John Mayer and McG on Buying the Henson/A&M Lot and Preserving It as Chaplin Studios: ‘This Is One of Those Times in Life Where You Throw Down for What Matters’

John Mayer and McG have both spent a lot of time thinking about what is inherently special about the Chaplin Studios, the lot that previously was home to A&M Records, Henson Studios and, in its earliest decades, Charlie Chaplin’s production company. Between the two of them, Mayer may have spent the greatest amount of time thinking about the scents associated with the landmark Hollywood property, which they jointly purchased for a reported $44 million just over a year ago.

“I’ve asked a lot over the years about this: I don’t know what makes an old California studio smell like an old California studio,” Mayer says. “You cannot fake the smell. Ocean Way [the classic Hollywood recording studio] had it. The medical buildings in Beverly Hills, those green-carpet kind of medical buildings, have it. You walk in and you go, “I don’t know why Mickey Fine smells like that’,” he says, referring to the historic pharmacy. “I don’t know why the Beverly Hills Polo Lounge smells like it does. But if you have that classic California smell, keep it! Because you cannot buy it. There is no candle.”

Mayer’s attention to the aromatic qualities of a historic property has apparently made an impression on McG, too, because even he raises the issue, when he discusses the day-to-day decisions that have been made over the last 10 months about what to renovate and what to leave alone for fear of affecting the all-important vibes that have accumulated over the last 110 years.

“It’s still a work in progress,” says McG, the filmmaker behind “Charlie’s Angels” and “Terminator Salvation,” who is especially in charge of the parts of the lot that involve film/TV production and offices. “I was telling John a lot of the buildings are built like film sets. I remember getting the reports, where there would be gaps in a window where the breeze will come in, and someone is like, ‘For God’s sake, a spider could crawl through! You gotta seal those windows.’ And I’m just like, if I seal it, that California smell might be erased. I can’t do that. So you’ve gotta lean into the Wabi-sabi funk of this place, or you’re in the wrong place.”

“I think that’s a great point,” agrees Mayer. “How do you thread the needle between that lived-in thing and looking forward and acknowledging modern-day? That’s something I try to do all the time. What are the best of both worlds, and what is great and sturdy about the past? What can you interlace in a way that doesn’t hold back the future and just gives it a little more strength and durability? And that’s what we’re having fun doing.”

Sentiments like these will be music to the ears of the many Southern Californians who look to Chaplin — or to A&M, or Henson, or however they grew up knowing it best — as a hopefully immutable touchstone of both the city of Los Angeles and its entertainment community. Whether you’re a historic preservationist or just a nostalgist, chances are you have some strong feelings about the lot, especially if you’ve worked or frequently visited there. Mayer and McG have not talked openly about their plans until now, but they met with a small group of journalists last month to first tour the lot, then sit down in Studio B talk at length about the property’s history and possibilities.

One of the things they are discussing for the first time publicly is how the sale came to be, and how they came to be in on it together, not having previously been buddies or even acquaintances up until this became a joint mission. They also addressed the widespread reports that Scientology was set to acquire the property, which did not sit entirely well with an entertainment community that had become accustomed to the lot being open for a wide variety of usages over the decades.

“John and I strangely don’t know each other all that well prior to our arranged marriage,” acknowledges McG. “I was sort of trying to take a run at it. I’d gotten to know Faryal (Ganjehei, the lot’s president and studio manager since 2000], and John kicked the tires for his purposes and tried to figure it out. And I just didn’t have enough dough, and I don’t think he wanted to deal with the headache. Then we finally got together and I was like, ‘I’m equipped to deal with the headache’ [of overseeing the entire lot]. He’s like, ‘Good. I want to tunnel into the [recording] studio and tunnel back out.’ And I go, ‘Perfect!’ And Irving Azoff gave me my first record deal in the ‘90s” — (McG was one of Sugar Ray’s primary instigators and had his own imprint before becoming one of the top musid video directors of that decade) — “and we had a very good experience with that, and he obviously manages John. So Irving vouched for both of us: Chocolate, meet peanut butter. Reese’s, knock yourself out.”

But McG approached the possibility of a deal first as a solo act. “I even got it into escrow,” he reveals, “but I couldn’t close it; I didn’t have enough dough. This is before John. And I don’t know if we should talk about our competition…,” he wonders aloud. “I think [Henson] got way downstream with a family with deep ties to the Church of Scientology, and then that got out in public, and people were concerned about the manner in which it was going to be deployed. I’ll leave it at that. And then we got our foot back in the door and got our financial ducks in a row, and we were fortunate enough to make it happen.”

Mayer was coming from a place of having recorded at the A&M studios going back to 2005, and having locked in Studio C for his own purposes in 2018, getting to know the people who worked there. “I’ll piggyback off what McG said. It was in the press; it’s known. But it wasn’t necessarily about anyone else who was in the running. For me, this was about keeping the band together And all I really cared about was in my sort of near view, which is: This is a gang you can spend another 30 years working with. It would’ve really upset me deeply if everyone who comes to work every day and sees one another — it’s a very tightknit family — had to separate and dissipate, and I went and worked at one studio, and Faryal went and started somewhere in the middle of the ladder at another studio. I did not want to see all of us go different places. That’s it.

“This was not about outsmarting anybody. This is about caring about so many people who see each other every day …. especially if you’re me and you’re an artist, and you don’t have any semblance of routine in your life, and I found it, like other artists find it here. … This is one of those times in life where you throw down for what matters, not for what you can brag about you were able to corner someone on… At a certain point… I know I said to the previous owners, ‘You have my attention, and I’m not here to play games anymore. And what does it take?’ And to have an emotional asset in your life is a really good thing. I think everyone’s always looking at assets from a very objective, hardcore, empirical value level. This is something I wake up and go to sleep every day knowing in my heart that I have a piece of in some way, or I’m responsible for other people’s piece of it.”

Says McG: “I’m old enough to have seen the exodus of aerospace out of Southern California — [it] broke my heart — and old enough to have seen the exodus of Hollywood out of Southern California. So if we could take a small step in the direction of planting a flag and saying, ‘Hey, we’re trying to do the right thing and protect the people of the city that we care about, trying to show that you can make a film or television show or record and do it here with extraordinary people and extraordinary facilities’ — why not?”

With an estimated $9 million going into renovating the property and its facilities, on top of the substantial purchase price, no one is expecting it to be a profitable investment soon. They’re fine with that.

“John makes a really good point about the dough,” McG says, “because I think a lot of financial people kicked us in the shins and said, ‘Not such a hot financial idea.’ And we just kind of shrugged because it was always emotional. It’s well-known that John is a premiere watch collector and a giant voice in that community. And I kind of wrapped my head around, if John buys a very interesting watch, it doesn’t pay a dividend; I’m sure his business manager told him he overpaid for it, all those things… But he gets to live with the watch, enjoy the watch, take it out for a test spin, do the thing, enjoy it. And it’s very likely to go from the value of one to the value of two over the course of time, even in the absence of making prudent financial sense. So I think that you’ve gotta look at it like one of John’s watches, if you will.”

“Yeah, it would be one of my watches that I love wearing more than I care about the P&L or what the books say it is,” agrees Mayer. “You don’t hear, as you’re scrolling through on line, about making a contribution in some way — having something in your name that is less about a portfolio and more about having a piece of something and having a part in preserving something. There are people in L.A. who have never needed a recording studio and will never need to come here, who are going to be very happy that a building in L.A. that was known as one thing has changed hands and will continue to be known as the same thing.”

Are there other major investors that McG and Mayor will need to answer to as they steer the lot toward a hoped-for profit someday?

“We didn’t really look up each other’s pant leg,” says McG. “We split it right down the middle. I brought in a couple of friends to help offset [some of the down payment]. My nephew gave me a couple bucks… It was a lot of money for me. We had to put down a lot cash to make the deal work… We all became sort of blinded with desire just to get it done at the end there.  But we got it done and, at the end of the day, what matters most is, it’s dually John and McG.”

“Yeah, I mean, I think it’s just you and I on the paperwork,” says Mayer.

“Yeah, there’s no ‘And therefore we also have to check with the big Daddy Warbucks character.’ It’s truly just us,” McG says.

“I have a food truck business,” adds Mayer. “I just went into that … used my profits from the food truck.” As is sometimes the case with him, it takes a couple of beats to realize he’s kidding.

The two co-owners got almost everything they wanted in procuring the lot — with a couple of symbolic exceptions that were denied by the property’s last two sets of owners. They were not allowed to use the A&M name, and the statue of Kermit dressed as Charlie Chaplin that had towered over the LaBrea front entrance for 25 years was carted off to go to a museum, despite a vociferous case being made to leave the frog where he stood.

“The Hensons took the Kermit dressed as the Tramp and put it in a museum in Atlanta that’s dedicated to Jim Henson, which I think is terribly sad for the people of Los Angeles,” McG says. “I’ve always made it analogous to, like, if we all owned Randy’s Donuts, but we sold it to the barbecue place, I think between us and the barbecue person, just leave the donut up there… Griffith Park Observatory, Formosa Cafe, the Hollywood sign — we don’t have that much, so don’t keep cannibalizing and chipping away. A woman I work with takes her kids to school every day on this road, and she says, ‘My kids every day would say, “What’s up, Kerms?” Now, they don’t.’ And it breaks my heart, and I think that it’s an opportunity missed. I think it transcends the Henson family, respectfully, and transcends John or McG or anybody. I feel like at a certain point it belongs to the city, and I’m very sad to see it go. Oh well.”

When it came to renaming the facility from Henson Studios, there were issues of whether to go back in time and, if so, how far back.

Says McG, “My company’s called Wonderland Sound and Vision, and of course, John’s breakout hit is ‘Your Body Is a Wonderland’…”

“And my best song to date, by the way,” interjects Mayer, tongue firmly in cheek.

McG: “So a woman I work a lot with goes, ‘Are you guys gonna call it Your Body Is a Wonderland Sound and Vision? And I’m like, no.”

Another idea: “People for a long time were saying, just call it J&M,” Mayer notes. Another immediate no.

“But we even took a run at just, ‘Hey, should we call it A&M?’” says McG. “Because I’m of a generation where I just regard this as A&M. I used to hang out on the docks begging everybody for CDs, so I associate it with that period. But there were problems with Universal Music Group being proprietary about this, that and the other.” Technically, A&M is part of a current label name — Interscope Geffen A&M — which represents some of the imprints that Universal bought and absorbed, although at this point the A&M part is more of a faintly nostalgic technicality than a distinct entity with any connection to the house that Herb Alpert and Jerry Moss built. “They just couldn’t see it,” says a frustrated Mayer. “They had A&M Records. This would’ve been A&M Studios. Two nodes… They couldn’t get it.”

But sometimes simpler is better (as anyone who has ever had to wrap their tongues around Interscope Geffen A&M can attest), and “Chaplin” is pretty simple.

“It’s difficult to correctly launch the narrative of a new brand in 2026,” Mayer says. “And if you take any name you have in mind for a studio and put the word ‘studio’ after it, it exists online… It’s very hard to find a (new) name for a studio that still has vowels in it… What I liked about Chaplin is, it is a 100-year-old brand, and there’s this second life to it. I thought this could be really interesting, to have people in their twenties who are working on their first album go to a place called Chaplin, even if they’re not aware of what the connection is. How can you get those who understand the legendary contributions Charlie Chaplin made to film understand it, and have a new cohort of artists just see a name that looks and sounds good, hoping that at some point people go, ‘I didn’t know there was a person behind Chaplin’? You don’t go to buy a Ford Raptor and interface so much with Henry Ford and his legacy. But it’s important to keep legacies alive. I think it’s cooler to have it exist in a constant but very low-grade way, so that you have just kind of a pinky locked on it, but move forward.”

A tour of the facility establishes that everything still around on the lot that has any connection to Chaplin’s era, which extended from 1917 through 1953, is being carefully preserved… except in cases of pure dry rot being uncovered.

Standing out in front of the La Brea entrance on the exterior sidewalk, McG says, “We started to redo everything in the spirit of getting it exactly like it was when Chaplin built it. We did the research with the width of the strip oak that he put in for the hardwood floors and replaced them.” In front, “We chipped off the paint and we got the original colors from when Chaplin did it and did the analytics, so it was the exact brown and the exact white. We did all the landscaping to make it more beautiful for the forward-facing part of La Brea, just trying to give back to the city, since there’s a lot of blight around here, and we’re just trying to be a moment of light in that. And these wooden buildings are historically protected” — but not necessarily in the exact spots they were in the 1910s. “When they widened La Brea, they had to put ’em on logs and push ’em back.”

Signs of Chaplin’s reign remain within. On a tour of the buildings, for instance, Ganjehei shows off a furnace where the silent film legend used to burn outtakes, after examining dailies in his screening room right across the front entrance. Some of Chaplin’s footprints remain in cement in an inner courtyard. In McG’s own office, there are stained glass windows that apparently date back to when Chaplin held court there. “A few years back, there was a really bad car accident on LaBrea, and the fire hydrant went up and the water destroyed the wall, and when we knocked down the wall for the repair work, these windows were discovered. So it’s so beautiful that Mc G is now including it in his office,” Ganjehei says. The director says that other glass windows will be replaced with Mondrian-style glass to match the original.

There are other artifacts or entire buildings that remain from the silent era. On the slightly tawdry side, the studio overseer points to a mostly out-of-sight loft where “rumor has it that that’s where Chaplin would keep his concubines of sorts.” Chaplin’s original grooming and makeup chair sits near the entrance to Studio A. Down the hall, there is a table with books perched on it that propped up a studio saw a hundred years ago, still branded with the “C.C. Film Co.” logo. In the building still called “the mill,” is “apparently the oldest standing saw, minus the blades, in the West,” Ganjehei says. All this woodworking talk leads to anecdotes about how, in the A&M era, there would be shout-outs about “needing the carpenters,” only for Richard and Karen Carpenter to answer the call.

Most of the footprint of the lot remains as it has been since the late ‘60s, when Jerry Moss and Herb Alpert bought it and transformed two of the three soundstages to five recording studios. Each of these six spaces where music or video productions are made has its own history.

The recording studios continued to be made available to outsiders during the quarter-century Henson had the place, while the soundstage was mostly utilized for Henson’s own kids’ shows, with exceptions.

Lately, the giant stage has been used for everything from “Knives Out: Wake Up Dead Man” pickup shots to a Stella McCartney fashion show to a benefit concert Mayer and his band did for a veterans’ charity. They have been looking at what kind of event should be held there during Grammy Week.

“I want it to be the kind of place where, if the event is happening here, the address is the pull to go,” says Mayer. “That might sound a little superficial, but I think that’s an interesting way to create a goal. Can the address become ‘Ooh, there’s a thing at Chaplin. It doesn’t matter what it is. That’s a cool place to go hang.’”

There are more outdoor chairs and tables, and more greenery and fountains, to “soften” the facility… not that everyone didn’t already just dig a nice bungalow. McG has gotten down into the dirt to do some of the planting himself,

“What you see with these gardens and stuff… for me, the whole impetus of this place was, everywhere we shoot, literally around the world, when it’s wrapped, you’re like,’How fast can we get the fuck outta here?’” says the filmmaker. “Here, when you finish your work, it’s like, ‘Do you want a glass of wine? Do you wanna hang out and talk a little bit?’ And I find that so magical.”

You will not find Mayer literally getting into the dirt, himself. Although if you are in one of the studios and you happen to need a guitar part, and you come across Mayer in the hallway, he might oblige you, without getting bogged down in whatever is involved in taking a credit.

As for whether there is a need for this kind of advanced studio anymore, when home studios are capable of so much in the 2020s, Mayer has an answer: “It’s work from home versus working from the office. And I think it’s cool to hedge your bet on the side of humanity.”

That’s why they haven’t made any major renovations to the structure or look, especially, of the recording studios, knowing that part of the appeal is being able to go into the exact room — Studio C — where Joni Mitchell recorded “Blue” and several other albums. Mitchell came by the studio last month, to revisit the scene of the crime at a holiday party, and was no doubt pleased to see that it’s Henry Diltz photos of her that everyone who comes in first sees, establishing a Laurel Canyon vibe.

“If artists walked in and immediately everything was LED back-lit…” says Mayer, letting that distasteful thought trail off. “There’s a nomenclature to being in the studio that lives in its own timeframe, and you just let people relate to that still. Even the tapestries… there’s just something about tapestries and string lights that make people want to write songs, even if it’s not the most modern, Tesla-fied thing.”

Ganjehel, the studio manager, will happily reel off past recordings of yore: The largest studio, A, can handle a 45-piece orchestra, and has been home to everything from vintage Burt Bacharach, Alpert and Sergio Mendes recordings to Guns N’ Roses’ “Use Your Illusions” projects to five out of the last six Paul McCartney albums to Justin Bieber’s recent “Swag” (volumes one and two). The smaller Studio D, on the other end of the hallway, has hosted the Doors, U2, Fleetwood Mac, Pearl Jam, Rage Against the Machine, Miley Cyrus and the last two Harry Styles albums.

But don’t ever imagine the studio manager is ever going to give up who is currently woriing in the studio. “We don’t kiss and tell,” she says. Not even to major rock stars or a co-owner.

“Lady Gaga a couple years ago was recording in Studio B, and the Stones were in studio A and D,” she recalls. “Mick Jagger comes up and says, ‘I hear Lady Gaga’s here.’ And we respond with, ‘We don’t discuss who’s here.’ But the bodyguards made it happen. Lady Gaga was sitting on this couch and I said, ‘Mick asked if you were here, but everything is so private and confidential and we really, really value that.’ And she said, ‘You can always tell Mick Jagger when I’m here.’ She recorded that duet with them [“Sweet Sounds of Heaven,” from their 2023 “Hackney Diamonds” album] two hours later.”

Says Mayer, talking about the years before he bought the lot, “Faryal never let me know who else was here. And you might say that my half of this place was worth paying just to get the calendar every day, being let behind that very iron curtain of who was in the building every day, I’m still not over it, I don’t think.”

“May I add, I’m not behind that iron curtain,” McG protests. “As recently as yesterday, Faryal was chewing my ear off because there was a truck loading in something, and she goes, ‘I have an artist coming’,” but she wouldn’t say who. “I’m shooting a fucking nude scene with Reese Witherspoon and Tom Hardy — I can handle the discretion of who the artist is! But I don’t say anything and I honor the code. So when I’ve earned it, that’ll be a hell of a day and I’ll definitely elbow John, like, ‘She let me in, dude.’”

With Bieber no longer on the premises, they can acknowledge press reports of an unusual recent request that made use of the large soundstage for a non-filming purpose.

Says Mayer, “Faryal wrote me one Saturday morning: ‘Hey, Justin’s gonna be in the studio. He mentioned wanting a basketball court. What do you think about turning the soundstage into a basketball court for him?” I said, ‘Great, but I don’t know that you can do that.’ Two or three hours later on that night, I get an image of what looks like a perfect basketball court with a three-point line and a foul line and everything, all done with tape. The runners had figured out how to do it.”

As for whether whims like that need to be indulged, Mayer, perhaps not surprisingly, is on the side of the talent. “I staunchly defend artists both as being more normal than you think and way more screwed up than you think. And I try to protect the best parts of both of ’em. So if Justin Bieber had something that you could hear on ‘Swag’ that was nominated for Album of the Year at the Grammys because he was able to shoot a little hoops on a break, then we’ve done our job.”

The match of personalities between Mayer and McG has been a good one, they avow, after 10 months of working together tightly, as two guys who both talk very fast and who can both use big words like “nomenclature” while talking that fast. To say nothing of shared ambitions.

“I like high-octane personalities,” says Mayer. “I think it’s fair to say, McG, you have a high-octane personality. I have somewhat of a high-octane personality. And I know how to weave in and out of that, and I know how to let someone else rip when it’s time to rip.”

Preservation was far from their only reason for acquiring the Chaplin Studios, but it’s neither negligible nor ignoble as a factor.

Says McG, “I hope that organically it will be revealed: Oh, that was the tenure where John and McG were the torch bearers and hopefully will be regarded as they did a good job and they threw down for Los Angeles. They put their money where their mouth was. I love what Jason Reitman did with the Village Westwood theater, where he got a consortium of superheroes to kind of come in and save it. It’s like, we don’t need another six-story mixed-use. They’re not cool… We really should take a look at what made Los Angeles great and be of a mind that those things don’t grow on trees and not everything is disposable.”

Mayer has his own take on that. “I wonder if at some point, like 10 years from now, someone who’s gonna be 30 will stand outside of Supreme [the clothing store that moved into Tower Records’ old Sunset building] as it’s being closed down and go, ‘You just can’t keep anything good these days.’ They probably will, because I do think that probably every generation thinks that their thing is the thing that matters the most — except this building has five generations. So I think if you can [hold onto it], you should, right?”

(More details about the lot can be found here, with specific information about the soundstage here and the recording studios here.)