In this aerial photograph, we’re looking north across the 20th Century-Fox movie studios in the Century City part of Los Angeles in 1954. (Originally the land was a ranch owned by movie cowboy, Tom Mix, but was later renamed after the studio.) The road running from left to right near the bottom of the picture is Pico Blvd. On the left we can see the soundstages and the big stretch of open land on the right is the backlot that would have to be sacrificially sold off to cover the ballooning costs of “Cleopatra,” whose production dates ran from September 1961 to July 1962. Albeit smaller now, the studio is still there.

** UPDATE **

from Michael Troyan, author of Twentieth Century Fox: A Century of Entertainment
Actually Spyros Skouras announced that the Westwood backlot would be sold in January 1958. Before Cleopatra was even initiated following September. More pressing to Skouras was fact that Fox was in a filmmaking slump because Zanuck had retired to become independent filmmaker for Fox. Literally from moment Zanuck left you can see the financial drop. Further, Skouras has noted expansion of Greater LA was making Fox property increasingly expensive and driving up taxes. Can’t blame you because even Fox employees still tell people that story about Cleo and the backlot. We really killed ourselves to get the true story told in our “Cleopatra and the Lot” section of Twentieth Century Fox: A Century of Entertainment . What a historic minefield! That fabulous doc about the film CLEOPATRA THE FILM THAT CHANGED HOLLYWOOD.

This satellite aerial image is from 2021: