A Studio Can Outlive Every Company That Rents It

The grass at the Victorine lot in Nice has survived occupation, bankruptcy, and at least four changes of management since the studio opened in 1919 — longer than most of the films shot on it, and considerably longer than most of the companies that have tried to run it. It is not a famous address the way Pinewood is famous, or Toho is famous. It just keeps being there, which turns out to be the harder trick.

This week the city took it back from the private group operating it, after that group couldn't raise the investment it had promised in time. The trade press is calling it a transition period, which is the polite industry phrase for someone else gets a turn. No producer loses a shoot over this. No festival moves a date. It is the kind of story that never makes a red carpet and decides, underneath everything else, what gets built on one.

Marcel Carné built his entire Boulevard du Crime on that lot in 1943, under occupation, for Les Enfants du Paradis — one of the largest sets ever constructed in Europe, assembled by a crew half of whom were hiding from the people financing the film. Thirty years later François Truffaut shot La Nuit américaine inside the same walls, a film about a studio pretending to be a film about a studio, which is the most French possible subject a backlot could choose for itself. Both films outlasted every company that signed their invoices.

Operators come and go the way weather does over a coastline. A studio's actual job is simpler and harder than running one profitably: to still be standing, lit correctly, and rentable to the next person with a camera and a deadline, regardless of who collected the keys last, or what the group before them called itself on the paperwork. Nice didn't save a business this week. It saved a floor plan, which is the only part of a studio that was ever worth saving in the first place.

Somewhere on that grass a grip is probably already laying dolly track for next spring's shoot, on ground that has played a boulevard, a battlefield, and itself, and has never once needed to remember which.