What did the studio at Wonderland Avenue do?

[Helen Reyes]

Have you ever seen a movie called The Mothman Prophecies, which explores some of these themes, precursors, synchronicities, in what might loosely be termed a Hollywood Jungian manner?

I saw it, watched it half-distractedly on television once. Funny you should mention that. John Keel half-wrote, half-collected the Mothman stuff as I recall. His book Our Haunted Planet goes into some of the connexions between Men in Black and elementals. The problem as I see it is the Suspense! radio plays prefigure this phenomenon again, as the first modern mention of The Man in Black, who introduced episodes prior to the first modern Man in Black, who contacted Dahl in the Maury Island case in 1947. To connect MIB with the Black Man, a witches' black sabbath name for Satan, is fine, but there's a more obvious and current candidate in the Suspense! announcer.

The broadcast posted was probably first broadcasted in 1946, not 45. Even so, it's prior to the stated time for the establishment of the studio on Wonderland Avenue, which is 1947. Since it's called a unit of the Army Air Corps, that means before June 1947 when the Air Force was commissioned as a separate branch of the military, just around the time the CIA and NSC were created by presidential decree. In 1946 Roman Polanski would have just been reunited with his father in Cracow after his return from Mathausen in Austria.

The episode I posted is more of a coincidence than it seems at first glance. It's not just the surname Polanski and Laurel Canyon. It's prefiguring all the blood later spilt in the canyon in the classical murder/suicides and it's telling us it is prefiguring it, and it is tying it to the specific location. It is also saying there is a mysterious force at work, akin to lycanthropy, that turns people bestial.

Wikipedia says: "Polański himself escaped the Kraków Ghetto in 1943 and survived the war using the name Romek Wilk with the help of some Polish Roman Catholic families."

Romek Wilk. Little Roman the Wolf.

While the Wonderland Avenue studio wasn't there until 1947, we are told (but there were film crews present for the nuclear tests, tasked with filming them for the military, in 1945 at Port Chicago and later Trinity), even before World War II there was a strange secure compound behind Laurel Canyon in what is now called Rustic Canyon. What it was, who ran it, no one knows, or isn't saying. The story it was a Nazi base inside America makes for sensational journalism but probably isn't true.

The next stage of interference arises when the work of art comes to be distributed, and here I will concentrate on books, films, TV and radio.

William Spier was the driving force behind Suspense at that time. Orson Welles was affiliated. Spiers married Gypsy Rose's sister. The script didn't change in the ensuing redramatizations over the years. They always even included the gratuitous product placement for Peterson Brothers furniture, whatever that is.

TV and radio programmes are always subject to interference from those funding the project.

Back then radio series usually had but one spnsor. At that time Suspense had Roma Wines. Suspense didn't shy away from violent deaths but it's safe to assume Roma wanted to cultivate a wholesome and decent reputation for the product.

http://www.oldandsold.com/articles02/fresno2.shtml

Roma Wine Company, Fresno

The largest winery in California, with a correspondingly large production. The Roma Wine Company was established when J. Battista Cella and his brother Lorenzo came to California in 1915 and acquired the small Roma Winery established at Lodi. The move to Fresno occurred in 1933, when the Roma Wine Company acquired the Santa Lucia Winery, which had been founded a few years earlier by N. D. Naman. Roma then began an expansion program which resulted in its becoming the world's largest and most modern winery of its time. In 1942 Schenley Industries, Inc., acquired Roma Wine Company and all wineries and physical assets of the company and embarked upon a further expansion and modernization program.

Colonel Albert H. Burton is in charge of over-all production of the Roma Wine Company and other Schenley wine interests. Richard Auerbach is in charge of production control, while William Shonkwiler is the chief chemist and quality-control supervisor. Sales and merchandising are handled through CVA Corporation of San Francisco under the direction of its board chairman, Harry G. Serlis.

The Roma winery at Fresno has a crushing capacity of 80,000 tons of grapes a season, while total storage capacity is over 16,700,000 gallons of wine. The Roma winery at Kingsburg has an additional capacity of 7,800,00o gallons.

Winery buildings and operating areas cover some fifty-five acres. With minor exceptions all Roma dessert wines are produced from grapes grown in the San Joaquin Valley within a radius of sixty miles of the Fresno winery. White grapes represent about 70 per cent of the total volume crushed and include chiefly Muscat of Alexandria, Feher Szagos, Palomino, Malaga, and Thompson Seedless, the last two varieties being used principally for the production of brandy and grape concentrates. The most important dark grapes used are Zinfandel, Petite Sirah, Mission, Grenache, Carignane, and Salvador.

Roma produces sound standard-quality wines which are nationally distributed and also exported to various foreign countries, including the Orient. Roma Reserve is the basic brand, with Roma Estate and Roma Select the two principal variations, conforming to the demand in various parts of the country.

Under the various Roma brands the following wines are available, most of which are bottled in the exclusive Roma dripless bottle, a new merchandising development:

Table wines:
RED: Burgundy, Claret, and Zinfandel; Red Chianti and Vino di Roma (vino rosso type); WHITE: Sauterne, Chablis, and Rhine Wine; White Chianti; ROSE: Vin Rose. ...

Now, to return to the example of the 1945 radio play featuring Frank Polanski in those synchronous locations. I find it highly implausible that the artist or artists who created the work of art, in a studio framework, were knowingly preparing us for Rosemary's Baby and the Manson family slaughter of Sharon Tate, Mrs Roman Polanski, in Cielo Drive, more than two decades into the future.

Or for a secret military studio to be located according to a radio play. The foundations were laid before the war, but only finished after.

That said, there is no particular reason in 1945 for the studio to decide to change a seemingly minor detail such as the name of the character "Frank Polanski".

No, Jan, the point was only that the script didn't change over the years, which means the details weren't mistakes, they were following the original script. It would've been easy for a Hollywood actor or radio star to insert "Laurel" for "Cypress" and to have it go out over the air, and even be transcribed (recorded for later rebroadcast). The first version has the cop say "Palanski" but later versions say "Polanski." The first actor simply didn't enunciate the O, he gave it the good old American schwa.

From what part of the scriptwriter's unconscious did that name come from?

Was it simply that the notion of a stupid "polack" milkman, signalled by the use of a name like "Polanski", would help make this brutal character believable for an American audience?

First, his character wasn't brutal. He was victimized, his throat was ripped out by Cathy Lewis/Ellen Woods, James A. Woods's wolfgirl wife. Second, "milkman" had a certain ring to it immediately following World War II, something like "postman," a male who has contact with women whose husbands are absent, abroad or dead, who might sometimes have access to the domicile. The Freudian implications of milk are obvious.

Or did the scriptwriter receive the name from the aether of the personal or collective unconscious? Where space and time twist and swirl in more than three dimensions?

Yes, I believe so. "Roma" Wines, Frank "Polanski" murdered in the canyon... In fact I'll wager the script writer lived in or near Laurel Canyon, and the story came to him as he contemplated unfinished construction next door over, late one night, when a wild animal was heard to howl somewhere nearby.

The Cypress Canyon address is a real one, if you transplant it to Laurel Canyon Boulevard:
2256 Laurel Canyon Blvd, Los Angeles CA 90046
An internet search of that shows it listed on http://www.orange-systems.info/usa/ as the business address of ORANGE SYSTEMS USA
An almost exact replica of the webpage exists at http://www.orange-systems.co.uk/ which lists the business address of ORANGE SYSTEMS Ltd as ORANGE SYSTEMS Ltd, UNIT F, THE SCOPE, WILLS ROAD, TOTNES TQ9 5XN

For more on why this radio drama is a bigger coincidence than it seems at first glance, read all the krazy kalifornia stuff beginning at http://www.davesweb.cnchost.com/nwsltr93.html if you haven't done so already.

I'm guessing there's something behind the secret studio and the murders in Laurel Canyon, and it has something to do with the compound in Rustic Canyon and something to do with local elemental spirits whispering in suggestible ears and something to do with MKULTRA and earlier projects aimed at shaping public opinion.