In the early days of Hollywood, there were the haves and the have nots. The haves were the obvious studios- Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Warner Brothers, Twentieth Century Fox, etc. The have nots were the studios located on Sunset Boulevard near Gower in a section of Hollywood called “Poverty Row”.
I Accuse PRC Studios
Poverty Row was what Hollywood called the area where the lesser known studios who mostly produced exploitation Pictures were located. These studios would fade out and are mostly forgotten these days unless one is a Mystery Science Theater 3000 aficionado. Poverty Row studios typically got stars who were on the way up or on the way down. Using facilities that were either outdated or borrowed from bigger studios looking to get a little cash during times when their sound stages weren’t being used, these studios were often scrappy, low quality film making machines. Nobody expected much of them, but one studio would rise, pulling itself out of Hollywood’s “gutter”.
That studio was Columbia Pictures. Columbia would eventually become one of the biggies and it would perform a bit of “urban renewal” on its own, by buying up all of the land on Poverty Row and turning it into a makeshift studio lot. Columbia would stay there for several decades, eventually buying what was left of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s storied lot and relocating there. It still exists on that lot today.
