Today’s Century City originated in 1923 as the Fox Film Corporation’s backlot, on land purchased not from silent cowboy star Tom Mix, as some believe, but from the Janss Investment Company. Twelve years later, Fox merged with Twentieth Century Pictures to form Twentieth Century Fox. In the 1950s, the popularity of television caused Fox – still just a movie studio at that point – to hemorrhage cash. So in 1956, Fox president Spyros Skouras, aided by his nephew-in-law Edmond Herrscher, decided to convert the backlot into commercial real estate. Their original vision for “20th Century City” got muddied by other investors, and by 1963 Fox had sold the property to Alcoa, the aluminum corporation. Much of Century City’s layout was designed by Modernist architect Welton Becket, in particular the fountain-lined Avenue of the Stars.
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