Hidden in the Hollywood Hills there was a top-secret film studio, administered by the US Department of Defense, that is enveloped in strange mysteries. Lookout Mountain Laboratory, located in the heights of Laurel Canyon in Los Angeles, was a secret base of operations for Cold War filmmakers and scientists. Its story, however, reaches beyond those secret, but confirmed, areas into the 1960s counter-culture, the rise of the hippies, and a notorious ‘psyops’ conspiracy that may have used the doped-up denizens of Laurel Canyon as unwitting test subjects. Add in Marilyn Monroe, escapologist Harry Houdini, Joker star Jared Leto, the Manson murders, and a possible alien autopsy and you have the perfect Hollywood conspiracy.
THE SECRET STUDIO
The summit of Laurel Canyon, dubbed Lookout Mountain, has always been an area of prime real estate. Offering amazing views across Los Angeles, the San Fernando Valley, and as far out as Catalina Island, it was initially an isolated outpost. By the 1940s, Laurel Canyon and Lookout Mountain were much more accessible, but still seen as separate from the rest of Los Angeles. It was, therefore, the ideal location for the American military to establish a top-secret film studio that was near Hollywood, but not of Hollywood. Following the first nuclear tests in 1945, there was a need to document progress through film. A specialist photographic unit was established, with the military settling on the still isolated Lookout Mountain for a base; close enough to the city, but sufficiently out of the way to be largely ignored. The Los Angeles Flight Control Centre, built in 1941 at 8935 Wonderland Avenue at a cost of $132,000, had served as a World War II air defence centre. It closed when the Air Force had no further need for it, allowing the new 1352nd Motion Picture Squadron to move in from 1947. The property was remodelled and expanded over the years, and at its height in the 1950s and 1960s, Lookout Mountain Laboratory featured a large sound stage, a chemical laboratory, five underground film vaults, a quartet of editing rooms, a sound department, an animation department, and a pair of screening rooms – everything a mini-film studio needed.
The Motion Picture Squadron based at Lookout Mountain aimed to document the United States’ ongoing nuclear weapons tests. Those films of mushroom cloud explosions and houses being blown away by a nuclear blast, as seen in countless documentaries and as stock footage in B-movies, were the work of Lookout Mountain.
Atomic weapons tests, including Operation Sandstone and Operation
