TMZ Drives Celebrity News. Thank This L.A. Intersection.

The corner of La Cienega and Beverly is a pretty good encapsulation of a certain uppity slice of modern Los Angeles. It is a horrific traffic quagmire with a huge mall on one corner, a luxury hotel on another and a gas station where a gallon of regular costs $5.79.

It is also the inspiration for the name of the celebrity crime, courts and gossip site that has delivered Los Angeles-centric scoops since 2005: the news that Michael Jackson had suddenly died at his Holmby Hills mansion, audio of racist remarks by the former owner of the Los Angeles Clippers, and aggressive reporting about last year’s murder of the director Rob Reiner and his wife in their Brentwood home.

“TMZ didn’t start as a media brand,” said Colleen Bell, the head of California’s film commission. “It started as a map.”

Over the past century, La Cienega and Beverly Boulevards have formed one of the film industry’s most important intersections. As far back as the 1930s, extras would cluster here looking for work in the movies. Decades later, what would become the Motion Picture Association opened its Los Angeles headquarters over a Rexall drugstore on the corner. A predecessor organization to the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers moved in too.

Those are some of the reasons that the southeast corner of the intersection became the center of the Thirty Mile Zone, a key industry-created boundary that dictates when movie and TV studios must compensate workers for mileage, lodging and other travel-related expenses related to filming.

Employees must pay for their own transportation for shoots within the circular zone, a creature of collective bargaining that has existed in some capacity since the early 1940s. Outside of it, movies and studios are responsible for paying.

A spokesman for Harvey Levin, the founder of TMZ, did not make him available to comment about the origin of his buzzy website’s name. But a 2016 profile in The New Yorker reported that options including Feed the Beast, Frenzie and Buzz Feed were being considered when a studio executive suggested Thirty Mile Zone. Levin, the article said, countered with TMZ.

TMZ’s reach extends to wherever crime, drama and gossip flourish. Someone is currently asking the website for a cryptocurrency payment in exchange for information about the disappearance of Nancy Guthrie, the mother of the “Today” anchor Savannah Guthrie, from her Arizona home.

But much of the news it reports takes place in Los Angeles, the home of the website’s headquarters and a seemingly unending supply of celebrity, wealth and power.

“Obviously they were using that name because most of the activity or the stories that they’re dealing with are within that Thirty Mile Zone,” said Ed Duffy, a longtime location manager and the political director of Teamsters Local 399 in Los Angeles.

The Thirty Mile Zone began in 1942 as a five-mile zone with a center that was farther east, at Fifth Street and Rossmore Avenue near present-day Hancock Park. It included a few locations outside the zone, like Disney’s studios in Burbank, Calif., and the Columbia Ranch that is now known as the Warner Bros. Ranch.

The industry grew considerably in the decades that followed. Duffy said that by the 1970s, unions had negotiated contracts with studios that expanded what is now the Thirty Mile Zone and began measuring mileage from La Cienega and Beverly. The studios would bus workers to shoots outside the zone or compensate those who drove themselves.

Unions still bargain over changes to the rules during contract negotiations. The Ontario International Airport and Leo Carrillo State Beach are now considered to be within the zone, even though they are just outside its boundaries.

Hollywood is always evolving. The San Fernando Valley is no longer endless citrus groves, and movie equipment is much more portable (goodbye, Cinemobiles!). More and more movies are not even being filmed in Los Angeles, which means that La Cienega and Beverly have analogues in other cities.

The circular filming zone in San Francisco begins at the corner of Powell and Market Streets. New York’s starts at Columbus Circle, near Central Park, and extends dozens of miles into Connecticut and New Jersey.