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Where Dreams Really Do Come True

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Greg Stone is deputy editorial page editor of The Day in New London, Conn.

Last month, our son, Pete, got married in Hollywood. I got my first glimpse of the City of Dreams and saw close up how it came to be called that.

Pete and his best friend, Jason Filardi, both of Mystic, Conn., emigrated to Hollywood right after college in 1993. Today, Pete is an agent, Jason is a screenwriter.

As I rode through Southern California, I felt I had been there before, passing street signs with names like Sunset Boulevard, Mulholland Drive and Wilshire Boulevard. Driving along desert roads, we passed scenery I could have sworn I had seen in westerns showing at the Niantic Theater in the 1950s. I had viewed many of these Los Angeles addresses years ago through the eyes of Joe Friday and his partner, Frank Smith.

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I arrived with the preconceived notion of a New Englander that I would hate the environment, having read the complete, damning works of Nathanael West. But a week here provided me with a much more sanguine view of a place that is robust with its most prominent products, American entertainment and free expression.

Sure, the place is an environmental nightmare, spread out helter-skelter into the hills and desert. You need a car even to get a newspaper. There is no destination that is within walking distance. There are buses and a new subway, but Angelenos other than the working poor don’t seem to take them seriously. So you drive and drive. But Los Angeles is also a place of beauty, within reach of mountains, beaches and ocean scenery as good as it gets. And it is a caldron of creative energy for an industry that packages America’s biggest and most famous export, its culture.

Pete had just sold a half-hour comedy series to a television network, an auspicious event for the week of his wedding. As Pete was driving me through Hollywood toward the Pacific Ocean, he had a phone headset on, taking care of last-minute details of his deal. Then his brother from New York called to announce he had arrived in town. Pete steered him to a bar near his house where he could watch the Angels-Red Sox game until we got back. Everyone in Los Angeles seems to be from somewhere else, and they bring to the city a root cutting from home.

We passed through one opulent neighborhood after another. I recognized one of the names: Brentwood, from the O.J. Simpson murder case. At some point, we would traverse the same freeway where the bizarre police chase occurred. I was learning there are few places in Los Angeles I hadn’t already been to on television or in the movies, and how much a part of my life this city always was.

It was Friday, but everyone wasn’t at work. Many were basking in the hazy sun at sidewalk cafes, rollerblading along the edge of the ocean or surfing. They’re “chilling,” Pete explained.

The hills along the water were parched brown and gray from a long drought. Houses were perched on hilltops, their owners risking mudslides, earthquakes and wildfires. The wedding was in a big church near the Hollywood Bowl. Our new daughter-in-law, Jessica, looked like a movie star, my sister-in-law remarked, and we all agreed. Her brother-in-law, a composer, sang the Lord’s Prayer. Many of the guests were workers in the entertainment town: writers, deal-makers and producers.

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But it was not a make-believe wedding, nor a make-believe place with make-believe people. The dreams sometimes may be elusive, but their fulfillment is down to earth. The people who live here are devoted and hardworking in the crafts that bring us enjoyment and help hold down the U.S. trade deficit. They can be fabulously productive and successful because they are, as Americans, free to express themselves. That’s why the dreams are so big.

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