Forget about that H-O-L-L-Y-W-O-O-D sign — if the Louis B. Mayers and Samuel Goldwyns hadn’t taken their celluloid act out West, there might have been one that read A-S-T-O-R-I-A instead.
Long before the first talkie sounded off, the Kaufman Astoria Studios — known as Famous Players Lasky Corp. back then — had W.C. Fields, Gloria Swanson and Rudolph Valentino on its Queens sound stages.
“It was the first one in New York,” said George Kaufman, studio chairman and founder. “It’s not just a New York City landmark, it’s an American landmark.”
“The film industry started here,” pointed out stage manager Charles Toufus. “People have a misconception it happened the other way.”
Full-fledged legends were right across the river, just for the asking, in this movieland before the La-La version came along.
“The best talent was on Broadway,” said Hal Rosenbluth, studio president. “The Marx Brothers shot ‘The Cocoanuts’ and ‘Animal Crackers’ here. They didn’t know the power of movies at first. People told them to keep their day jobs.”
Kaufman Astoria has six sound stages. The largest is the oldest, the 26,000-square-foot Stage E — twice the size of any other — which is presently home to Bill Cosby’s sitcom.
“It’s the largest stage east of Hollywood,” said studio spokeswoman Jane Bartnett.
Among other films shot on that massive stage were “Ransom,” “Carlito’s Way” and Harrison Ford’s “Sabrina.”
“For ‘Stranger Among Us,’ we had a taxicab run across the whole stage and smash into the windows of the Diamond Exchange,” said Toufus, giving an idea of the hangar-sized stage.
During World War II, the Astoria complex served its country big-time. The U.S. Army Signal Corps selected it as its pictorial center. Yes, there was Nazi-bashing propaganda in Queens — way before Archie Bunker.
“This was a top-secret facility,” said Rosenbluth. “The Army needed a place to shoot all their training and propaganda films. They’d sneak generals in here, for security reasons, who went on film for the troops.
“If you saw a film on venereal disease, it was shot here.”
After decades of neglect, the city wrested the property from the military and, in 1982, Kaufman submitted a bid to develop it. Work started in the former Army barracks area. It was like digging into a cavernous foxhole.
“There were barrels and barrels of rations and crackers and stuff,” said Rosenbluth. “That was the place you wanted to be when the bombs went off!”
Plans for the millennium include constructing an 18,000-square-foot sound stage — the complex’s seventh — across the street, in the old vaults that once stored highly explosive nitrate film.
“We’ll probably break ground in the spring,” said Kaufman. “It should be ready by the end of the year.”
NYPOST.COM
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