Home (latest issue) | Recent Photography | Image Archives | Guest Photography | The International Desk | About This Site | Search This Site | Just Above Sunset Commentary

Tuesday, August 10, 2010 – Catching Hollywood

Yep, that's a stock shot if there ever was one, the front entrance to the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, where the ghost of Montgomery Clift haunts the seventh floor and the ghost of Marilyn Monroe flits about here and there, or so they say. It's all in the framing. But the red light and blue sign and the green palm in glass make a nice composition. It'll do. And on this day someone is shouting a movie or a television show or a commercial or something here – gaffers and grips and booms and deflection scrims and thick blue cable everywhere. The late summer tourists gawk at it all, and read this sign. Maybe they'll be in a movie! Or maybe they wonder why the production company's legal staff can't spell.

Across the street the tourists at Grauman's Chinese Theater are putting their hands and feet in the impressions of the hands and feet of long-dead movie stars in the cement courtyard paving stones, elbowing each other aside and chattering away in Japanese and German, and in the flat-vowel nasal English of Iowa – taking pictures of each other to show others back home. Those of us who have lived here for twenty years sometime drop by to watch at listen – it's cultural anthropology, and for those fascinated by language, endlessly fascinating. But we see other things.

Down the street the pigeons have rendered their judgment on Stella Adler – the woman who taught Marlon Brando everything he knew about acting – "You can't be boring. Life is boring. The weather is boring. Actors must not be boring." The pigeons have had their say about that.

The Obama plays –

Acting these days – a billboard for "Nikita" –

All this can get to you. In fact, Faulkner and Fitzgerald and Hemingway used to drink right here. They drank heavily. It had something to do with ending up in Hollywood, if just for a time, knocking out a screenplay or two. Faulkner and Hemingway were just passing through of course. Fitzgerald stayed, and died out here, his Gatsby fame far in the past, and his Paris of the twenties just a hazy memory. But all three got pie-eyed at Musso and Frank on the boulevard.

It has to do with feeling you don't fit in. This is the World's Tallest Man at the Guinness Book of World Records museum on the boulevard. This guy has been there forever. And, oddly, he speaks to those of us who live here.

Home (latest issue) | Recent Photography | Image Archives | Guest Photography | The International Desk | About This Site | Search This Site | Just Above Sunset Commentary

All text and photos unless otherwise noted, Copyright © 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010 - Alan M. Pavlik

[August 2010] [Cat-Dog-Bird] [Family Life] [The Face of LA] [Street Signs] [Hollywood Enticement] [Two Theaters] [Partial Faces] [A Wailing Wall] [Brain Food] [The Survivor] [Hopper Be Gone] [Just Not Real] [Rubber Vultures] [The Unexpected] [By the Pond] [Sunset Sirens] [A Street Gallery] [Catching Hollywood] [The Posters] [Colony Vixen] [Our Tours Rock] [Illegal Dumping] [American Icons] [Nightmare Icons] [Faces Up] [Hollywood Trash] [Shadow Lilies] [Hot Fuzz] [Hollywood Ruins] [In the Details] [Melrose Angels] [The Graffiti Trap] [August Gulls] [Vortex Beach] [Random Heat] [Malibu Abstracts] [Giant Guitars] [Serious Guitars] [Busy Work] [In the Dark] [Summer Roses] [Looking Odd] [Reading the Walls] [Pier Surfing] [Hermosa Interpreted] [On Pier Avenue] [Selling Heat] [Some Stars] [Cross-Cultural] [Street Passion] [Regarding Oppression] [In the Beach Fog] [Beach Beasts] [Sun Shots] [Shape Shots] [Get the Concept] [The Red Hotel] [Long Ago] [The Walking Man] [Local Hostility]