His old haunts
Wax museums. Costume shops. Young
Tim Burton loved them. Revisiting L.A., he has a nightmare before Christmas.
By Scott Timberg, Los Angeles Times
Staff Writer
Tim BURTON knows the dark side. No, he's not evil, exactly, but his
films often take grotesque elements and twist them into something more
endearing than repulsive.
Take the Pumpkin King in "The Nightmare Before Christmas" who scares
good boys and girls with well-meaning presents that explode or chase them
around the house. Or the tender young man in "Edward Scissorhands"
who can't fit in because of those enormous shears at the end of his arms. Or
"The Corpse Bride," a brokenhearted beauty whose eye pops out at the
most inopportune times and whose body is infested by a maggot who won't shut
up.
So it's only natural
that, with Halloween fast sneaking up on us and a new 3-D version of "The
Nightmare Before Christmas" just out, we turned to Burton to take us on a
tour of frightening spots in Los Angeles.
By day's end, we had gone to a wax museum, a cemetery or two and a bizarre
costume shop spiffed up for All Hallows' Eve. And we had talked about some of
the public places that inspired him creatively as a youth.
But what scares Burton the most is not in any guidebook of L.A.'s famous
haunts. In fact, it looks perfectly normal. Because, as it turns out, for
Burton, the scariest place in Southern California is the suburbs.
"I still get the creeps, I still get a funny feeling driving over to
Burbank," Burton, dressed head to toe in black, with a mop of disheveled-genius
hair, says in a slightly adenoidal voice. He grew up there, and still hasn't
entirely forgiven the place.
A place lost in time
The thought of Burton's hometown and his childhood is making him squirm as we
start our tour by heading there in a black SUV. We set out on an appropriately
gloomy, overcast day - the kind when L.A. offers none of its Mediterranean
charm.
Cruising around town with Burton is a lot like going driving with any former
Angeleno who's visiting after years away. Over the last decade he's spent most
of his time in London, where he now lives.
So most of the stuff Burton loved in Los Angeles is gone, he says. (Not the
first time we've heard that one.) Traffic has gotten a lot worse. (Check.) The
lack of seasons seems kind of eerie. (Ditto.)
But his memories are a bit darker, more unrelieved by warmth, than most natives
returning to L.A.
Famously, Burton wears clunky black specs with dark-blue lenses. They seem to
be literally, and figuratively, the opposite of rose-colored glasses.
"The Valley," he says. "I get freaked out just coming here: It's
all flat. There're even less seasons here in the San Fernando Valley,
aren't there?"
Born in Burbank in 1958, when the city already seemed lost in time, Burton grew
up in a middle-class neighborhood just under the airport's flight pattern.
"You could watch the exhaust come down," he says.
"The thing about Burbank was, life sorta ended at the Smoke House,"
he says of the landmark 1946 restaurant near the Universal, Warners Bros. and
Disney studios. "You didn't venture outside. You didn't get a lot of
residents making that trip over the hill to Hollywood."
All artists are shaped by their upbringings, but Burton's childhood as a
misunderstood loner who lived in his head ended up feeding directly into his
work as a filmmaker.
As he drives past Magnolia and Victory, the main drags near his old house, he's
not charmed by what he calls "that weird '50s quality" of his old
neighborhood, and he's amazed by how many old liquor stores have survived.
"A lot of wig shops - is there a lot of hair loss in Burbank, or
what?"
But the old movie palaces - among the few oases of his childhood - are just
memories now.
"There were five or six great movie theaters, including a couple of
drive-ins on Burbank, all gone," he says, pointing out where each used to
stand. "There was this one called the Cornell, my favorite, which showed
triple features for 50 cents.... You could see 'Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde,' a
Godzilla movie and 'Scream Blacula Scream.' Or three Japanese science-fiction
movies."
This is where he discovered horror films from England's Hammer studios and the
Italian monster movies of Mario Bava.
After passing by the church he attended as a child, we turn onto his old
street, Evergreen Street, past a series of squat bungalows that becomes
increasingly claustrophobic, and pull up to his boyhood house. "There's
something frighteningly ordered about it, and also unknown," he says of
the area. "When you look at these houses, they're so small and close together.
You kinda knew your neighbors, but you didn't really know them, so there's a
secretive nature to it."
For Burton, recalling "the private hell" of childhood produces
various disappointed groans and sighs, as we continue on to the schools he
attended. A short distance away, his high school, Burbank High - which he
remembers as an imposing building alone on a hill, like the hotel in
Hitchcock's "Psycho" - has changed too much for it to be very
evocative. "It looks more like an airport terminal now." He's still a
bit haunted by the return. "Everybody said, 'These are the best years of
your life.... ' Are you kidding me?"
The years before were even worse; he describes himself as "quiet and kind
of anonymous." His junior high - now Luther Burbank Middle School - looks
even less inviting than he remembered it. Between chain-link fences, a sign
announcing 24-hour surveillance and yellow "Caution" tape, it doesn't
exactly welcome him back.
"Is this a school or is it some sort of strange prison camp?" Burton
asks. "All you need is a little barbed wire on the fence and you could
shoot a new 'Dirty Dozen' film here."
He walks around the campus and comes to the gym, which Burton says resembles a
weapon bunker. "It's got a sinister quality to it. Like, 'This is where we
hold our executions.' "
As he starts to reflect on his memories, planes take off loudly behind him.
Burton's sure he couldn't go in, even if the place were open. "It's like a
vampire entering a church," he says. "You can't do it."
Waxing nostalgic
The director seems much cheerier as our car passes the Smoke House and heads
onto Barham Boulevard past Forest Lawn, one of several cemeteries where he used
to play as a kid, and toward Hollywood.
"This was amazing," Burton says of the route. "Here you start to
get a sense of Universal Studios, that there was a bigger world out there.... I
would take the bus; I used to love making that trip to Hollywood Boulevard. It
was a bit more seedy."
Burton, like many native sons returning home, can't believe how cleaned up
Hollywood is. "Oh, my God - it's Vegas," he says, as the car pulls up
to the Hollywood & Highland complex. "All this new .... Oh, my God
....Yecch!"
On a less polished stretch of Hollywood east of Highland, he finds what he's
looking for: costume shops that sell fake hand grenades and real pepper spray,
even more wig shops than in Burbank, palm readers, a bondage shop and run-down
magic stores. Burton, after all, went on a magic and ventriloquism kick as a
kid.
"You ever been to the Magic Castle?" he asks. "I saw how angry
they were - there's nothing worse than an angry magician. I realized that I had
anger issues, and that if I became a magician it would be really bad."
He wanders down the street to Boardner's, the kind of old-school Hollywood bar
that filmmaker Ed Wood (the subject of another celebrated Burton film) and his
associates would frequent. But at 3:30 p.m. on a Sunday, it's not quite open
yet.
Who's drinking at 3:30 on a Sunday, anyway?
"Are you kidding?" Burton asks. "Most of the people who go in
here!"
One of his old haunts, Hollywood Toys and Costumes, however, is open for
business. In fact, the place, which seems to be the size of two basketball
courts, is teeming. "Look inside," he says. "It's every mask you
could ever hope for."
Burton has good memories of buying masks, plastic vomit and rubber hot dogs at
such places. This emporium is stocked with monster masks, fake snakes, wooden
coffins, Styrofoam headstones, simulated human organs and severed plastic arms.
But the highlight for Burton is a return to the Hollywood Wax Museum. "I
don't know why I get so excited," he says. Burton remembers being at the
wax museum one day when the air conditioning broke and the figures started to
melt. "Wax figures, when they're hot - they really stink."
His return visit doesn't start off well, though. Most of the figures are from
recent movies, whether the new "Miami Vice" or "Master and
Commander" or lesser-known Sylvester Stallone projects.
"All new," Burton says with a sigh. He's unmoved even by figures from
his own movies, like the wax figure of Johnny Depp from "Charlie and the
Chocolate Factory" or of Michael Keaton as "Batman."
Appropriately, the first really old figure he comes across is Vincent Price,
one of Burton's boyhood idols, whom he later cast in "Edward
Scissorhands." And there are some other classic monster-movie figures -
Lon Chaney as the Phantom of the Opera, Boris Karloff as the Mummy - thrown in
with old wax museum evergreens like Christ's Last Supper and the cast of
"Bonanza."
Thanks to his obsession with the Hollywood Boulevard locale, the adult Burton
visits wax museums at whatever city he's in. In fact, after the Movieland Wax
Museum in Buena Park closed last fall, he bought its Sammy Davis Jr. figure and
had it shipped to London.
"I forgot to tell the housekeeper, though," he says. "She came
in and thought there was a dead body on the sofa."
Later, Burton makes a quick stop down the street at Disney's Soda Fountain and
Studio Store. It's next door to the El Capitan Theatre, where the new 3-D
version of "The Nightmare Before Christmas" is playing and where
there's an exhibit of the original puppets from the film.
"We do a themed ice cream for every movie that comes here," says
manager Cary Khatab, offering Burton a sundae based on "The Nightmare
Before Christmas." Burton, after posing for a picture with virtually every
member of the staff, gives it a thumb's up. He's sold on the pumpkin ice cream.
"I think that's what sets it apart," he says weakly, "from other
sundaes."
But "I just want to point out, I don't normally come here," Burton
says. "Unless it was a strip club before it turned into a Disney
store."
Always and forever
Even with all the attention and good vibes at the El Capitan, Burton is at his
most comfortable at the next stop: the Hollywood Forever Cemetery.
Like most of Burton's haunts, this wasn't a place he typically visited with a
posse. "Actually it was very private; I spent a lot of time by myself.
Making up stories, that kind of thing. Wondering about the scary guy who works
for the cemetery, you know? There was this element of danger."
He especially likes the quiet, the expanse of nature, the palm trees and the
elaborate crypts, some with their own lakes and arrays of birds.
"That's pretty much what I'd do when I went out: brood. I wouldn't really
go out with other people." He recalls spending one Christmas Eve in the
parking lot of a Valley Bob's Big Boy. With a girlfriend, hopefully?
"No, I think it was because I didn't have a girlfriend," says
Burton, who's done better since. (He's lived with actress Helena Bonham Carter,
with whom he is engaged and has a 3-year-old son, for five years now.)
After high school, Burton went to CalArts, where he generally had more fun.
His college evenings working at nearby Magic Mountain for Fright Fests, dressed
as the Mummy and other monsters, weren't among the happy part, though.
"You'd get so abused," he recalls. "Once we got chased around by
gangs of teenagers. I think there's some natural response: People just want to
abuse characters in a theme park, punching out Winnie the Pooh or something.
Then add Halloween into the mix: It's pretty rough."
Finally, there were other spots Burton was fond of because they appeared in
movies. He enjoyed staring off into the distance from the heights of Griffith
Observatory, which appeared in "Rebel Without a Cause" and other
films.
Another place was the Santa Monica Pier. "I used to like sulking on the
pier a lot," he recalls. The fog, the crashing waves and the striking
Byzantine architecture allowed the dramatic teenager in him to act out. (It was
also the setting for one of his favorite oddball movies, the 1961 Dennis Hopper
thriller "Night Tide.")
Even humble Burbank had a few significant locations: He enjoyed hanging out in
a cemetery near his house, Valhalla, because it resembled the graveyard in Ed
Wood's 1959 sci-fi film "Plan 9 From Outer Space," considered by some
the worst film ever made. And parts of Burbank showed up, Burton thinks, in the
1968 B movie "The Astro-Zombies."
But as the day nears its end, it's clear that Burton has gained some
perspective on his life as a young man. He just may have spent more solitary
time - in graveyards, wax museums, beaches and dodgy bars - than was good for
him.
"I'm just now realizing how much time I spent alone," Burton says.
"Kind of frightening, really."