J and C in California

Today we did the Warner Brothers studio tour. It was tough to choose between Universal, Sony and NBC, but our Lonely Planet guide to LA said the Warner Brothers one was the best so we went for it. The tour was about 2 hours long but most of the cool stuff we saw we couldn’t take photos.

Some of the “camera-banned” highlights were the Harry Potter prop museum where we both donned the sorting hat and Jesse was pronounced as “Hogwarts” and I a “Slitheren”.

We saw the sets of Ellen and Chuck and basically just got a sense of how grand all of these productions are. Seeing the set of Friends was really neat too. We didn’t officially see any stars, but Jesse and I could have sworn we saw Chris Kattan leaving a set.

After that, it was off to Universal Studios to stand in line at 3:30pm for the 5:00pm taping of the Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien. Had we showed up earlier (probably around noon) we would have had better seats. Instead, we were in the top level and off camera, but we watched the show on TV tonight and Jesse swears he saw himself once near the beginning!

Although we weren’t terribly excited about the guests on the show (Drew Carey, Joe Buck and Joshua Bell), the energy of the show was really incredible and especially the charisma of Conan as a host. It’s a really grand stage and TV doesn’t do it justice. The design and attention to detail in the set design is so beautiful. I wish we could have had cameras there too, like the one we snuck into his old studio back in New York.

Tonight we are beat. We just got room service and are going to bed early”ish”. (Jesse is already sleeping.) As always, the full set is on Flickr.

Tagged as Los Angeles, travel + Categorized as Life