Hallowed halls are a staple of the Los Angeles landscape, which is no surprise considering the city’s status as the entertainment capital of the world. But some halls are far more hallowed than others. Take, for example, Wilshire Courtyard. The Class-A, LEED Gold-certified office complex, which consists of twin buildings located at 5700 and 5750 Wilshire Blvd., has served as the headquarters for a plethora of major media conglomerates throughout its nearly four-decade history, including E! Entertainment, Variety magazine and Aaron Spelling Productions, just to name a few. And, thanks to a newly-inked deal making headlines across the interwebs, Sony Pictures Entertainment will be taking over a significant chunk of the office park next year!
Constructed in 1987 in the heart of L.A.’s Miracle Mile, Wilshire Courtyard was the brainchild of Jerry Snyder, the commercial development titan behind Santa Monica’s Water Garden complex and Ocean Towers condominiums. Designed by the McLarand, Vasquez & Partners firm (now McLarand Vasquez Emsiek & Partners) at a cost of $185 million, the L.A. Times called the project “one of the more adventurous and ambitious architectural efforts in Los Angeles in recent years.”
Enveloped in red granite and solar bronze glass, the C-shaped buildings have since become one of the most recognizable landmarks of the Miracle Mile skyline. Comprising a whopping 1 million square feet of indoor space, the six-story structures stand on a massive 8.7-acre plot featuring a central courtyard, multiple fountains and a two-acre park complete with a quarter-mile jogging path, a smattering of palm trees, a children’s playground and a pond.
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Image Credit: Cushman & Wakefield At the time of the complex’s commission, Miracle Mile was experiencing a resurgence. Initially developed in 1921 by A. W. Ross, the once-bustling shopping destination faced a steep downturn in the late 1960s as well-heeled Angelinos began moving westward to places like Beverly Hills and Century City, with retailers in tow, leaving massive vacancies in their wake. Enter Snyder, who, sensing potential in the downtrodden district, thoroughly renovated the Prudential Square building (now Museum Square) at 5757 Wilshire Blvd. into a prime office complex in 1982, attracting such high-profile tenants as the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) and the Association of Film, Television and Radio Artists (AFTRA) in the process.
The completion of Wilshire Courtyard five years later cemented the area’s status as a veritable media core, with Snyder’s 2020 obituary noting that the development mogul “helped make the Miracle Mile neighborhood a mainstay of entertainment businesses.” Indeed, within the first 18 months alone, such powerhouses as Mark Goodson Productions, Daily Variety and New Visions Pictures had all relocated to the thriving complex as part of what the Los Angeles Times deemed “the continuing saga of Hollywood moving” to Wilshire Courtyard. E! Entertainment Television followed suit in 1998, leasing 260,000 square feet to house both executive offices and studio space, where such hits as “The Soup” and “E! News” have since regularly been filmed.
Wilshire Courtyard is such an entertainment hub today, in fact, that if you conduct any sort of business on the premises, you are practically guaranteed a celebrity sighting!
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Image Credit: Paul Harris/Getty Images The complex’s most famous former tenant, though, is certainly Hollywood magnate Aaron Spelling, who moved his prolific production company to the 5700 building in January 1990 (10 months prior to the debut of his mega-hit “Beverly Hills, 90210”), signing a 10-year lease totaling $10 million for 35,000 square feet of space.
His wife, Candy, was tasked with decorating the sprawling site (which is pictured above in a 1992 image). As she recounted to The Hollywood Reporter in 2015, “Aaron always had a big office. I’d read about Louis B. Mayer‘s office at MGM, and that was an image I thought Aaron should have, and I made sure he did. He had a sofa that was 23 feet long, and everyone always said by the time you got to his desk, you felt lost.” Variety columnist Army Archerd reported that Spelling even had “his own kitchen, cook and butler” onsite.
The luxe surroundings were fitting for a guy the Los Angeles Times noted in 1986 had “produced more hours of filmed entertainment” and “made more money from television” than anyone else in Hollywood. And that was long before “Beverly Hills, 90210” and “Melrose Place” hit the air, launching him even further into the Zeitgeist.
Spelling proceeded to call Wilshire Courtyard home for the next 16 years. According to Wikipedia, “The company grew so large with so many different entities that at one point it leased all three top floors of the 5700 building and held additional office space across the street. Aaron Spelling had one of the largest offices in Hollywood for a single executive.” The producer moved out of the complex in May 2006, just one month before he unexpectedly perished following a stroke. Despite the passage of nearly two decades, Wilshire Courtyard remains inexorably linked to the legendary producer today.
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Image Credit: Cushman & Wakefield And now, following in his distinguished footsteps, Sony Pictures Entertainment has leased over 225,000 square feet of the 5750 building. Josh Bernstein, Peter Collins, Scott Menkus and Alexa Delahooke of the Cushman & Wakefield commercial real estate brokerage represented Onni Group (the Vancouver-based development company that purchased the complex for $630 million in 2019) in the transaction.
Per The Hollywood Reporter (which coincidentally was headquartered at Wilshire Courtyard up until 2020), Sony announced the relocation, scheduled to take place in May 2024, via a staff memo. Seven hundred employees from Sony Pictures Animation, Imageworks and Crunchyroll will be making the move from their current Culver City offices to a sprawling four-level space in Wilshire Courtyard that is set to be designed by RIOS and will feature a coffee bar, a theater and a dining hall.
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Image Credit: Cushman & Wakefield The Sony team will also have access to the property’s slew of “wellness-enhancing amenities,” such as an Equinox Fitness facility, multiple outdoor plazas and a whopping 125 balconies positioned throughout the buildings. A new amenity center is currently in the works, as well, and set to include an entertainment area, a lounge, conference spaces and a golf simulator for the ultimate work/play experience.
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Image Credit: Paramount Domestic Television -
Image Credit: Cushman & Wakefield Adding to Wilshire Courtyard’s cachet is its filming history, which is quite prolific. Not surprisingly, the complex became an onscreen staple for Spelling during the producer’s tenure, most famously masquerading as D&D Advertising on “Melrose Place,” where everyone from Allison Parker (Courtney Thorne-Smith) to Billy Campbell (Andrew Shue) to Amanda Woodward (Heather Locklear) worked.
The campus was showcased regularly on the hit nighttime soap, appearing in both establishing shots of D&D and in numerous on-location scenes set at the high-ranking agency, and is easily one of the series’ most revered locales, second only to the apartment complex the main characters called home.
The property’s central courtyard, the area most frequently featured throughout the show’s seven-year run, was extensively remodeled in 2014 and looks quite different today. But thankfully, the distinctive architecture of the twin buildings surrounding it remains intact, instantly recognizable to any “Melrose Place” fan.
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Image Credit: CBS Television Distribution Spelling also utilized Wilshire Courtyard on “Beverly Hills, 90210.” In the season two episode titled “The Pit and the Pendulum,” the complex portrayed the headquarters of DSC Development, the company attempting to raze the West Beverly High gang’s beloved Peach Pit to make way for a new shopping center, much to Brandon Walsh’s (Jason Priestley) chagrin.
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Image Credit: New World International The locale has appeared in several non-Spelling-related productions as well, including the 1988 television movie “The Incredible Hulk Returns,” in which it poses as the Joshua Lambert Institute, where Dr. David Banner (Bill Bixby) works.
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Image Credit: Multicom Entertainment Group Wilshire Courtyard pops up as the Gossamer offices, where John Bishop (Sherman Howard) is employed and stalked by hitman Charlie Pike (Jeff Fahey) in the 1993 action flick “The Hit List.” In an ironic twist, Howard also worked at Wilshire Courtyard on “Melrose Place!” In the first two episodes of the series, the actor portrayed Hal Barber, a D&D executive who befriends and then sexually harasses Alison.
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Image Credit: Warner Bros. Pictures The complex also appears in the 1993 action thriller “Demolition Man” as the spot where John Spartan (Sylvester Stallone) and Lenina Huxley (Sandra Bullock) enter the portal leading to “the depths of wasteland” while attempting to track down Simon Phoenix (Wesley Snipes).
It is quite an illustrious resume for quite an illustrious building!