For all the movie studios to have operated in Culver City, Studio Drive is named for one that didn’t: United Artists. In January 1927, UA purchased 16 acres at the southeast corner of Jefferson and Overland for an “auxiliary” lot. (Their main lot was on Santa Monica and Formosa.) Six months later, Studio Drive appeared on the opposite side of Overland, on a 64.5 acre tract owned by the Harry H. Culver Company. Although Culver of course founded Culver City and fought for it as a filmmaking hub, he had no stake in UA that I know of. Pickford Way and Fairbanks Way were also laid out on the tract, honoring silent screen stars Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, who had founded UA in 1919 with Charlie Chaplin and D.W. Griffith. (Griffith had left UA by 1927, hence no “Griffith Way”, but one wonders why the street west of Fairbanks is a weirdly isolated extension of Westwood Boulevard instead of “Chaplin Way”. My guess is that it was due to Chaplin’s very public divorce from his teenage wife Lita Grey that summer: it would have been awkward to name a street in his honor at that time.) That UA outpost was never built, but the streets kept the names.
Find it on the map:
