Jared Leto's new home is $5M, 50K-square-foot ex-military complex
Oscar-winning actor and musician Jared Leto recently paid $5 million for a legendary ex-military complex where top-secret nuclear films were produced, Variety reports.
The complex is known as Lookout Mountain Laboratory, at 8935 Wonderland Avenue in Los Angeles' Laurel Canyon area not far from the Sunset Strip. It was built as the Lookout Mountain Air Force Station but became best known — after declassification, at least — for its studios that documented atomic bomb testing in the Nevada desert and the Pacific. (Click here or on a photo for a slideshow, including a few historical pictures.)
"Every time you see an atomic explosion on TV, for a scare film or whatever, we filmed it," photographer Jack Cannon told the Los Angeles Times in 1999.
The nuclear-related work produced there — thousands of motion pictures and still photographs — was classified for decades, seen only by military and government functionaries. Between the 331 bomb blasts they documented, they produced training films, the L.A. Times said.
The studio workers are considered "unrecognized patriots" for the risks they took and sacrifices they made. They'd get as close as two miles to the blast center. One cameraman recalled flying over a blast when a protective lens fell out of his goggles: "All I could do was put my hand over my eyes. The blast was so bright I could see my bones through my skin."
Many of the atomic cameramen died of cancer, one studio survivor told the New York Times in 2010. "No doubt it was related to the testing."
For the past 20 years, Variety reports, Lookout Mountain Laboratory had been the 50,000-square-foot home of artist Mark Lipscomb and John Ladner, an ex-judge and lawyer to philanthropist Aileen Getty. They bought the complex in 1994 and began trying to sell it in 2010, asking as much as $6.5 million in various listings. Click here or on a photo for many more pictures.
John Venti, a Redfin agent who visited the compound a few years ago, said: "I have never seen anything like this in my entire life. ... It is an endless property with multiple levels and areas that aided in scientific experiments to rooms that looked like interrogation rooms as well as film and weapon vaults." (For the record, we have come across no evidence that it was used to conduct experiments or interrogations, nor to store weapons. Its original intent when built in 1941 was as "a World War II air defense center that coordinated radar installations on nearby mountaintops," the Los Angeles Times wrote in 1997.)
The complex is fortified with 3-foot-thick concrete walls, the Times said, and has a bomb shelter (naturally), two subterranean parking garages, a sound stage, three screening rooms and 17 climate-controlled film vaults. One of the screening rooms now doubles as a bathroom (really -- see the photo at right or in our slideshow).
Locals whisper that there are secret tunnels, too, but the owners who just sold it to Leto told the Times: "We've heard all the legends. If they've closed them off, they did it very skillfully."
The home is an interesting choice for a documented hippie tree-hugger:
