The Architecture of Displacement in To Kill a Mockingbird

... if we are attentive, we might glimpse a mountain range in the deepest background of these images and might infer, correctly, that we are not, so to speak, in Maycomb, but in California — in a back lot of Universal Studios, to be precise. Making this observation about the fictionality of the diegetic world would be banal and beside the point, were it not for this one material fact: The houses that we see along this fictional street were actually expropriated from a real organic community in Los Angeles, a few miles from Universal Studios.

Filming locations had originally been scouted around Harper Lee’s hometown of Monroeville, Alabama, but that town no longer resembled the lost object it was meant to symbolize. Director Robert Mulligan recalled the effort: “The town had changed radically. After World War II a lot of the old buildings came down. There was a lot of corrugated iron up and modern looks to the buildings, and big plate glass stores. … It just didn’t have the feel of the small town.” In an interview, art director Henry Bumstead narrated his experience of being shown around Monroeville by Lee, who introduced him to collard greens and to the local scenery. He rounds off his story with this somewhat paratactic insight: “I did get a lot of wonderful research done in Alabama. And so when they were moving a lot of houses in Los Angeles to make way for the freeway, we bought three or four of them and remodeled them. That saved the studio a lot of money.”

The story of those expropriated houses is a murky one. One account suggests that the houses were to be demolished to make way for the construction of Dodger Stadium, home to the baseball team that had recently moved to Los Angeles from Brooklyn. Another account, in the film’s publicity pressbook, coincides with Bumstead’s memory that the houses were to be destroyed due to the development of the freeway, and confirms that their purchase was a money-saving measure for the studio. According to one of the packaged articles (which could be adapted to suit the needs of distributors and exhibitors), “Almost a dozen 50-year-old Southern California cottages being removed to make room for a network of Los Angeles Country freeways were hauled to the back lot at Universal studios to provide the main setting, a small Alabama town.”  Another article from the pressbook adds more details:

Cost of the set would have been at least $100,000 more had it not been for the ingenuity of [Alexander] Golitzen [another member of the art department] and Bumstead. Learning that a number of clapboard houses of the same general style as many Monroeville homes were being demolished to make room for a new Los Angeles Freeway, Golitzen and Bumstead made arrangements to buy a dozen of these houses. After they had been moved to the studio back lot and slightly remodelled to match specific Monroeville houses, the total cost to Universal was approximately $25,000. To have built them from the ground up would have cost close to $125,000, according to Golitzen. 

The studio’s breezy reference to the state’s assertion of eminent domain, resulting in the displacement and expropriation of Angelenos, is disturbing enough to raise the curiosity and suspicion of the historian-analyst. These vaguely specific production anecdotes suggest that the film’s production is imbricated in one of the most notorious episodes in Los Angeles history.

This image is embedded in ...