Paramount Pictures has made movies on this Melrose Avenue lot since 1926, the only major studio still in Hollywood. Paramount Pictures was founded in 1912 and moved to this Melrose Avenue lot in 1926, where it has been making movies and television ever since. Behind the famous Bronson Gate — the arched iron gate flanked by guard booths that appears in Sunset Boulevard, when Gloria Swanson drives through it in 1950 — lies a working studio backlot with standing sets, sound stages, prop warehouses, and the infrastructure for making stories.
The water tower with the Paramount mountain logo, the sound stages numbered into the thirties, and the back lot that has stood in for New York, Paris, and a hundred other locations are all there. Paramount made The Godfather, Chinatown, Rosemary's Baby, Forrest Gump, and Titanic, along with decades of television including Happy Days, Cheers, and Frasier. The studio offers tours; on a tour you can walk through the sound stages and see how the illusion is constructed.
Stand at the Bronson Gate and look at the white letters on the arch; this entrance has meant arrival in Hollywood for a century.