Valley Tour: From Weird to Wondrous

To paraphrase Dorothy, in conversation with Toto, delegates to next week’s Democratic convention will know they’re not in Kansas anymore the minute they hit downtown Los Angeles.

Sure, they’ll all head for the Getty, the Viper Room and other Westside attractions as soon as they put down their “Gore & Lieberman” signs. The question is: Do they realize there are neat things to see and do in the San Fernando Valley and its environs?

With the special interests of the politically inclined in mind, we propose the following tour of the Valley:

Mulholland Drive at night. The ideal way to encounter the Valley for the first time is to drive up into the Hollywood Hills, park somewhere along Mulholland Drive and observe the sea of Valley lights shimmering below. Thanks to the movies and TV, Mulholland Drive is Every Teen’s Favorite Spot to Make Out.

It is named for William Mulholland, who realized in the 1890s that the future of Los Angeles depended on importing water. A ruthless visionary (something delegates to both conventions should understand), he built the monumental Los Angeles Aqueduct, draining the Owens Valley and making the arid San Fernando Valley bloom.

As responsible for the current face of Greater Los Angeles as anyone, he was ruined in 1928 when the St. Francis Dam burst near Saugus, killing at least 450 people. “I envy the dead,” 80-year-old Mulholland said tearfully. He was the inspiration for Noah Cross, the rapacious character played by John Huston in Roman Polanski’s classic movie “Chinatown.”

Ventura Boulevard. The Westside has famed artist David Hockney, who has documented its backyard pools and other Southern California icons in dozens of paintings and prints. Until recently, the Valley had an artist of its own, the considerably less well-known Jeffrey Vallance. Before Vallance, 45, moved to Las Vegas, he spent much of his career documenting the low-key wonders of places like Canoga Park. Vallance once built an elaborate art piece around a frozen chicken he bought at a local Ralphs supermarket and named Blinky, the Friendly Hen (let me just say it includes a description and drawing of the Shroud of Blinky).

In 1985, he did a series--both drawings and text--called “Avenue of the Absurd.” In it he describes such bizarre Ventura Boulevard sites as the Aku Aku Inn in Woodland Hills, a vintage Polynesian-themed motel that will transport you back to the era when no Valley backyard lacked tiki torches--and the nearby Chateau, a commercial building with delusions of grandeur that is said to be a replica of France’s Chateau Severne.

Other weird sites on the Valley’s Main Street include the final resting place of author Edgar Rice Burroughs. The creator of Tarzan was a pioneering artist/entrepreneur--one of the first to trademark his characters and, thus, ensure they would continue to bring in revenues in perpetuity. When he died in 1950, his ashes were buried under a large walnut tree on Ventura Boulevard in Tarzana, named for his immortal Ape Man.

Lone Ranger rock. The push West was the defining act in making the United States, as all of us know who ever saw a Western. We carry the mythic geography of the West around in our heads, as we learned it from movies and later TV. You can see bits and pieces of the real terrain where the West of the imagination was created at the surviving remnant of the once busy Iverson Movie Location Ranch in Chatsworth.

More than 2,000 films, including the silent version of “Ben-Hur” and “The Grapes of Wrath,” were shot at the movie ranch between 1912 and 1969, when construction of the 118 Freeway closed it down. What the site still sports are photogenic rocks. As one Hollywood director observed, “When you see a rock in a motion picture, it’s either a studio rock or an Iverson rock.”

To get there, drive north on Topanga Canyon Boulevard, turn left on Santa Susana Pass Road, then right on Redmesa Drive. Less than 100 yards up the hill, on the right, you’ll see Lone Ranger rock. If it looks familiar, that’s because every American youngster with a TV set saw it weekly during the 1950s when the Lone Ranger reared up in front of it on his horse, crying “Hi yo, Silver, away!”

If you continue up Santa Susana Pass Road, you’ll see, on the left, what little remains of the Spahn Movie Ranch. This is where Charles Manson and his so-called Family of followers squatted before killing actress Sharon Tate and others in 1969. For a comprehensive look at both the West and its depiction, check out the Autry Museum of Western Heritage in Griffith Park, across from the Los Angeles Zoo. Current exhibits at the Autry--which is aware as few institutions are of the West as a manmade phenomenon--include one on the Chinese-American experience in Southern California.

Disney. Los Angeles has always been known for its outlandish “programmatic” architecture, which reached its greatest flowering with such goofy buildings as the hat-shaped Brown Derby restaurant. Today some of the most puckish architecture in Greater Los Angeles is on the Burbank lot of the Walt Disney Co.

From the Ventura Freeway in Burbank, you’ll see a two-story-high blue cone hat covered with silver stars--a gargantuan replica of the one Mickey Mouse wore as the Sorcerer’s Apprentice in “Fantasia.” It sits upon the studio’s ocean liner-shaped animation building designed by Robert A. M. Stern, and serves as a smile-inducing reminder that Disney created one of the great American popular art forms--feature animation. Unfortunately, its impact is diluted by the towering new ABC building next to it. The public cannot tour the studio, but if you look over the fence of the studio’s Alameda Avenue entrance, you can see another Disney whimsy, the Michael Graves-designed “Team Disney” building on which Snow White’s pals, the Seven Dwarfs, function as caryatids and seem to be holding up the gabled roof.

Warner Bros. Politics and Hollywood were tangled up long before Ronald Reagan became president or Steven Spielberg and other industry heavyweights spent nights in the Lincoln Bedroom during the Clinton administration. President Kennedy’s father, Joseph, himself an aspirant to the presidency, bought his own movie studio--RKO--in 1929.

The relationship between politics and Hollywood is closer and more tangled than ever. The literally unflattering light in which television presented Richard Nixon during his 1960 debates with John F. Kennedy deferred Nixon’s dream of the White House until 1969. Today the presidency is the theme of one of the most highly acclaimed shows on television, NBC’s “The West Wing.”

Recently nominated for 18 Emmys, tying “The Sopranos,” the show is the funny, moving saga of Democratic President Josiah Bartlett (Martin Sheen), his family and staff. It is shot on the Warner Bros. lot in Burbank.

Warner Bros. has a VIP studio tour that is the real deal--a chance to glimpse inside a working film and television studio. What you encounter on the three-hour tour, which is limited to 12 people, depends on what is being shot that day.

The bad news is “The West Wing” rarely opens its sound stage to visitors, although the occasional real White House staffer, such as Clinton press secretary Joe Lockhart, has dropped by. Warner Bros. is at 4000 Warner Blvd. Call (818) 954-1744.

Campo de Cahuenga and Forest Lawn Memorial-Park. Perhaps the most notable historic site in the Valley is Campo de Cahuenga, a one-story adobe building at 3919 Cahuenga Blvd. in North Hollywood.

It was here on Jan. 13, 1847, that Mexican Gen. Andres Pico and American commander John C. Fremont signed the Treaty of Cahuenga, by which Mexico ceded California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona and parts of New Mexico, Oklahoma and Wyoming to the United States.

But the truly mind-boggling Valley sites reflect the quirky role Southern California has played in shaping American culture. Nothing does that better than Forest Lawn.

Put in political terms, Forest Lawn is all about spin. Death is bad, right? Not at Glendale’s Forest Lawn, where death is relentlessly euphemized and turned into a tourist attraction.

A veritable Disneyland of death, Forest Lawn inspired Evelyn Waugh’s wicked little 1948 novel “The Loved One.” Waugh, who called his fictional embalmer Mr. Joyboy, was fascinated with the vast, upbeat cemetery at 1712 S. Glendale Ave. It is, he observed, “The only thing in California that is not a copy of something else.”

Clark Gable, Gracie Allen and Nat “King” Cole are buried here, as are writer Theodore Dreiser, swashbuckler Errol Flynn and Walt Disney.

The staff has been instructed not to tell you where specific bodies are buried, but several guidebooks do. Unique, free and never crowded, Forest Lawn is a wonderful place to meditate on the transitory nature of all things, even presidential politics.

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Spotlight appears every Friday. Patricia Ward Biederman can be reached at valley.news@latimes.com.