HOLLYWOOD — While the soundstages sit emptier than they have in years, the tram tours are packed.
Studio tours across the region reported record attendance this spring, a contrast the operators are the first to point out: the business of showing people how movies are made is booming in the same season that making them has slowed.
One major lot’s tour drew more than four hundred thousand visitors between April and June, its strongest quarter on record and up roughly a fifth from a year earlier, according to figures the studio released this month. The visitors come for the backlot streets, the prop warehouses, the standing sets from shows they have watched at home, and — increasingly rare — the chance to glimpse an actual production at work.
That last item has grown scarcer as shooting has drifted to other states, a shift this paper has traced through the crews who left with it. The tours have adapted by leaning on what stays put: the history, the facades, the craft buildings, the stories a lot accumulates whether or not anything films that day.
“The stages empty out, but the past doesn’t move to Georgia,” said Marisol Vane, a tour guide of nine years, whose scripted patter has drifted toward history as the live sets thinned. “I used to point at working stages. Now I point at where the working stages were, and honestly, the tourists like the stories just as much.”
The pattern is regional. Tour operators at three of the area’s largest lots reported spring attendance at or near record levels, and hotels and restaurants near the studios say weekday traffic has held up even as call sheets have thinned.
The color of the job supplies its own small comedy. On a recent Tuesday, a tram idled beside a soundstage while its guide described the decades of famous productions the building had hosted. A child asked what was filming inside right now.
“Right now?” the guide said. “Right now, us.”
The economics are part of why the tours matter more than their ticket prices suggest. Production is cyclical, prone to strikes, tax credits, and the whims of other states’ budgets. Tourism has proven steadier — a dependable line of revenue that keeps lights on and gates staffed through the stretches when little is shooting.
The studio does not break out what the tour earns. It did note, in releasing the attendance numbers, that the visitor lot this spring filled before ten most mornings — earlier, on many days, than the crew lot beside it.