Studio City Remembers Dick Clark

At the close of the after 11 p.m. Wednesday night, board member Jeff Carter paid a tribute to , who died earlier that day.

“I was a great Los Angeleno,” Carter said at the meeting at the lot. “He brought racial acts together and has had an amazing history.”

Clark, the music producer and game show mogul  who died at 82 of a massive heart attack, has had a long history in Studio City.

One of his favorite places to dine in all of Los Angeles was at James Wong Howe’s Chinese restaurant Ching How in Studio City (which doesn’t exist anymore). The building is now the closed Platinum Live, and is where the Beatles performed when they first came to the United States, and has a long history in music lore.

Clark also loved the place across the street and down the block at 11345 Ventura Blvd., known as the Grace Hayes Lodge, and later the Larry Potter’s Supper Club through most of the 1950s.

Also, nearby in Burbank, the Dick Clark Productions office still exists on Olive Avenue, and locals posted fond memories of dealing with the American Bandstand host over the past half century. (See some of the tributes here in the Glendale News-Press.)

Clark also opened a Country-Western club in Studio City, which only lasted a few years, but he told legendary Los Angeles Times music critic Robert Hilburn in 1969, that “country music, along with soul music, is the biggest trend in the music business today.  I’ve always liked country music.  People don’t know I was a country music disc jockey for a while before I ever became involved with rock ‘n’ roll.”

In 1978, Clark played himself in a made-for-TV movie called Deadman’s Curve, and according to a contract that was being sold on the Internet Wednesday, the Studio City filming earned him $1,000 for his one day work on Nov. 2, 1977.

After Carter paid tribute to Clark at the close of the Studio City Neighborhood Council, fellow board member Richard Niederberg suggested that the meeting be adjourned in his memory.

President John Walker said it hasn’t been done before, but he OK’d the idea.

No, the board didn’t dance on their way out, as suggested.

* Read Chatsworth-Northridge Patch's Saul Daniel's memories in: