HOLLYWOOD — Sal Brancato gave essentially the same tour for forty-one years and insisted, to anyone who rode with him twice, that he never gave it the same way once.
Mr. Brancato, who guided the tram tour at Universal Studios from the driver’s microphone for four decades, narrating the backlot streets and soundstages for the tourists rolling past, died September 18 at his home in Toluca Lake. He was 84. His daughter said the cause was heart failure.
The job, as he practiced it, was equal parts geography and theater. A good tram guide had to know every building on the route — which stage had housed which famous production, which false-front street could stand in for New York or a small town or a flooded village — and had to deliver it all on a moving platform, timing the punch line of a story to the moment the tram cleared a corner and the set swung into view. Brancato timed his for decades, and the other guides said he was the one they learned from.
“Sal could make the same forty-year-old joke land like he’d just thought of it, because he watched the tourists, not his watch,” said Renaldo Poche, who drove trams alongside him for years. “He knew when to talk and when to shut up and let the flash flood do the work. That’s the whole art, and most people never get it.”
Salvatore Brancato was born in 1940 in Chicago and came to California in his twenties, taking a seasonal job on the tour that he assumed would last a summer. It lasted the rest of his working life. He watched the tour change around him — new attractions bolted on, the live sets growing scarcer as production drifted, the script updated for pictures he privately doubted would last. He kept the old history in anyway, slipping the silent-era anecdotes and the studio ghost stories into a tour that officially no longer required them.
He was proud, his family said, of a specific kind of work: sending a family home from a long, hot day feeling they had seen something real. He collected the questions tourists asked, the earnest ones and the absurd ones, and could recite the strangest of them the way other men recite fishing stories. A child once asked whether the actors lived on the lot. He told her some of them practically did, and let her believe it.
Brancato retired in his early seventies but kept riding the tour as a civilian, sitting near the back and mouthing the narration a beat ahead of whoever had the microphone. Guides who spotted him would sometimes hand him the mic for a block, and he took it without hesitation, as though he had never set it down.
He is survived by a daughter, Gina Brancato of Burbank; a son, Anthony, of Portland; four grandchildren; and, his family noted, several hours of shaky home video shot by tourists over the years and mailed to the studio, on which his voice can still be heard telling the strangers on the tram to hold onto their hats.