TLDR: Laramie Street was built on the Warner Bros. Burbank lot in 1957 to support the studio’s television Western boom and served as the primary exterior set for dozens of series and films for 47 years.
Every major Warner Bros. Western of the late 1950s and early 1960s filmed there, including Maverick, Cheyenne, Lawman, and Sugarfoot.
The same street later hosted Blazing Saddles, The Muppet Movie, Westworld, and The Last Samurai.
It was demolished in May 2003 and replaced by Warner Village, a fake New England residential street containing 42,000 square feet of production offices hidden behind suburban facades.
For nearly five decades, millions of Americans watched the same street without ever knowing it. The saloon where Bret Maverick played poker was the same building where Marshal Dan Troop kept order in Laramie.
The boardwalk where Cheyenne Bodie tied his horse was the same boardwalk where the citizens of Rock Ridge ran for their lives in Blazing Saddles. The dusty main street where Kermit the Frog faced down Doc Hopper was the same street where James Garner filmed his final episode before suing Warner Bros. and winning.
That street was Laramie Street. It was the most heavily used Western backlot in the history of American television, and almost nobody knew its name.
Why Warner Bros. Built It
The construction of Laramie Street was a direct response to a logistical crisis. Following the critical and commercial success of Cheyenne in 1955, Warner Bros. Television rapidly expanded its Western programming portfolio.
By 1956, the studio was producing multiple frontier series simultaneously for ABC.
The sudden influx of horses, stunt coordinators, and camera crews created gridlock on the lot, with production units physically colliding while trying to shoot on limited outdoor spaces.
Warner Bros. responded by building three new outdoor Western sets in rapid succession. Western Street was built in 1956 on land previously occupied by Philadelphia, Canadian, and Norwegian streets.
Mexican Street followed shortly after. Then came Laramie Street in 1957, built on the southeastern portion of the 140-acre Burbank lot on the far side of Avon Street, near the wooded area the studio called “the jungle.”
It was the most sophisticated of the three and quickly became the primary home of the studio’s television Western output.
What the Street Actually Looked Like
Laramie Street was not a single straight road. It comprised two parallel streets running roughly north to south, connected by a perpendicular street at the southern end, creating a compact triangular layout that allowed directors to achieve deep perspective shots and coordinate complex scenes around street corners.
The northern end featured open space and a prominent bank facade. A two-story saloon anchored the mid-street. Boardwalk-fronted false-front facades represented general stores, blacksmith shops, a jail and marshal’s office, a church, cantinas, and other frontier staples.
Additional elements added over time included a western-style Mexican village section, a fort extending westward, and a railroad track at the southern end.
The Burbank hills were visible in the background of many shots, which forced cinematographers to use low camera angles to sell the illusion of flat prairie rather than Southern California suburbs.
The buildings were standard Hollywood backlot construction: wood-frame structures with plywood and composition-board facades, heavily detailed and painted to simulate weathered wood siding, adobe, or brick.
ehind the meticulously crafted frontages was open scaffolding, diagonal bracing, and rear stairs for crew access. The buildings were entirely hollow. Any scene requiring practical interiors was filmed on nearby soundstages, primarily Stages 22, 25, and 28.
There were no permanent overhead lighting rigs or built-in camera rails. Productions brought in mobile generator trucks, buried cables in the dirt, and suspended large silk diffusers from cranes to control light and shadow.
The ground was packed clay and imported topsoil that required water trucks between takes to control dust and stabilize the footing for horses. There was no running water or electrical wiring within the buildings themselves.
The Western Factory at Full Speed
At its peak in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Warner Bros. Television operated what amounted to an assembly line under executive producer William T. Orr, Jack Warner’s son-in-law and the head of the television division.
Orr was running up to six Western series simultaneously for ABC: Cheyenne, Maverick, Sugarfoot, Bronco, Lawman, and Colt .45. Every one of them filmed on Laramie Street.
The factory worked through extreme standardization. Scripts were treated as interchangeable blueprints. A completed script from a detective show like 77 Sunset Strip might have the character names changed and a car chase replaced with a horseback pursuit and emerge as a new episode of Maverick or Sugarfoot.
Scripts recycled this way were sometimes credited to the fictional writer “W. Hermanos,” Spanish for Warner Brothers. A single distinctive Stetson hat or carved gun belt might be worn by Clint Walker on Monday, Jack Kelly on Wednesday, and Will Hutchins on Friday.
Expensive action sequences originally filmed for theatrical releases were archived and spliced into weekly episodes to avoid the cost of new location shoots.
Crews did not belong to specific shows. A director might wrap an episode of Lawman on Laramie Street in the morning and walk to Stage 25 to begin pickup shots for Cheyenne in the afternoon.
James Garner later recalled the logistics vividly: multiple companies working within a hundred yards of each other, with Maverick and Cheyenne dolly grips literally working back to back on the same street.
Multiple productions shared the three-street matrix through strict scheduling from the studio’s production office. When nearby soundstages were recording sync dialogue, crews on Laramie Street were restricted to silent shooting: horse arrivals, stunt sequences, and insert shots that would be dubbed in post-production.
How the Same Street Became a Different Town Every Week
The genius of Laramie Street was its mutability. The core building shells and boardwalk layout were permanent fixtures.
Everything else was swappable.
Signs, awnings, wanted posters, hitching post configurations, wagon placements, and prop arrangements were changed between productions to suggest different towns, different decades, and different tones.
For a standard Maverick episode, the street was dressed with clean canvas awnings, pristine painted window signs, and dry packed dirt to reflect an active, prosperous frontier town.
For grittier productions, art departments aged the wood with dark washes, replaced signs with weathered hand-painted boards, and imported wet clay to turn the dry roads into churned mud.
When Mel Brooks used the street for Blazing Saddles, it was dressed with slightly artificial hues to emphasize the film’s parodic tone. When The Muppet Movie needed a ghost town setting for its showdown sequence, the art department added artificial cobwebs, boarded windows, and tumbleweeds.
Cinematographers faced the weekly challenge of making the same physical space feel like a different location. The solutions involved extreme wide-angle lenses, low shooting angles, creative lighting, and constant redressing.
The Burbank hills that appear in the background of so many shots are the one element that could never be changed.
The Complete Production History
The roster of productions that used Laramie Street across its 47-year life represents a remarkable cross-section of American film and television history.
The heavy users during the Western factory era were Cheyenne, Maverick, Sugarfoot, Bronco, Lawman, Colt .45, and F Troop. Bonanza used it as a studio base during its final three seasons from 1970 to 1973 after moving from Paramount.
Kung Fu filmed there extensively alongside the studio’s jungle set. Little House on the Prairie rented it continuously for transit town scenes across its nine-season run.
The theatrical films that used it include The Left-Handed Gun (1958) with Paul Newman, Westworld (1973), Blazing Saddles (1974), The Shootist (1976) with John Wayne in his final role, The Muppet Movie (1979), and The Last Samurai (2003).
Star Trek: The Next Generation used it for Western-flavored holodeck simulation episodes. The Adventures of Brisco County Jr., the steampunk Western starring Bruce Campbell that aired from 1993 to 1994, was one of the final major productions to use the street extensively.
In its last five years before demolition, Laramie Street logged only nine shooting days total, compared to 125 annual days for the studio’s more modern and versatile Midwest Street set.
Hadley’s Hunters and the Day Every Warner Bros. Western Came Together
The single most celebrated episode filmed on Laramie Street was “Hadley’s Hunters,” Season 4, Episode 2 of Maverick, broadcast September 25, 1960. It was a self-referential marketing exercise designed to shore up the studio’s Western lineup during a period of falling ratings and the turbulence surrounding James Garner’s departure.
The premise required Bart Maverick to seek help from other frontier lawmen, allowing the script to bring in characters from every active Warner Bros. Western on the lot. John Russell and Peter Brown appeared as their characters from Lawman, filmed on the familiar Laramie Street marshal’s office set.
Will Hutchins appeared as Tom Brewster from Sugarfoot. Ty Hardin appeared as the lead of Bronco. Edd Byrnes appeared as a stable hand from 77 Sunset Strip, with that show’s theme playing in the background as a deliberate meta joke.
Clint Walker was also scripted to appear as Cheyenne Bodie, but Walker was in the midst of a bitter dispute with Warner Bros. over wages and working conditions. He refused to film new footage for the crossover.
The studio worked around him by inserting a brief silent shot from archived Cheyenne stock footage, demonstrating the factory’s ability to use a star’s existing likeness without requiring new cooperation.
James Garner, the Lawsuit, and What It Changed
Laramie Street was the backdrop for one of the most consequential legal battles in Hollywood history. James Garner had been earning approximately $1,250 a week playing Bret Maverick, a fraction of the revenues the show generated.
During the 1960 Writers Guild strike, Warner Bros. invoked the force majeure clause in his contract to stop paying him while preventing him from working elsewhere. Garner sued for breach of contract.
The litigation revealed that the studio had secretly obtained roughly 100 scripts during the strike, employing writers under the pseudonym W. Hermanos to keep production going while publicly claiming it was impossible.
The 1961 appellate ruling in Warner Brothers Pictures Inc. v. Bumgarner declared Garner’s contract terminated. In his own words: “You can’t do that, so I sued them for breach of contract. I won that lawsuit and I got out of my contract for Warner Brothers.”
The ruling set important precedent limiting a studio’s ability to use force majeure as a punitive suspension mechanism. It was an early step toward the power actors would eventually hold in contract negotiations. Garner called Laramie Street “just like home” and remembered filming scenes on nearly every foot of it. The lawsuit that freed him from that home changed how Hollywood worked for everyone who came after.
The Physical Decline and the Fire
Maintaining timber-and-plaster facades for nearly five decades was a constant battle. The buildings were susceptible to dry rot, wood-boring pests, and water damage from winter rains, requiring studio carpenters to routinely replace decaying support beams, repatch cracked plaster, and reinforce boardwalk framing.
Fires in the early 1980s damaged portions of the set including the saloon, which was later rebuilt. The street survived the 1971 San Fernando and 1994 Northridge earthquakes with only minor plaster cracking.
It was threatened with demolition during Warner Bros.’ mid-1980s modernization drive, when both the General Western Street and the Mexican Street were razed for office buildings and soundstage expansions.
Laramie Street was spared by a brief resurgence of interest in Western programming and commercial shoots, and then again in the early 1990s when The Adventures of Brisco County Jr. gave it a two-year reprieve.
By 2003, its fate was sealed. The set was recording only nine shooting days annually. Studio executive Gary Credle, who oversaw studio operations, cited the need for production office space as the decisive factor.
A farewell employee barbecue was held on the set on May 13, 2003. Demolition followed that weekend. Bruce Campbell, who had filmed Brisco County on the street ten years earlier, later spotted “Brisco was here, 1993” graffiti on pieces of plywood that had been salvaged and reused elsewhere on the lot.
The saloon’s swinging doors were preserved in the Warner Bros. archive. Almost everything else was hauled away as debris.
The Last Samurai and the Final Shoot
The final major production to film on Laramie Street was Edward Zwick’s The Last Samurai in 2003, and the manner in which it used the set was almost poetically appropriate as a farewell.
The production team modified the rooftops of Laramie Street’s Western buildings with Japanese-style tiling and architectural flourishes so they could serve as background representing the rooftops of historical Tokyo for scenes filmed on the adjacent New York Street sets and water tank.
The most famous American Western street in Hollywood history played Tokyo in its final appearance on screen.
Warner Village: What Replaced It
In place of Laramie Street, Warner Bros. constructed Warner Village, which opened in 2004. It is a crescent-shaped New England-style residential street featuring eleven two-story homes in varied classic East Coast architectural styles, complete with paved sidewalks, manicured lawns, driveways, garages, and established trees.
The homes function as a suburban neighborhood set for television series, commercials, and photo shoots. Hidden directly behind the residential facades is approximately 42,000 square feet of state-of-the-art production office space.
The entrances to the offices are at the rear of the properties, allowing writers, executives, and production staff to enter their workspaces without disturbing filming at the front. The set has appeared in Two and a Half Men, The Big Bang Theory, and numerous other productions.
The irony requires no elaboration. Laramie Street, a physical symbol of the rugged, mythologized American West, was replaced by a manicured fake New England suburb concealing corporate offices.
The frontier gave way to a homeowners association aesthetic with a production budget hidden inside.
The Warner Bros. Studio Tour in Burbank passes through Warner Village today. Tour guides discuss its dual function as set and office space.
The specific history of Laramie Street is not prominently acknowledged in current tour programming. The swinging saloon doors are in an archive somewhere. The pigeons that used to ruin western shots by landing on the fake mountain backdrop at Paramount have no equivalent problem on Warner Village’s green lawns.
For the full story of the shows that called Laramie Street home, see the cast hubs for Maverick, Lawman, and Bat Masterson, and the filming location guides for where Maverick was filmed and where Gunsmoke was filmed.
What was Laramie Street at Warner Bros.?
Laramie Street was the primary Western backlot set at Warner Bros. Studios in Burbank, California, built in 1957 to support the studio’s television Western output. It comprised two parallel streets connected by a perpendicular street, lined with false-front Western facades including a saloon, jail, marshal’s office, bank, general store, and boardwalks. It served as the primary exterior filming location for Maverick, Cheyenne, Lawman, Sugarfoot, and dozens of other productions for 47 years until its demolition in 2003.
What shows filmed on Laramie Street?
The primary television series that filmed on Laramie Street include Maverick, Cheyenne, Lawman, Sugarfoot, Bronco, Colt .45, F Troop, Kung Fu, Bonanza (final three seasons), Little House on the Prairie, and The Adventures of Brisco County Jr. Films that used the street include The Left-Handed Gun, Westworld, Blazing Saddles, The Shootist, The Muppet Movie, and The Last Samurai. Star Trek: The Next Generation also filmed there for holodeck episodes set in the Old West.
When was Laramie Street demolished?
Laramie Street was demolished in May 2003, following a farewell employee barbecue held on the set on May 13, 2003. The final major production to film there was The Last Samurai, which used the street’s rooftops dressed with Japanese-style architectural elements to represent historical Tokyo. The replacement set, Warner Village, a New England-style residential street containing 42,000 square feet of production offices, opened in 2004.
What replaced Laramie Street at Warner Bros.?
Warner Village replaced Laramie Street in 2004. It is a crescent-shaped New England-style residential street featuring eleven two-story homes in various East Coast architectural styles, complete with lawns, sidewalks, driveways, and trees. The homes serve as a suburban neighborhood filming set on the outside while containing approximately 42,000 square feet of production office space accessible from the rear. It has appeared in The Big Bang Theory, Two and a Half Men, and numerous other productions.
What was the Warner Bros. Western factory?
The Warner Bros. Western factory was a production system in the late 1950s and early 1960s in which the studio simultaneously produced up to six Western television series for ABC, all sharing the same Laramie Street backlot, soundstages, props, costumes, crews, and sometimes scripts. Executive producer William T. Orr managed the system. Shows including Maverick, Cheyenne, Lawman, Sugarfoot, Bronco, and Colt .45 all filmed on the same street, often on the same day with multiple crews working in different sections simultaneously.
Can you visit Laramie Street today?
No. Laramie Street was demolished in 2003 and no physical elements survive on the Warner Bros. lot beyond the saloon’s swinging doors, which were preserved in the studio archive. The Warner Bros. Studio Tour in Burbank passes through Warner Village, the set that replaced Laramie Street, but does not prominently acknowledge the history of the Western street that once stood there. The closest surviving equivalent to a classic Hollywood Western backlot street is Old Tucson Studios in Arizona, which was rebuilt after a fire in 1995 and remains operational.
