Restoring the Glory, Romancing the Gutter

Keynote Address to the Hollywood Preservation Society:

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, and thank you for coming. I am here tonight to warn you of a grave peril. As we sit sipping vin gris and chai in the comfort of this penthouse suite, a precious indigenous community is fighting for its very survival. I am speaking, of course, about Hollywood. Each morning, Hollywood’s genial and rustic denizens lift themselves off the sidewalk to find a bit more of their lush natural habitat sacrificed upon the altar of improvement.

Alas, there are people working under the shield of an entity known as the Hollywood Entertainment District who want to make Hollywood nice. They are plotting to make a place where tourists, some 7 million a year, and residents alike frolic amid a bacchanal of shopping and entertainment. As I speak, ground has already been broken on the vaunted Hollywood and Highland development, a $385-million project that, among other things, will be a new home to the Academy Awards.

But these niceness-mongers did not stop there. Their little improvement district, with its security foot patrols and tidiness crews, has just tripled in size, running now from La Brea to Gower. Soon, I fear, Hollywood may actually be CLEAN and SAFE. This is foremost evidenced by an alarming 50% reduction in recent years of the practice of their colorful native religious ceremonies, frequently referred to as crime (an egregious misconstruing by the Western scientific mind).

I am not surprised to hear snickering in the back. Laugh while you can, my friend. It may not be long before that supercilious smirk is exfoliated right off your exquisitely Botoxed countenance. For what you cynically dismiss as today’s chancre of urban blight, I defend as a delicate and unique ecosystem. We have seen bulldozers maul the rain forests of Brazil, destroying ancient ways of life. Will Hollywood as we know it--grungy, shoddy and tattered--be trampled by similar forces? Will we lose this crucial organ in our body politic? I like to think of it as the liver. Naturally, the idea of being fitted with a nice, supple, pink new liver, especially after years of self-abuse, may on the surface seem like a fine idea. At least up until the antibodies kick in.

Please join me now in an imaginary safari down Hollywood Boulevard, as I experienced it recently, and I think you’ll see whereof I speak.

We begin at the famed intersection of Hollywood and Vine. Please take care not to cross in front of those tourist bus passengers. We wouldn’t want to spoil their photos of vacant corner buildings. Continuing, we stroll westward past the L. Ron Hubbard Life Exhibition, a.k.a. the Church of Scientology, a magnificent repository of arcane knowledge. Tons of it. Kind of like a medieval monastery during--oh, never mind.

Now, I want everyone to lie down on the sidewalk facing upward. Flail your arms and legs, just like you were making a snow angel. OK, everybody, up! And let’s just look at what you’ve revealed under the soot. See the star-shaped brass inlays? You are standing on ancient glyphs known as the Hollywood Walk of Fame. (I must say that there’s something poetic about W.C. Fields’ star being stamped right here in front of the Hollywood Cabaret and Le Sex Shoppe. W.C., wherever you are, we know you’re uttering one of your brusque, whimsical chortles.) “Wash the grime away,” the improvers cry. Yes, wash it away. Fill the sidewalks with tourists and shoppers, and banish our colorful street dwellers, with their mangy hair spikes and studded collars and bottle-in-bag crossings against the light, to live in oblivion with the Chumash.

Fellow preservationists, tempting as it may be, I urge you to withstand the impulse to go native by visiting one of the many village tattooists. Sadly, Hollywoodians themselves continue to face stigmatization for their various forms of ritual scarification, which, alas, is frowned upon as a mark of savagery by temp agencies. But let me point out that while these imaginative design concepts may suggest hallucinations from delirium tremens, anthropologists (such as myself) believe these primal etchings spring from the eternal human conviction that it IS the divine right of each of us to be on MTV.

Contemporary Hollywoodians, of course, are believed to be descended from the lost tribes of Matinee Idols, who once spilled from the walls of film studios, illuminating the bars, restaurants and sidewalks like a crimson tide with their aura of glamour. Here, amid these very streets, deals were made, tribute was paid, romances were kindled. Why the diaspora? Historians attribute it in part to the construction of the Hollywood Freeway, which cut a life-draining swath through this formerly cosmopolitan land, where such gods and goddesses as Aphrodite (Marilyn Monroe) and Zeus (Cary Grant) once roamed freely. But it also seems that eventually, the Walk of Fame became dangerously diluted by the no-talent brothers-in-law of Hollywood’s film warlords.

Onward. Is anyone hungry? Good. Hollywood takes great pride in its singular native cuisine, the New York Pizza.

Now notice the preponderance of wig stores along the boulevard. A vestige of some long-forgotten fertility rite? We may never know. Of course it cannot be denied that the Hollywoodians have their warlike side--witness the Tasers, machine guns and portable missile launchers gracing the storefront windows of several local merchants. Replace them with Banana Republic and Nine West? Yes, and just where, I ask, will those beer-sozzled frat boys shop for the weapons they need for trips to Baja?

So now do you see what’s at stake? Will Hollywood’s unsinkable spirit be hidden beneath the chadra of good taste? Will the mannequins at Frederick’s of Hollywood soon be cloaked in tweed and lace? Will those biker jacket/boot boutiques be replaced by The Gap, or worse, Starbucks?

What’s more, will we lose that unique Los Angeles experience: Watching the tourists cry? Please indulge me in a personal recollection. A few years ago, I frequented the coffee shop of a family motel near the corner of Sunset and Gower, just a stone’s throw from the boulevard. Here I could watch the Midwestern tourists arrive full of gleeful anticipation, only to climb out of their cars and stare at the scene in disbelief. “Where’s Sandra Bullock?” The daughter would cry, while the wife glared at the husband with an expression that suggested he’d put the children in danger of being sold into slavery. For the French tourists seated in the next booth, the scene was giddy confirmation that America was every bit as awful as they suspected. I get misty just thinking about it.

But the loss of these trifles is nothing next to the socio-ecological disaster the improvers would unleash. To fully appreciate this, please close your eyes and imagine Tinseltown as seen through the eyes of a typical new arrival. She is a 19-year-old aspiring starlet from Minnesota. She has cornflower blue eyes and hay-colored hair and we will call her Sandy. Think of her excitement as her Greyhound coasts down the freeway offramp and lumbers up to the boulevard! She has come thousands of miles to shed the dusty shroud of everyday life for the sequined mantle of stardom. She steps off the bus and onto the Walk of Fame. She looks around her. She lowers her sunglasses. And she realizes she has made a terrible mistake.

As things stand now, our Sandy will head for the nearest pay phone (probably trying three before she finds one that works). She will call her parents collect and be on the next bus back to Rum Bump, scared straight. It’s fitting, for the Hollywood sprawled cruelly before her is nothing less than a perfect metaphor for the industry she so desperately wanted to embrace. ‘Tis a gift to be simple, Sandy, and let this be a lesson to you. Go and finish that junior college degree--Jennifer Aniston has some life left in her yet.

But what if, instead, our Sandy finds a Hollywood that shimmers in Mediterranean light like the city of Oz? A Hollywood that beckons with the false promise of riches, fame and glamour? A Hollywood that makes it all seem possible? What then will deter her? Nothing, sadly, nothing at all. Our quaint village will become a sprawling refugee camp teeming with Sandys from the world over, who will sacrifice years before they realize they never had a chance in the harsh industry that lured them here. CNN will broadcast their anguished cries for Hard Candy nail polish, reduced-fat Haagen-Daz and backstage passes to ‘N Sync. Soon, Doctors Without Borders will be diverted from critical natural disasters to airlift alpha hydroxy to the needy. The Midwest will be destabilized by radical depopulation.

So I say: Keep Hollywood as it is! Sure, it’s tough love, but don’t we owe this to all the Sandys of the world? And can we really afford to loiter in the hospitality lounge of apathy while this exotic subculture darkens in the looming shadow of NICENESS? I think not.