better.
