Imagine that you’re standing on Hollywood Boulevard. Imagine that it’s late June 2013. Imagine that you are, say, a 27-year-old campus minister at a North Jersey all-boys high school and that you’re here running a service-immersion trip for nine students.
It’s evening, nearly dusk, but the block is aflame with light pouring down from marquee signs and blinding LED screens. The dry desert heat of the day still clings to you, but there’s also a breeze: not cool, but comforting.
You are standing under the marquee of the Hollywood Hard Rock. It’s been a busy, often-intense week of service and reflection. You’ve served meals to people experiencing homelessness, talked with former gang members, packed hundreds of grocery bags. You’re staying in a men’s shelter on Skid Row, which is an experience in its own right. It’s been a good week and the kids are doing a great job, but they could also use a little break. So, like last year, you bring them to Hollywood Boulevard.
With ads blaring from screens and music blasting from car speakers, you give them final safety instructions before letting them explore the block a little. Stay in groups of at least three. Stay on the Boulevard. Meet back here in an hour. And the one you repeat several times, trying to make it stick: don’t take pictures of anyone unless you’re planning to pay them. That one’s causing you a lot of anxiety. Hollywood Boulevard is patrolled by costumes: superheroes and Star Wars characters and dubious celebrity look-alikes. A week before you arrived in LA, a woman was fatally stabbed right over there, at the end of the block, after taking a picture of a panhandler’s cardboard sign and declining to give him a dollar. Everywhere you’ve gone this week people ask if you’d heard, retell the story. It doesn’t help your nerves.
Still, your students seem to take it seriously and go off in knots of three or four. Within moments they’re indistinguishable from the other dazzled tourists crowding the sidewalks. You exhale, tell yourself to stop worrying and enjoy a few teen-free minutes. Besides, you’re in the heart of Hollywood: there’s plenty to see.
Hollywood Boulevard is LA the same way that Times Square is New York: the city rendered in broad strokes, then packaged, processed, and served up for tourist consumption. It’s a pure distillation of Hollywood as Dream Factory, as Home of the Stars, as glamor and excitement and ovations. In cities the past is always present, but in LA that past is mythology, as packed with divinity and tragedy as anything the Greeks believed.
Take where you’re standing now. The Hard Rock is wedged between two of Hollywood’s major basilicas. To your right, the pagoda spire of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, site of countless movie premieres. To your left, the sleek monument-edifice of the Dolby Theatre, where movies are coronated with Oscar gold. Across the street, you see the sparkling sign of the El Capitan Theatre, where Disney hosts most of their premieres (it was also where Citizen Kane premiered in 1941; several other theaters turned Welles down because they were too afraid of William Randolph Hearst’s retribution). There’s even history at your feet: the Walk of Fame, stretching off in either direction. You and your co-chaperone take a walk, treading over Hollywood legacies cast in terrazzo and bronze. Most of the names you know; some you don’t. That name meant something here once, you think, and then you move onto the next.
You decide to check out Grauman’s. Last year you couldn’t even get close because they were hosting the premiere of a Jordin Sparks movie, Sparkle. Sparks was there of course, as was (you learn later) a Disney Channel star named Zendaya. You didn’t see any of them, although you think you remember hearing cheers as Sparks made her entrance.
Tonight the Forecourt of the Stars is populated only by picture-snapping tourists, like you. You stroll across the cement slabs, reading the names first and then studying the imprints of hands and shoes (and, in Jimmy Durante’s case, a nose). It’s fun, but you can’t help but think about how many of the names and handprints belong to people who are dead now. It’s especially pronounced when you think about all of those who died tragically: Judy Garland, Rock Hudson, Marilyn Monroe. On the opposite corner you can see the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, where Monroe lived for a couple of years; she died in her Brentwood mansion, but urban legend claims she haunts the Roosevelt, appearing in the mirrors of her old suite. You look at her handprints for Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and realize that she pressed her hands into the wet cement exactly sixty years ago, yesterday. You wonder what she was thinking, what she was feeling. You wonder if she was happy.
More walking, more stars. You catch glimpses of your students, satisfy yourself that they’re safe. Eventually you ride the escalator to an upper floor of the Hollywood & Highland shopping complex (now Ovation Hollywood) to find a bathroom. The heart of the mall is an enormous atrium, dominated by a massive faux stone gate carved with images of Mesopotamian gods, and two statues of elephant deities perched on top of towering pillars. They’re replicas (Google tells you) of set pieces from the Babylon segment in D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance (1916). Pagan idols presiding over tourist-trap excess; even for Hollywood, it feels on the nose.
In the bathroom you see Black Costume Spider-Man, who’s washing his hands, and ask him how it’s going (“Okay”). You get ice cream, and take in the commanding view from the mall’s balcony with your co-chaperone. Below, costumes and tourists go through their dance; phones flash, money changes hands. Looking to the north, you see the Hollywood sign, bathed in golden hour light. This is how it’s supposed to be, you think. Just like it is in the movies.
After an hour your students are at the meeting spot, safe and sound and excited to show off their souvenirs. You pile into your 15-passenger rental, muscle your way through traffic, and head back to your temporary home.
The shelter is on Winston Street, a couple of blocks off of Los Angeles Street. During the day it’s the Toy District, an Oriental Trading Company catalogue that’s metastasized across city blocks. Shops sell action figures and toy guns and bouncy balls and keychains. There’s one alley that’s full of pinatas (you’re thrilled, seven years later, when you recognize it in a chase scene in Birds of Prey). There’s a pet shop on the corner, and you’re always terrified that a kid is going to decide (or, more likely, be cajoled by his friends into deciding) to buy a small bird or lizard. When the shops are open, parking spots are as rare as cool breezes, every inch of sidewalk blocked out by cars and food trucks.
But at night, Winston Street is empty, the storefronts replaced by a gritted jaw of locked steel shutters. It’s one of the quieter blocks of Skid Row: go a couple of blocks over to 6th or San Pedro and the sidewalks are crowded with tents and people mill around all night, with nowhere else to go. Anyone who’s going to sleep inside tonight is already inside. The rest make do.
You park and walk up the block under the glow of the neon sign crowning the old Hotel Rosslyn. The shelter is the only building that looks alive, flood lights illuminating a few guests talking out front. Up and down the block a few people are already sleeping, curled up in sleeping bags on strips of cardboard. As you unlock the front door and hold it open for your students, you look up at one of the apartments above the shops across the street. A slim woman with an afro appears in silhouette and leans against the window. You wonder what it’s like to live there.
Later, you lie on an air mattress in a social worker’s office that’s serving as your bedroom this week, staring at the drop ceiling. You’re thinking about Hollywood Boulevard. You’re thinking about the stabbing, about the handprints at Grauman’s, about the people you’ve met at shelters and soup kitchens. You’re thinking about the thin line between Hollywood and Skid Row, between dreams and desperation.
You go to the window and push back the shades. Across the street, someone’s sleeping in the doorway of an electronics shop. You can’t tell race, age, or gender from up here. You watch as they roll over in their sleep before settling into stillness again. You wonder what they’re dreaming about.
Things Seen & Heard
Taylor Swift’s The Tortured Poets Department drops on Friday. I’m a big Taylor fan, but I also have a great sense of foreboding about this album. A lot of the promotion for it makes me worried that she’s going to double down on all of the stuff I didn’t respond to on Midnights and Lover. I’m going in with an open mind, but if the first thing I hear is a moody Antonoff synthesizer or a chopped up vocal sample I might throw my phone across the room. However I respond, I regret to inform you that the album will probably be the topic of next week’s newsletter.
Hollywood history is on my mind because I’ve been listening to the audiobook of Michael Schulman’s Oscar Wars: A History of Hollywood in Gold, Sweat, and Tears and just watched Damien Chazelle’s Babylon (2022) on Monday. Oscar Wars is fascinating, a compelling and compassionate look at the people who made Hollywood history (and some who are still making it), and I’m having a blast listening to it. Babylon got a lot of hate, but I’m proud to announce that I’ve enlisted in the Babylon Defender Corps and appreciate it for the messy, moving big swing that it is.
That’s it for this week! If you follow me for Catholic reasons and wouldn’t mind, please offer a prayer for my daughter this weekend as she receives First Communion!
This. is. awesome! An Ignatian meditation on Hollywood. Please don't disown me if I tell you that we lived in Pasadena for 5.5 years and never went to the Boulevard. (In our defense...traffic!)
This was awesome. And what a masterclass in the use of the second person POV!