Opinion: Way Too Ready For Our Close-Up

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I was driving east on Hollywood Boulevard the other evening, heading home from a pleasant dinner at a grand Hollywood house that – according to legend – had once been a love nest for Gloria Swanson and her paramour, Joseph Kennedy.

I was in a mellow, movie-world frame of mind – until I saw the sign, one of those rolling light-up city traffic billboards: ``Hollywood Boulevard closed … February 18 through 25.’’

The Oscars? Well, of course, the Oscars.

The street shutdowns actually began three weeks before the show, with Orchid Alley, behind the Kodak Theatre. Two weeks before the show, curb lanes and sidewalks along Hollywood Boulevard get closed. A week before … well, all I can say is, just stay away. Perplexingly, even after every last starlet straggles home from the last parties and shimmies out of her dress and sits down to her first good meal in weeks – even then, two, three days after the event, some closures stay in place. What’s up with that?

Because the Oscars are a nonprofit event of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the city waives the $75,000 street-closure fee. But it isn’t a nonprofit event for the TV networks covering all the attendant hoopla. And the street closures turn a lot of the local merchants into unwilling nonprofits – who can get make any money when customers can’t get past that cordon sanitaire to buy anything?

A friend of mine went to the big world economic forum in Davos, Switzerland a couple of times, an event where the richest and most important people in the world – yes, even more important than movie stars – collected. No streets were closed, he said, but people had to show ID badges to get near the conference center.

The Swiss security were unflappable, efficient without being hysterical about it. And the delegates were hard to impress. In an auditorium where Bill Clinton was about to speak, the Secret Service tried to clear the room for a security sweep. The audience for the previous panel -- most of whom were staying to hear Clinton, too -- refused to submit. Hundreds stood in their places and shouted, ``Let him speak or go home.’’ And damned if Clinton didn’t just come out, and everyone sat down, and Clinton’s speech went off without a hitch.

Some contrast to the pompous control freaks who sometimes work on movie locations, rent-a-cops strutting out to stop traffic so the crew can get ‘’the shot.’’ Movie sets have such a potential for overbearing obnoxiousness that a few years ago, in downtown, the shooting of some Disney pic created so much friction with the locals that someone scrawled a Mickey Mouse face on a wall – and drew a bullet speeding toward it.

The film folks, and the city, would do well to remember that they’re not curing cancer – not even on Oscar night – and should repeat to themselves that seminal line from a horror movie called ``The Last House on the Left’’ …. ``It’s only a movie.’’