Overall I liked L.A.'s newspapers. Even the worst of them (like the scandal sheet L.A. Daily News) were better than the local TV news in L.A. Whenever good anchors leave the local stations around here, they say they're going to a bigger market. Los Angeles is the biggest TV market in the country, and you'd think they could get decent reporters to work there. They didn't, though. The news we watched tonight was anchored by an Asian man and a black woman, neither of whom could read more than a couple of lines without stumbling. The sports reporter was an Anglo man who shouted out the entire segment in a pant. They had a consumer reporter that looked and sounded like that old gossip columnist Rona Barrett, a Hispanic woman with hair piled a mile over her head who gave financial planning advice, and a "pretty boy" weatherman who could never cue the right maps. We tried other stations as well while we were here, and we watched both morning and evening newscasts. They were all about the same; even the tiny station in Mason City would put them to shame.
I got up early this morning and set out on a lengthy walk. The first thing I encountered was sort of interesting. Just down the street from the Roosevelt is an old church building that is now owned by the Church of Scientology (at least five different old churches in Hollywood are now Scientologist). The side street to the east of that church was blocked off, and workers were setting up cameras on cranes at the intersection. All along the side street there were trailers parked. Those trailers serve as the offices and dressing rooms when movie studios shoot on location. I have no idea what they were shooting here today, but it was interesting to walk in on the beginning of it-whatever it was.
After getting as close to the film site as I could without trespassing, I turned east and walked back to the Chinese Theatre. Believe me, early morning is the time to see a tourist attraction like that. At 7am the only people here were me and a janitor who was hosing down the famous forecourt where the hand and footprints of the stars are enshrined in cement. .....
I walked on back to Hollywood and Highland. Just north of the intersection is another famous church--famous because it was the "on location" site of several movies, most notably the Whoopi Goldberg blockbuster Sister Act. It's fascinating that a movie about nuns in San Francisco should be filmed at a Protestant church in L.A., but the inner-city institution you see in that film is in fact Hollywood United Methodist Church. Virtually that entire movie was filmed on-site here. They used the adjacent fellowship hall and Sunday school building as the "convent" in the movie. ... Apparently the actual Hollywood United Methodist Church choir was even used in the movie. I didn't go inside, but I did scope out the place. It really does look like the Sister Act church, with the exception of an enormous red AIDS ribbon attached to the bell tower.
The church where Whoopi hides in that movie is supposed to be in a rough inner city neighborhood, and they didn't have to stretch much to make this church fit that bill. They've cleaned up the nearby section of Hollywood Boulevard, but Highland Avenue is still definitely on the seedy side. There are homeless people wandering all through the neighborhood-not really begging, just wandering around with nothing to do. There was also more trash in the area than I saw anywhere else in L.A., as well as a lot of graffiti. I got a cup of coffee at a Burger King across the street from the Methodist Church, and the whole place was plastered with graffiti. ... There was spray paint inside the building and all over the front of the building. One of the windows was broken, and the whole restaurant looked like it was about to be abandoned. (The church, on the other hand, is handsome and very well kept up.)
The neighborhood quickly improved as I walked west from Highland. The next point of interest--and I use that term very loosely here--was the Highland Gardens Manor Hotel on Franklin Avenue, a couple of blocks west of the Methodist church. The motel is a broad glass building from the '60s. It reminded me of the Collegiate Center in the town of Olivet, Michigan, where we lived when I was quite young. It's big claim to fame is that rock star Janis Joplin overdosed and died in a second-flood room here. (I picked up a fascinating guidebook called The L.A. Musical History Tour, which is where such strange tidbits come from.) I can't say I particularly cared about Joplin, but since it was in the neighborhood, it was interesting to see. It's quite an elegant hotel, and I'd imagine it was even nicer 30 years ago. Joplin always dressed trashy, and it was really kind of hard to picture her staying here. Regardless of what they dress like, though, rock stars certainly do have money; and if you've got money, I supposed you'd pick the nicest possible place to overdose.
I turned south at LaBrea and then walked west a long way down Hollywood Boulevard. West of LaBrea, Hollywood Boulevard becomes mostly a residential street--though a very different kind of residence than I am used to. As I mentioned before, everyone in Hollywood lives in apartments. The whole boulevard west of LaBrea is lined with ultra-elegant "garden apartments". The buildings are crammed together (usually with three feet or less between them), but each complex faces on a central patio or pool area, not unlike the cabanas at the Roosevelt. .....
The apartment buildings were all high security buildings. Most had underground, gated parking. To get in or out you had to pause in the entry area and enter a code to open the gate. The main entrances to the buildings was through the parking ramp. Many had no exterior doors at all, and those that did invariably had intercom systems like the one in the senior building where my Aunt Alaire lives, where visitors have to be "buzzed" in to enter.
It this sounds like an unfriendly neighborhood, it wasn't. Quite the opposite, in fact. ... The whole street is lined with palms and flowering trees, and there are small, but flashy gardens everywhere. All that vegetation is probably the nicest thing about L.A.; it's the one thing that would make it possible to live in such crowded conditions.
Also adding to the pleasant feeling was that there were people everywhere. Everyone seemed to be out walking their dogs or jogging. It intrigued me that everyone seemed to greet everybody else (including me) with a friendly nod, but no one ever seemed to actually speak. I've heard people say that Angelinos tend to be very private people, and perhaps this was a reflection of that. It's not like that was a problem as a tourist, though; I can't imagine having a meaningful conversation with a passing jogger I've never met before. I just nodded my head at them and kept walking.
This was obviously a very wealthy neighborhood. It's the sort of place where people dress their dogs and buy designer leotards to go jogging. The people were still quite multi-racial-though certainly heavier on Anglos and Asians and lighter on Hispanics than other neighborhoods. A large proportion of them are elderly, and the fact that I passed three synagogues would imply that there are a number of Jewish people in residence.
The apartments march down Hollywood Boulevard literally for miles. I've never seen another place quite like it Unlike modern housing developments, each building looks completely different from the one next to it-but they all serve the same purpose. I'd guess that most of these buildings were put up in the '40s or early '50s, and they've been kept up very well. ... I really liked the neighborhood here; it made for a lovely morning walk.
My ultimate destination on this walk was another rock and roll highlight--a mansion that overlooks Hollywood from the top of Curson Terrace. The most famous occupants of the house were the Beatles, who stayed here while performing on their last tour to America. Several other rock groups stayed here during their recording sessions in L.A. The most frequent guests were the members of Jefferson Airplane, who lived in San Francisco but recorded all but two of their albums in Hollywood. On different occasions, they spent a total of over two years here. .....
Hollywood Boulevard runs right along the edge of a basin, and the Santa Monica Mountains rise abruptly just north of it. The rock house is at the very top of a very steep hill, about three blocks north of Hollywood Boulevard. I huffed and puffed my way up the first couple of blocks of Curson Terrace, at which point the rise got even steeper. I decided my life would be complete if I never made it to the front door, so I just snapped the obligatory picture from below and came down again.
From the hill on Curson Terrace there was a panoramic view to the south, looking over the city. Once again, I couldn't help but notice the smog. There are a lot of high-rise buildings about three miles south of here near Wilshire and Fairfax, and they were cloaked in brown haze. Smog is a weird thing; when you're in the middle of it, you don't really realize that it's there. In L.A. the only time I was aware of the smog was when I focused on things in the distance. The air didn't smell bad, and the sky immediately overhead always looked bright and blue. Looking off across the basin, though, I could always tell the air was horribly polluted.
Just a few blocks southeast of the Beatles/Airplane mansion are two other sights from the musical history tour. First I walked past the Gardner Street Elementary School. There is nothing of particular significance about this old concrete monstrosity except that Michael Jackson went to school there. This was another school day, and this morning I saw several young children walking into the entrance of the Michael Jackson Auditorium at the side of the school. Just south of here on Sunset is "Guitar Center", a garish purple music store that hosts its own Rock and Roll Walk of Fame. A variety of famous musicians (mostly rock guitarists, needless to say) have their handprints enshrined in the sidewalk out front. I just looked quickly and went on; the Chinese Theatre was really much more interesting.
I ended up back at that cramped Burger King at Sunset and La Brea. I knew Margaret would want morning coffee, and since our room didn't have a coffee maker, I stopped in to get a couple of cups for us. This Burger King was much nicer than the one on Highland. There are homeless people in this neighborhood, too, but the businesses are at least kept up; it looks more like a suburb than a slum.
Back at the hotel I commented to Margaret on my walk and the contrast in the neighborhoods. Hollywood is a strange place. It's a like a stately old suburb, a destitute inner city neighborhood, and a tacky tourist trap--all rolled into one. The three parts do seem to fit together somehow, and it makes for a fascinating place.
Once we had our coffee we headed back to the Hollywood and Highland subway station. We took the red line north to Universal City, which is located just west of the famous studio complex and theme park of that name. Universal Studios is California's second biggest tourist attraction (after Disneyland), but it wasn't our destination. I've been to Universal Studios--Florida, and while I didn't dislike it, it really was more of a theme park than a studio. Both Margaret and I felt that if we were going to go to Hollywood, we should see a real studio, so ahead of time we had booked reservations on the Warner Brothers VIP Tour in Burbank.
Metrorail doesn't go to Burbank, so we had to make connections. We walked across Lankershim Boulevard from the subway station and waited at a shelter next to a strange man who kept muttering to himself. Eventually we climbed aboard bus 96, which follows an enormously long route from Sherman Oaks (where Valley Girl was filmed) to Burbank, to the city zoo, and then downtown. The whole route has to be at least 25 miles and it takes two hours to run, including stops. We boarded bus 96, flashed our passes, and then headed east for about 10 minutes through the "Valley" neighborhoods of North Hollywood and Toluca Lake, before arriving at the corner of Olive Street and Riverside Drive (never mind that there's no river anywhere near here) in beautiful downtown Burbank.
Surprisingly enough, downtown Burbank isn't terribly ugly. Burbank is an independent city (unlike Hollywood, which is just a neighborhood of the city of L.A.), and it does sort of have its own downtown. There's not really much of anywhere to shop here (the stores are all in Toluca Lake ...), but there are lots of five-floor glass office buildings that mostly house all those lawyers who attach themselves like leeches to the movie industry. The streets in front of those offices are all lined with palm trees, and there are formal planters filled with flowers along the curbs. It's a very sterile neighborhood (and one of the few places I didn't see any pedestrians to speak of), but I suppose the word "beautiful" wouldn't be stretching things too much.
We walked a block south on Olive to the visitors' entrance to Warner Brothers. The gate is definitely geared to cars, rather than pedestrians, and we had to go backwards through the "exit" turnstile to get in. We checked in at the desk and then filled the time before our tour began by browsing through the gift shop.
Here's a tip--if you're ever anywhere near Los Angeles, go out of your way to take the Warner Brothers tour. It's one of the most fascinating things I've ever done, and was definitely a ... highlight of this trip. One of the best things about the tours is that admission is very limited. You go around on oversized golf carts that seat no more than twelve, and no more than 100 people are allowed in each day. Our tour had just seven people: a middle-aged Hispanic woman, two twenty-something gay men, two college girls, Margaret, and me. That limited group really did make me feel like the "VIP" that the name of the tour implied. (In fact, the tours originated as a way of taking actual VIPs--like Queen Elizabeth--behind the scenes of the movie-making process.)
As you might expect at a movie studio, the tour begins with a movie. They have an ornately decorated little theatre where they show an entertaining film giving the history of Warner Brothers, interspersed with "bloopers" from dozens of movies they have made. After that we rode the golf cart to the Warner Brothers Museum, which can only be viewed by people who take the tour. While I'm not really a movie buff, even I would have to admit that this is one of the best museums you'll see anywhere. They have carefully selected costumes, props, and set pieces from all the "Best Picture" movies Warner Brothers has produced (everything from The Jazz Singer to Casablanca to Batman), and they're displayed together with original scripts (complete with cross-outs and marginal writing), special effects gear, and fascinating letters and telegrams recording the history of those movies.
Whoever selected everything did an outstanding job; there's just enough stuff to really let you find out about each picture, without so much that it gets dull. Everything is original, of course, but since there are only a handful of people there at a time, the stuff is not roped off or behind glass. They have guards everywhere making sure you don't touch anything, but you can get right up next to everything and see it close-up. It's not a large museum (two floors, each about the size of a gym), but it really was well-presented.
I noticed the same thing here that I had noticed at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland. We view celebrities as "larger than life", but in reality many of them are extremely short in stature. It's amazing just how small many of the original costumes they had on display were; there's no way I could wear most of them-and I'm talking mostly about height, not weight (though that would also be an issue, of course).
After visiting the museum we got a small taste of actual behind-the-scenes work at the studio. Ron, our guide, had made arrangements for us to see a Foley artist and his accompanying engineer in action. If you've ever watched the credits at the end of a movie, you've almost certainly seen "Foley artist" right up there with "gaffer" and "best boy". I can't tell you what those other two are, but I can say after having visited Warner Brothers that "Foley" refers to sound effects. When most movies are shot, only the dialogue is recorded on the original track; indeed they work hard to ensure that there are no background noises to spoil things. It's the job of the Foley artist to invent the sounds that should be there and the job of his engineer to make sure all those sound effects occur at exactly the right time.
While we were in the Foley studio they were adding sound effects to a Disney cartoon. (Strange as it may seem, the different studios contract out work like this to each other.) They had the entire cartoon entered in digital form on a computer. The engineer sat at a console, separated by glass from the studio where the Foley artist worked. The studio was quite a large room-at least as big as my living room. The walls were carpeted like any sound studio, and the room was full of various objects that might be used to make sound effects. They didn't use any of these while we were there. What they were adding was the sound of footsteps, and the Foley artist created those sounds by simply walking or running in place on plywood platform.
To start the Foley process, they ran the film on a big screen monitor at the far end of the studio. In the top corner of the film was a running time meter, accurate to the hundredth of a second. The artist and engineer would first just watch a few seconds of the film. Then they might discus what was appropriate to add for sound in that sequence. They would re-run the same few seconds, and the artist would make his footsteps--hopefully in time with the cartoon character--while the microphones were recording. Sometimes either the artist or the engineer would realize immediately that they had screwed up, and they'd start over right away. If not, they re-played the sequence with the sound effects added to see if the timing was right. If it was, then the engineer would adjust the volume to an appropriate level, and they'd go on to the next few seconds of the film.
I asked how long it took to do this type of work. Neither the guide nor the engineer directly answered the question, but the implication was that something like a half-hour situation comedy would take at least a day to finish. A full-length movie would certainly take weeks.
Even if we has managed to sneak onto the Warner Brothers lot, I would think it would be impossible to find something like the Foley studio if we weren't on the tour. My mental image of a studio was that it should be something glamorous. The truth is that it's basically a big factory. Unlike most factories, though, Warner Brothers isn't just one building. There are scores of two-story beige stucco buildings spread over an enormous area, together with dozens more tan and brown trailers that look like the temporary classrooms at an overcrowded school. All the buildings look identical, and there are virtually no signs telling where anything is. If you work there, you presumably know where you're going; if you don't work there, you're not supposed to know. The place looks a lot of the NASA complex in Houston where a former student of Margaret's friend Vicki gave us a private tour several years ago. .....
While Warner Brothers is still a major movie studio, the bulk of their production these days is in television. There are several famous TV shows produced here in Burbank. None of them films in summer-which is actually a good thing, because it meant we got to go "up close and personal" on the sets.
We first saw the set of "The Drew Carey Show". I don't think I've ever seen that show, and the few times I've seen Drew Carey on anything else, he's made me want to change the channel. That said, seeing the studio was interesting. It's apparently a very typical sitcom stage. Along one of the longer walls of a huge barn they have three permanent sets. If you watch most sitcoms carefully, you'll note that almost all the action usually takes place in about three locations-like the living room, the kitchen, and the bedroom ... or the apartment, the office, and the restaurant. Whatever those three key locations are, their sets are permanently laid out side by side along the same wall of the studio. At the ends of the studio (the short walls of the barn), they have spaced to put up temporary sets. Those that are frequently used (like a workplace that appears in some, but not all episodes of a show), are built as fold up sets that can be easily put up and struck. Almost all the background walls on the sets are built of plywood. The sets are typically smaller than a real room, but they are designed with visual tricks to create a greater feeling of depth for the camera. Of course all the sets are open in front, with a "fourth wall" to the audience and the cameras. The floors are all finished, but there are only partial ceilings on the sets. Above each set is a vast reserve of professional lighting equipment.
There is a very small wing area behind the sets, where they apparently have refreshments set up for those working on the show. There was still a "free" pop machine and a beer keg in the wings of the Drew Carey set. There's about a 15-foot aisle in front of the sets where the cameras are located. Typically sitcoms shoot with three large cameras, but that number can change depending on the wishes of the director. Warner Brothers shoots all their TV productions on film, because they've found film preserves color better than videotape.
The fourth wall of the barn is where the audience sits. Almost every situation comedy is filmed "live" before a studio audience. Lucille Ball started that tradition in the '50s, and today the audience is used as a check to make sure the "real world" can relate to whatever the writers came up with. There were about 100 seats in the audience area of this studio, which featured padded chairs placed on rolling risers. Filming takes place on Fridays, and the filming schedule is roughly the same as the school year--starting in August and ending in April or May (about a month before the "official" TV season begins and ends).
While the filming is done "live", it's not quite like attending a play. First of all, while they do shoot from beginning to end, they will keep re-doing each individual scene until they get it right. Then the cast keeps moving from set to set, and the way the audience seats are set up, nobody could see more than one or two of the sets from where they are sitting. What's more, the cameras would block most of what view they did have. They have TV monitors set up around the audience area, and that's where the audience actually watches most of the time. It can take the better part of a day to finish filming a TV show, though, and apparently the audiences are quite transient--just coming for a little while and leaving when they get bored. The guide told us there are usually long lines to be in the audience of popular shows, but sooner or later virtually everybody gets in.
A TV show I rather liked in the '80s was "Growing Pains", which was taped right here at Warner Brothers. There's one episode of that show called "Meet the Seavers" where the characters come off the set and into the studio proper. I recently re-watched that episode, and it was fascinating that everything looked exactly like the studio we saw today. They even did some of the filming outside, and I saw those same beige stucco buildings and tan trailers.
Noting the enormous size of the studio, I asked how many people typically work on a sitcom during filming. The number varies, but it would normally be well over a hundred--not even considering the actors. The guide also told us the total number of people that Warner Brothers employs in Burbank. I can't recall that number, but I know it was many thousand.
After seeing the sitcom set we made our way to another studio where we saw the set for the hospital drama "ER". It's interesting that sitcom sets and drama sets are entirely different. The goal on dramas is authenticity. For "ER" they tried to recreate as exactly as possible the actual Cook County Hospital in Chicago There is no live audience for dramas, so the set is not open on one side, but closed up with four full walls. The "ER" set even had full ceilings, with fluorescent drop panels like you'd see in a hospital. They film in natural light (or rather the fluorescent light of those drop ceilings), and they mostly use hand-held film cameras about the size of older video cameras so they can follow the cast around through the rooms of this enormous set. There is no actual wing area on the set, so people just wait in an adjacent room to enter the room where they're performing.
The ER set is also mostly built of plywood. Things that look like glass are glass, but the glass is all severely angled to avoid any sort of glare or reflection. (The thing they worry most about is seeing reflections of the camera or of people waiting to come on.) "Brick", "tile", or "metal" on a TV set is invariably molded plastic, painted to look like the appropriate material. The sets are extremely durable, but also built to be easy to put up and strike.
The final set we saw was from the show "Friends". The college girls were in awe on entering what to them was sacred ground. Like Drew Carey, I'm not sure I've ever seen "Friends", so for me the trill was hardly the same. It looked a lot like the Drew Carey set, so I won't bore you by trying to describe it separately.
Next up we made a quick run through the Warner Brothers shops. This is where they make the set backgrounds, furniture, properties, and costumes. This not only looks like a factory, it is a factory. We saw a wood shop, a metal shop, an injection molding facility, and a paint facility. I've never seen Steve's workplace at Pella Windows, but I'd bet a lot of it looks very similar.
Next we made a passed by their classic car garage. Most of the cars you see in TV shows and movies are leased for the duration of the filming. The studio maintains a barn full of special vehicles, though. Some of them are unique to particular productions (like the "Batmobile"), some are beautifully restored antique cars, and some are specialty vehicles like ambulances and police motorcycles. We just got a quick glimpse of everything, but it was interesting to see.
The final stop was on the back lot. While both TV and movies do a lot of location shooting these days, the majority of exteriors are still shot on the old studio lots. It's just a lot easier to control what's going on when you're shooting on your own property. The buildings on the lot are fascinating. Many of them are built so that different sides of the building are different things. For example, if you watched "The Waltons" back in the '70s, you probably remember the church and the country schoolhouse on Walton's Mountain. They're the same building, just shot from different sides, and the same building also appeared as a courthouse and a town hall. There are houses on the lot that have completely different styles of architecture on different sides of the house. Everything is designed so it can serve a variety of purposes.
I mentioned "Growing Pains" earlier, and I was pleased to see the house from that show on the lot. They also have whole streets designed to look like the Old West, a quiet Midwestern town, downtown Manhattan (complete with a subway entrance to nowhere), and a back alley in Chicago (complete with rusty el tracks overhead). Beyond the buildings there's also empty space on the lot where they can shoot in the great outdoors.
On a part of the back lot that looked like the set of a gangster movie they were in fact actually shooting a movie. I didn't see anything more than I did by the Scientology church in Hollywood, but it was interesting to actually see a "hot" set.
The whole tour lasted about three hours. ... We finished back at the gift shop building, where they have free coffee available. There's also a strange display in that building featuring probably forty stuffed Bugs Bunnies, each dressed in a different outfit. Some of the outfits represented different careers (like soldier), while others appeared to have been donated by famous designers. I'm not sure what they thought the purpose was, but it certainly was different. It also reminded me of the one thing Warner Brothers is famous for that we didn't see: animation. I'm not sure if Warner does much in the way of animation anymore. Even if they did, there probably wouldn't be that much to see. I understand that Disney does virtually all of their animation by computer these days, and those cartoons that are animated by hand (like "The Simpsons") are mostly produced overseas.
We made our way back to Riverside and Olive, where we waited for the bus ... and waited ... and waited ... and waited. There are some bus routes in L.A. that have frequent service. Most, however, do not. Bus 96 ran about every half hour this time of day, and we probably just missed one as we left the studio. Half hour service is actually fairly frequent off-peak service by L.A. standards--some routes run as seldom as every 90 minutes at midday. What's up is that the MTA is trying to serve such an enormous area that they spread themselves too thin. They provide good service on the rail lines and on a few core lines on major boulevards, but away from that you get to sit at the bus stop and wait.
The bus stop was in front of a Chevron station. Across the street was a car wash. You see car washes everywhere in L.A.--not the do-it-yourself carwashes you find around here, but professional carwashes where an assembly line of Hispanic boys hoses down, towels off, waxes, and buffs your car. This one cost $9.50, and it was full of shiny sports cars and SUVs. It intrigued me that the whole thing was outdoors; can you imagine having an outdoor carwash in the Midwest?
Eventually a bus came by flashing "NOT IN SERVICE" on its electronic display. However it had a little piece of poster board that said "96" on the front window. The driver confirmed that it was in fact bus 96, and it was in fact in service. We boarded quickly. The most noteworthy among our fellow passengers this time was a trio of young ladies who could only be described as "Valley girls". Today, though, even the San Fernando Valley ... is ethnically diverse. We had an Anglo girl, a Hispanic girl, and an Asian girl that were "for sure like totally talking in a you know kind of way". Every other word was one of those Valley girl cliches, and every sentence was punctuated by a gasping cough. I gathered from what little I understood of the conversation that the Asian girl's mother was upset that she had taken to American culture so completely--and I can't say that I blame her.
Before long we made it to Universal City. ... where the subway station happens to be located right next door to Campo de Cahuenga (cuh-WENG-guh), the place where Mexico ceded California to the United States. There's not much to see there, just a little palm shaded park surrounding a tile-roofed building that is now the neighborhood senior center.
The place also had public restrooms, which reminds me of another thought. Los Angeles is one of the most restroom friendly cities I've ever been to. There are many cities where I've had to grudgingly ordered a drink at a fast food place for the privilege of using a smelly, graffiti-infested toilet. Even in small towns in Iowa it can be hard to find a nice public restroom. In L.A. there are lots of public restrooms--even ... in neighborhoods with large homeless populations. Both the city restrooms and the restrooms we found in restaurants, museums, and stores were mostly clean and well maintained, ... and they were always free of charge. I don't know who's responsible, but I certainly salute them.
We got in the subway and went back to Hollywood and Vine. When we got out there was police tape closing off one end of the platform, and some officers were working there. We never did find out what was up--I certainly hope it was nothing serious.
Like all the subway stations, Hollywood and Vine is decorated with public art. The benches on the platform are designed to look like antique cars, the tiles on the walls feature childlike line drawings of "cruising" scenes, and the entire ceiling is covered with plastic film reels. In the mezzanine they have an actual old fashioned movie camera with a laser inside that shoots out light across the concourse, and in the ground level plaza there are cement reproductions of historic Hollywood landmarks (like the defunct Brown Derby restaurant). Actually it's one of the ugliest stations in the metro, but it's certainly an eclectic combination.
We walked south on Vine and then turned east on Sunset. Along the way we passed several more famous locales. First there was the Cinerama Dome. This was built in the '60s and was the predecessor to today's IMAX theaters. The building is notable because it is a huge white geodesic dome sitting amid the fast food joints and minimalls along Sunset Boulevard. It has actually been declared a National Historic Landmark.
A couple blocks east of the Cinerama Dome is a more distinguished venue, the Hollywood Palladium. Anyone my age or older has almost certainly seen the Palladium on television. Lawrence Welk used to own the theatre, and in the '60s and early '70s his show originated from here. The Emmy awards were given out here for more than twenty years, and scores of lesser awards shows and beauty contests also graced its stage. My musical history tour book notes that Lawrence Welk, that master of big band music, made a great deal of money leasing out the Palladium for rock concerts. Groups like the Greatful Dead, the Rolling Stones, and the Who all made their Los Angeles debuts right here. It's still a big performance venue, mostly for cutting edge dance bands. As we walked past, the most striking thing I noticed about the Palladium was that it was painted "seafoam green".
Kitty-corner from the Palladium is the Hollywood home of RCA Records. Those same groups that performed at the Palladium recorded their music here, as did Elvis Presley and Jefferson Airplane. It's still a very active studio, second in L.A. only to Capitol.
For me what was probably the most interesting sight in the neighborhood was what is now known as the Sunset-Gower Studios, named after the corner where a rather nondescript building sits. This was formerly the CBS Hollywood Studios, and as a child of '60s and '70s television, this was for me the sacred ground that the "Friends" set was for those college girls in Burbank. All those Norman Lear sitcoms were taped here--"All in the Family", "Maude", "The Jeffersons", etc., as were things like "The Mary Tyler Moore Show". In fact, if you name a '70s sitcom other than M*A*S*H (which was filmed at Universal), it was probably produced right here. The place is still an active studio. In the '90s their most successful show was "Saved by the Bell", and they're producing stuff now that appears on the UPN and WB networks. ... You can't tour the studios (which probably looks a lot like the sitcom sets at Warner), but I found it really fascinating just to see the outside of the place.
It was well past time for lunch, and our destination this afternoon was a restaurant called Roscoe's House of Chicken and Waffles. I came across this rather strangely named bistro countless times as I researched possible places to go on this trip. Everybody said that no matter where else you eat in Hollywood, you must eat at least one meal at Roscoe's.
This is definitely one of those times you don't want to judge a book by its cover. Roscoe's could almost literally be described as a hole in the wall. It sits in a dumpy little storefront about a block north of Sunset in the middle of a neighborhood that has yet to gentrify. It's definitely a popular place, though. It was the middle of the afternoon, but we had to wait about 15 minutes to be seated for lunch. The walls are lined with pictures of celebrities who have dined there (almost any star "of color" you can think of, and a fair number of celebrities with lighter complexions, too).
Roscoe's is black-owned, and its clientele is heavily, though not exclusively, black. It was founded back in the '50s as a place where black people could go out for dinner after spending a night on the town. It was the first restaurant (as opposed to bar) in Hollywood that was open late at night, and it became popular for serving good down-home food in a "colorful", relaxed atmosphere.
Roscoe's food really is quite good. Chicken and waffles may sound like a strange combination, but they actually work quite well together. The waffles are nothing special (you could get the same thing at Denny's down the street and better at every Waffle House in Dixie), but the chicken is out of this world. It's just simple pan-fried chicken with very limited spices. It's the sort of thing anybody could make at home, but nobody does anymore. I had a chicken breast, a waffle, and an enormous portion of potato salad. Margaret had a special that included a quarter chicken (cut to include both white and dark meat), a waffle, potato salad, and "hot water corn bread"--which was more like delicate cookies than bread or cake. Margaret's special also included a heaping portion of "greens". I had more collard greens than I wanted for a lifetime in Mississippi; I certainly didn't want them now ... and I noticed Margaret didn't finish hers, either.
Margaret ordered coffee with lunch. I had a drink I had read about called a "sunrise". It's apparently a non-alcoholic cocktail made of mixed juices. The juices had different weights, and they settled in the glass in a variegated pattern of yellows and oranges, not unlike a sunrise. I'm sure it was non-alcoholic (the place had a liquor license, but this drink didn't cost enough to have booze in it), but I'd imagine you could spike it with rum without anyone noticing.
Our waitress was talking with some kids at the next table, and her conversation confirmed that school would be ending this week in L.A. She asked if any of the kids had to go to summer school (presumably because of failing grades during the year). Two of them didn't, but one did.
After lunch we quickly caught our third bus of the day. This time it was the #2 bus, which heads down Sunset Boulevard. L.A.'s best known street begins downtown at Union Station (where the same street changes names to Cesar Chavez Avenue) and runs twenty-seven miles west through the best and the worst of neighborhoods until it arrives at the Pacific Ocean, just south of Malibu Beach. At one time I had considered taking the bus all the way to Malibu and back, so I could really see a cross-section of L.A. That seemed like a needlessly long bus ride (a minimum of three hours round-trip), particularly since we would be seeing large chunks of the city on other trains and buses throughout the trip. Instead we traveled about ten miles west on Sunset to another of those "must see" tourist attractions: Beverly Hills.
No we didn't get one of those maps of the stars' homes and start snooping around. Even if we had, it's not like we would have seen anything. The homes in Beverly Hills are all well screened by hedges that I would estimate were as tall as 15 or 20 feet. Except for an occasional view through a driveway gate, you can't see anything of significance. .....
We also never made it to all the snooty shops on Rodeo Drive. I really can't imagine why I'd want to go there. Those same stores are in major cities all over the world; if I wanted to buy an Armani suit, it would be a lot easier to go to Chicago than to Beverly Hills. The stars, of course, don't actually shop there when tourists are around. They either have private shopping sessions at night or they send personal shoppers to make their purchases for them.
* * * * *
We basically saw two things of note in Beverly Hills. First, we got off the bus and strolled past the famous Beverly Hills Hotel, a gorgeous place whose manicured grounds sprawl for acres. I checked on an internet booking service; the cheapest rate they had on a "standard" room at this five-star hotel was $325 a night, ... and there are "private cottages" on the grounds that go for up to $8,500 a night--just a wee bit out of my league. Those rates do include services I'm certainly not used to in a hotel-like luggage unpacking, complementary pajamas, in-room fax machines, and bedtime tuck-in service. It's also the only hotel I've ever heard of that has an on-site jewelry store and furrier. By the way, people my age will recognize the main building of the hotel; it was the "Hotel California" on the cover of the Eagles album of that name. I can certainly picture the guests here with "Tiffany twisted" minds sipping "pink champagne on ice", as the song says.
Across Sunset from the Beverly Hills Hotel is Will Rogers Park, a small but truly gorgeous green space. It's a little triangle of land centered on a fountain full of towering trees and lovely flower gardens. This afternoon the park was alive with young children and Hispanic women I assume were their nannies. Rogers lived in Beverly Hills, and they certainly chose to memorialize him in a fitting way.
We caught a bus back toward Hollywood with a very different group of riders than the bus we had come in on. This time everybody on the bus (except us, of course) was Hispanic. These are the people who work in Beverly Hills, and they were all headed east--back to where they live. The people who live in Beverly Hills wouldn't be caught dead taking a bus. We saw them cruising down Sunset in cute little sports cars and monster SUVs. This is where the beautiful people we didn't see elsewhere were hiding themselves. There's just not very many of them.
We stopped again in the city of West Hollywood, right in the heart of the Sunset Strip. The most notable feature of the strip is its garish architecture. Every building seems to be its own billboard. There's a club here that's part of the House of Blues chain, for instance, that is built to look like an old shack from the Mississippi delta. They've torn down all those shacks in recent years, since they were never fit for human habitation anyway; but here in West Hollywood you can go to a dance club in a shack.
The bulk of the businesses on the Sunset Strip are nightclubs of one sort or another. This is one of two "happening" areas for night life in L.A. ... I'm sure things are hopping after sunset, but it was absolutely dead in the late afternoon.
The main thing we saw in West Hollywood was a larger than life-size statue of the cartoon character Bullwinkle J. Moose that stands in front of a pet store on the south side of the strip. There's a store called "Dudley Do-Right's Emporium" just down the street where they sell memorabilia of all the old Jay Ward cartoons. Unfortunately it's open limited and very odd hours, so we weren't able to check it out.
Once again we waited ... and waited ... and waited for a bus. That's not supposed to happen on Sunset Boulevard. Sunset is one of the busiest streets in the city, and bus service is never less frequent than every 15 minutes. It was getting on toward rush hour now, when five-minute intervals were supposed to be the norm. Probably the buses got bunched up somewhere, because we sweltered in the heat for nearly half an hour before a downtown bus came our way.
While we waited I browsed through the free papers they had available in local dispensers. There's a broad selection of these everywhere in L.A., but the papers in West Hollywood are different than in other areas. West Hollywood, you see, proudly proclaims itself California's only majority gay city. (Rather oddly, a large portion of the minority are Orthodox Jews.) It was the first city in America to elect a gay mayor, and the free papers here cater to that clientele. Other than the papers, you really wouldn't know that on Sunset Boulevard. I gather, but can't personally verify, that the "action" in town is down on Santa Monica Boulevard, about a mile to the south.
The gay papers were actually tame compared to what you see in central Hollywood. On every street corner there you'll find vending machines for the L.A. X-Press, which is nothing more than a thinly disguised directory of call girls. I didn't buy one, but I did pick up a copy that had been littered on the street. Nobody directly says what they are doing, of course; this is California, after all, not Nevada. The key euphemism appears to be FULL body massage--often with the word "full" highlighted just as I did in this sentence. Oh well, I guess I'd rather have them take out ads in the paper than walk the street in front of my hotel.
When the bus finally came it was standing room only. I was holding the strap above a young man who was reading a book called How to Develop Your Ear for Music. We took the bus to the Vermont and Sunset subway station, where we saw more public art. Vermont and Sunset is near the Griffith Park Observatory, and the whole station is designed in an astronomical theme. The entrance is topped by a tower that looks like the Jetson's apartment building (I'm not sure what it's supposed to be, but it's interesting), and the walls and ceiling of the mezzanine show what looks like a three-dimensional map of the universe with metal stars and planets on a deep blue tile background. It's definitely one of the nicest of the subway stations.
The next station up, however, has to be one of the worst decorated stations-not just in L.A., but anywhere. The entire station--walls, platform, and hallways--at the Hollywood and Western station are covered with multi-colored tile arranged in no particular pattern. It looks like an enormous bathroom, and if you stare at it too long, you start getting optical illusions. I recently found a description of the place on a website that made me laugh. It said, "people used to have to use hallucinogenic drugs to see things like this."
* * * * *
We rested up at the hotel for a while. Then instead of dinner we went out for a snack. Just up the street from El Pollo Loco was a Middle Eastern ice cream parlor. Many of the signs were in Arabic, so I have no idea what they said, but the flavors of ice cream were in English. I had ginger rosewater ice cream, which was outstanding. The base of it was like unflavored sweet whipped cream, and there was just a hint of ginger. Margaret also picked up some Middle Eastern snacks. She got what amounted to a fruit roll-up that was made of some extremely sour fruit that I'd never heard of. More interesting was a product called "nazook", which the label said was made right here in Los Angeles. Nazook amounts to little pillows of flaky pastry with an "enamel" topping that's probably painted egg white. The most amusing thing about it was the ingredient list on the label. The person who wrote that label obviously spoke English as a second language, because the number one ingredient listed was "flower". I laughed out loud as I pictured someone grinding up rose petals to make a cookie.
Our last touristic excursion tonight was right at the Roosevelt. The hotel maintains a museum of Hollywood history on the mezzanine. To get there you walk up the steps where Shirley Temple learned to tap dance. The displays filled us in on the history of Hollywood, Los Angeles, the entertainment industry, and the hotel itself. When we finished with the museum we checked out the mirror in the elevator lobby that used to be in Marilyn Monroe's cabana room when she lived here. "Legend" (probably created by the hotel's owners) says Monroe's image appears in the mirror from time to time. Actually, the way the mirror is positioned now, her image couldn't help but appear. It's at the end of the elevator lobby, perpendicular to the elevators. On the wall opposite the elevators they have an enormous framed portrait of Marilyn Monroe, and the reflection of that portrait is always visible in the mirror.
... We returned to our room, relaxed while we watched the evening news, and eventually went to sleep.
CONTINUED IN PART 5
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