Hooray For Hollywood

I can imagine that a good number of people who visit Los Angeles for vacation do so because of Hollywood. Maybe they want to get close to where the movies or their favorite television shows are made. Or hop on a bus tour of movie star homes in Beverly Hills or Malibu or wherever those kinds of things take tourists to. Or maybe even spot some celebrities (OMG it's a celebrity!!!) doing whatever celebrities do in their average day, if it's even that much different than what you or I do in a typical day.

I've never particularly thought of Los Angeles equaling Hollywood, probably because I'd maintain that I'm not overly interested in the movie and TV industry that much. Or at least that's the way it seems to me most days. Give me a choice between watching something and listening to something, and I'll go with music over a film or show most any day. If Hollywood were packed with musicians it might be a different story for me.

Having said that, in my prior trips to the City of Angels, I have had my brushes with Hollywood and stars and some of it I guess was deliberate. I've been on the TMZ Celebrity Tour and it was truly awesome; we've eaten at Spago and spotted Jeffrey Katzenberg (one of the founders of DreamWorks along with Steven Spielberg and David Geffen) a couple of tables away from us; and yes, I have a celebrity encounter story with Keanu Reeves which I won't relate here but suffice it to say Keanu deals very, very well with complete strangers who don't necessarily know how to maintain personal space boundaries. He's as awesome as the TMZ Celebrity Tour in my book. 

It had been about six years since we'd been to Los Angeles and on this trip we decided to devote a bit more time to movies, television and all that stuff than I have in the past on trips to the left coast. Diversification of experiences is good, folks! We looked into a motion picture studio tour; some kind of museum experience; a Hollywood food spot sometimes visited by celebrities; and the crown jewel for us: attending a taping of some sort of show. We were pretty sure based on an initial look that we could get to the first three by just paying admission somewhere; getting to the last one would rely a little bit on someone else saying "yes" to a request.

The weekend we arrived in town was Oscars weekend. We had no idea. If we had, we might have stayed in town. Instead, our itinerary took us to Palm Springs for a couple of nights before heading back to L.A. the day after Will Smith slapped Chris Rock. We drove straight from Palm Springs to Burbank, home of Warner Brothers Studios. And home of the Warner Brothers Studio Tour.

There are a number of studio tours available to the public in the Los Angeles area. We looked into Paramount (closed because of COVID), Universal (accessible only with a visit to the theme park), Sony and Warner Brothers. Warner won out because of their catalog. Sony has Spider-Man, Jeopardy!, Wheel of Fortune and The Goldbergs; Warner has DC Comics, Friends, The Big Bang Theory, Harry Potter and a lot of current shows we watch. OK, maybe not me, but our household in general. Despite our preference for Marvel over DC, Warner's shows and movies won out.

The Warner tour has basically three components to it: a tour of the lot on a sort of massive golf cart like vehicle past and through various outdoor filming locations and then driving by a bunch of sound stages; a sort of behind the scenes / how it's all done type exhibit; and a museum with DC and Harry Potter displays. 

I figured there would be one or two moments that I'd feel some real connection to works of cinema that I loved on this tour. I did at one time, after all, religiously watch Friends sometime in the middle of the series. I came in after the departure of Marcel the monkey and stopped watching right before Chandler and Monica got married. I've also read all the Harry Potter books and watched all the movies (although admittedly not a huge fan of the movies - or J.K. Rowling really any more) and I've dabbled in the DC Comics movies. There had to be something of value here that would strike a real nerve, I figured. 

I was wrong. It was actually way better than I possibly could have hoped. It wasn't all Friends and Big Bang Theory and Harry Potter. Which was really good.

In addition to being entertaining (I mean, why wouldn't it be?) there is a ton of useful information on the tour, from the history of the actual Warner brothers founding the company to all sorts of information about how movies are made and put together to general fan type stuff like original props and being able to sit on the couch at a reconstructed Central Perk and get your picture taken. I'm going to skip most of that, including the history, which actually shocks me because I've written about history of whatever it is we've seen everywhere we've been just about every opportunity I've had on this blog. I'll just say that I loved seeing the actual models of the X-1 and Liberty Bell 7 from the movie The Right Stuff (aka the greatest movie of all time); I appreciated the storyboard section of the museum because I think it's crazy that people actually do that still; and yes, I loved sitting on the Central Perk couch. We have a picture of us on the thing that I'm not posting here but I'm happy we have that picture. 

Central Perk. Or a facsimile of a coffee shop that actually never was.

The first reason I'm skipping most of the Warner Brothers Tour is because the golf cart on steroids portion of the tour absolutely blew every other part of this experience away. 

The Warner Brothers property in Burbank is literally just one big recording studio featuring outdoor spaces created to look like cities or towns to film outdoor scenes and then interior sound studios to capture all other non-outdoors scenes. There are a series of offices and animation studios and shops on the campus as well but if you want to film anything using those buildings, you can do that too (hence like zero signage on all the buildings and offices that look like houses). It's also not exclusive to Warner Brothers films. If you want to shoot a scene for any movie on Warner's property, you can. Just pay the fee and put it back the way you found it if you need to modify the set in any way. We were told a story about a setup for The Last Samurai movie that took three months to get the scene just right for what ended up being about two minutes in the actual movie. Crazy stuff. On some level, I'm sure, a complete waste of money.

The majority of the places we were driven to were just fake streets or fake houses or fake town squares (complete with gazebo). The buildings and houses that make up these neighborhoods or communities or whatever they purport to be are generally not occupy-able. Maybe you can walk in the front door, maybe there's a room or two behind the façade or maybe there's a catwalk inside where an actor can poke his or her head out the window to talk to someone outside. It is amazing how generic these places are and it's incredible how many shows and movies they have appeared in. How do we not notice that we are looking at the same street over and over and over again? I guess they don't appear for long enough in enough different movies and shows that we can actually recognize the same place. 

We were driven down a street called Hennesy Street that was used in Annie, Friends, The Big Bang Theory, Batman and Robin, Living Single, The Mask and National Lampoon's Vacation. We were also taken to a town square that was recycled from picture to picture to picture. I guess the generic-ness of both of these places makes them impossible to actually be distinguishable as unique places. It's pretty impressive. I mean, I know the people filming on these locations make small variations but it still seems like we should notice. I know any time I see a movie with a town square with a gazebo in it, I'm going to be checking to see if it's the place we visited on our tour.

Hennesy Street (top) and what could be any town in the United States (bottom), but isn't.

But we don't travel to places like this so we can see generic. We travel to places like this to recognize signature moments on film that touch us deeply. And sure enough, there were some spots that actually did that. And I know it's stupid, especially considering the ephemeral nature of the scenes that transported me to some of the films that I love.  But I now know that I've been to some of the spots where a few minutes in a couple of my favorite movies ever were filmed. 

One of my favorite movies of the last ten years is Argo. I could watch (and have watched) that film over and over and over. I'm a sucker for movies based on reality and that movie is fantastically (in more ways than one) entertaining with a terrific cast (plus Ben Affleck, who is excellent in the film but is still...well...Ben Affleck). There's a scene in the film where Affleck's character, real life CIA star Tony Mendez, is sitting on some steps of a building talking with Alan Arkin's character, Lester Siegel. They are about to start making a fake film so Mendez can go rescue some Americans from Iran in 1980. We drove by that actual spot on our tour. We were right where that dialog between those two characters was filmed. I have to wonder how long it took them to film those 60 seconds for that scene. 

The Warner Brothers lot isn't all cities and towns, though. They actually have a little piece of jungle. And I mean that literally. It's so small, it's comical. There's a little cabin near a re-fillable or drainable (depending on what you need for your shot) lagoon of sorts that's been in all sorts of TV shows. There's also a little road circling that pool that's forested close to the road on both sides. It's maybe 25 feet long, if I'm remembering things correctly. And if I'm not, it's not that much longer than 25 feet.

It was used to film the iconic T Rex chase scene in Jurassic Park. Now, I know what you are thinking...that chase scene is way more than 25 feet long. It was. Apparently, the cast and crew got kicked out of Hawaii due to weather and needed to film that scene in a fake jungle in Burbank, no matter how long the set proved to be. So, they just filmed different parts of the scene in the same 25 feet of space over and over. Film. Back up the equipment. Film. Repeat. I looked at that scene when I got home. I can recognize the spot on the set where the T Rex bursts onto the path but the actual chase itself doesn't look like it was filmed in Burbank. These guys are good. That Spielberg guy.

Props from The Right Stuff. Goosebumps!!!

But that wasn't even the best part of the tour. And the best part isn't even from a film. It's from a still photograph. It was almost a side note on the tour while we were driving around the sound studios when our driver slipped something like "that's where the album cover of Pink Floyd's Wish You Were Here was photographed" into the narrative before he hit the accelerator and moved on. Hold up! What?!?! Camera out! A quick picture or two (both crooked but straightened with the edit function on iPhone Photos) and we were gone. 

But it's true. Check out the picture below. Now go pull Wish You Were Here out of your record or CD collection and match it up. It's right there. It's true. Why they would take that picture in that location is beyond me but it's totally where they shot it. Complete Easter egg. Never would have realized this if I hadn't taken this tour.

The second reason I am skipping the museum part of the Warner Brothers Tour is that if you want to do a museum experience, go to an actual museum. And the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures did museum-ing better than the Warner Brothers Tour. Much better.

So I'm a guy who claims (earlier in this very post) he doesn't care that much about movies or television and then goes gaga over seeing a model of an airplane and being near to where about 60 seconds of pretty well non-important to the whole movie plot footage from Argo was shot. So maybe I do love movies a little bit more than I claimed. Or being in Hollywood awakened something.

What happened on the Warner Brothers' lot kept going at the Academy Museum. There is so much stuff in that place for me to gawk at. I realized maybe a little bit just how many movies I love in this world. 

The Museum is organized around a multi-story exhibit called Stories of Cinema which basically describes how films come together. It spends time on the finished product, the actors, the directors, the costumes, visual effects, sound, makeup, modeling, animation, casting and pretty much everything else that goes into making a motion picture. Sprinkled in and around that main narrative exhibit are other smaller (and I suppose changing) displays which we probably found less valuable than the main exhibit.

The Academy Museum, Los Angeles.

I don't necessarily have a list of favorite movies beyond number one (The Right Stuff, in case you missed my worship of that three hour and 12 minute masterpiece earlier...) but if were to start to assemble one, I think I could get some ideas from my time in the Academy Museum. There are so many objects there related to pictures that have moved me. Storyboard from Grease. Storyboard from Escape From Alcatraz. Orc head from Peter Jackson's (awesome, amazing, fantastic) Lord of the Rings trilogy. The actual C-3PO and R2-D2 costumes used in the original three Star Wars movies (which, other than Solo - controversial take I know, are the only three really worth watching). Promotional models of the seven dwarfs to publicize Walt Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. The actual fake shark from Jaws (Richard Dreyfuss is one of my favorite actors ever).

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, by the way, was the first movie I ever remember seeing in the movie theater. It was probably 1972 or 1973 and I'm pretty sure it was actually the first one I ever did see. I can't imagine my parents taking me to the pictures when I was younger than four.

We got some other great nuggets about the Oscars out of the Academy Museum. I mean, why wouldn't we? The first Academy Awards were presented in 1929 and covered the period from August 1, 1927 through July 21, 1928. It Happened One Night was the first film to win the "Big Five" (who knew there was such a thing?) awards of Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor and Actress and writing. In 1940, the cinematography category was split into films made in color and those made in black and white (wonder how long that lasted...).

Storyboards for The Matrix (Warner Bros. Studio Tour) and Grease (Academy Museum).

Of course, what we wanted to know more than anything else is why the heck is it called an Oscar? We didn't get a definitive answer to this question. Instead we got a legend. Apparently, Academy librarian Margaret Herrick said, when she saw one of the statuettes for the first time, that the trophy looked like her uncle Oscar. Can this really be true? I mean, really? That's what the museum says. That's all I can say there.

Our Academy Museum visit was a morning event. We finished up just after noon. I get hungry about that time of day and was in no mood to kill my Hollywood buzz so we picked a lunch place with a Hollywood vibe: Pink's Hot Dogs. Not going to spend a ton of time on this one but Pink's is quite simply a Hollywood institution. They have been serving up hot dogs day and night since 1939. That's an awfully long time. They must be doing something right. 

So why Pink's on a celebrity fueled Los Angeles binge? Well because sometimes the rich and famous (or just famous, maybe) go to Pink's for some food, although not when we were there on this trip. No Keanu Reeves, no Nicole Kidman, no Mario Lopez, no James Corden, no Quentin Tarantino. Although signed pics from most of these stars and more are on the wall of the restaurant. I have to say this was not my first visit to Pink's. I went there years ago at night and waited three hours in line to grab a couple of dogs. A Tuesday afternoon was a bit quicker - less than an hour from parking to moving on. I'd hazard a guess that star-spotting at Pink's is more productive at night than during the day. But the Mulholland Drive Dog with jalapenos tastes just as good in the afternoon as it does at night. Although check that...maybe not after a few beers. Definitely would taste better then.

Pink's. And their wall of fame. A younger Jimmy Kimmel on the second row.

We needed Pink's. The wall of signed celebrity pics actually did keep our Hollywood buzz going. We didn't really expect to be chowing down on a hot dog and fries with Drew Barrymore or Patti LaBelle but hey...you never know. Pink's was a way stop on a drive to the main event for us on this trip: a live taping of a show. Yes, we made a request and yes, someone said yes.

Actually we made several requests. And someone said yes to one of them. American Song Contest? No response. Call Me Kat? Also no response. The Late, Late Show with James Corden? Also also no response. Jimmy Kimmel Live! YES!!! In all honesty, we probably got an affirmative response to the best option we requested. Actually, there's no "probably" about it. We got the best.

Two things about these in studio experiences. First, attending one of these takes a significant chunk of time out of your day. Not saying it isn't worth it because it totally is. But between traveling to Hollywood; being early because with L.A. traffic you never know; waiting in line; having the line be moved closer to the door; waiting in line more; clearing security and being admitted to the studio; waiting while everyone behind you is admitted; settling in; getting a bathroom break; and then the taping of the actual show itself, it can take hours.

Second, they are free. And that's honestly unbelievable. Here's something that people would likely pay a significant amount of money to do and it's totally free. You just have to be picked. And obviously since we got no response on three of the four requests we made to participate, that's not an automatic. There are many, many ways to part with your hard earned cash in Hollywood; attending the taping of a show ain't one of them. They even validate parking. That's actually kind of refreshing.

No pics inside the Kimmel Show so this is it for pics of this part of our Hollywood pilgrimage.

We made our own luck with the quality of our Kimmel experience. We got there early before any of the signs for the audience line were in place and asked some people hanging around there how it worked and although they were apparently unaffiliated with the actual attending the show thing, they steered us absolutely right about where to go and wait. That effort translated into a number one spot in line and being one of the first to be seated which as it happened was in the second row of the studio audience with nobody in the front row in the two seats before us.

When we sat down we noticed a star on the floor of the studio about 10 feet away from us and a giant camera just to our left. The star had to be Kimmel's monolog spot, right? Turns out it was, so we pretty much got the best seat in the house. Despite our proximity to the host for the opening segment, we actually didn't hear a bunch of the words he said because of the applause in the audience, which drowned out parts of the jokes. Didn't come through that way when we watched the show when we got home. It wouldn't be the only thing different about the broadcast from our in studio experience.

One thing about going to see a show like this is that the quality of the experience can sometimes depend on who's joining the host for the night. We got Donald Glover and Machine Gun Kelly. Glover is a writer, comedian, actor, filmmaker, hip-hop artist and probably about ten or twelve other things who most notably for me portrayed the greatest Star Wars character ever (Lando Calrissian) in the fourth best Star Wars movie of all time (Solo - had to get that one in again). Super excited. I honestly couldn't have told you anything about Machine Gun Kelly (MGK for those in the know) before I got to Los Angeles last month. But hey, I like music of all sorts so I could go for a live performance to open up my mind a little more.

These aren't the droids you are looking for...at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures.

If there are potential audience members out there who have performance anxiety about being on a show like this, there's no reason to be at the Kimmel Show. That's because we were coached up ahead of time and told when and how to applaud and cheer and when to stand and sit. When Jimmy or guests enter, stand and go crazy but don't yell out anything specific or notable, no matter how well intentioned you might think you are being. No "I love you, Jimmy", in other words. Don't move out of your seat or you'll risk being forcibly removed (the forcibly was more implied than explicit). Don't stop clapping and cheering suddenly; bring it down slowly but DO bring it down. And most importantly, if you don't get the joke, laugh and applaud like you do anyway. It's Hollywood. Fake it!

Oddly enough, the first thing Donald Glover said when he sat down was "Do y'all stand for everybody? That was great!" Actually, yes. Yes, we do. That's exactly what we were coached to do. The guests have to know that, right? Right? 

Glover was great. That dude has so much going on. I don't know how he keeps it all straight with all the creativity outlets he has. I'd love for there to be some more Lando movies. I can always dream. He and Billy Dee Williams are totally different from my perspective but I'll take either guy in the role.

So...Glover in and out. Machine Gun Kelly into the guest seat and let's get ready for a performance, although honestly, we couldn't figure out where he was going to perform. There didn't seem to be a spot on the set for that to happen but they DID build Jimmy's carpet, desk and guest chair after the monolog during the commercial break so maybe they had it figured out? I mean, they do this sort of thing all the time, I guess. But legitimately setting up for a musical performance would seem a lot more complicated than setting up a desk for some discussion.

After Kimmel's talk with MGK (I'm catching on...), he left Kimmel there alone in the studio and we were then told something to the effect of "now you are going to hear Jimmy talk about something you are not going to see" and the tape rolled on Kimmel doing the intro to the MGK performance. And that was it. Show over. No performance. If you watch the show (or any episode of the show, I imagine), you see a performance with enthusiastic audience clapping after. It wasn't us. We weren't there. So I still haven't seen Machine Gun Kelly perform live (and probably never will).

The actual shark from Jaws. The least scary part of that movie is when we see the entirety of this thing.

It is difficult to say I was disappointed by anything about our experience at the Kimmel Show, including the lack of a musical performance. The whole thing was just awesome and really, really well done. But there had been a musician that I am truly into, I might have been a little stunned here. Good thing I don't have any MGK in my collection. 

We walked through the spot where the musical performances happen on the way out towards Hollywood Boulevard and realized that we had actually heard the performance earlier in the day. When we first got where we thought the line might be, we heard banging of drums and other general concert-type noise coming from the building. We figured it must have been a rehearsal. Probably now we think it was the actual performance that ended up on the show.

I'll say a few last things about this whole experience. The Warner Brothers Studio Tour was awesome and eye-opening. Having the background that things are not always what they appear to be translated well into our whole weekend experience. That tour paired with the Academy Museum worked well. Finally, if you get the opportunity to go to a taping of a live show, do it. It's some interesting stuff and it's free. For us, Kimmel was I think about the perfect thing for us to do. Jimmy's on the same side of the aisle as us I think on most issues, he's genuinely funny and doesn't seem like a complete jerk. That last piece is important. I'm hoping I'm right.

---

How We Did It

The first three things we did on our Hollywood weekend (or more accurately Monday and Tuesday of a long weekend that included a trip to Palm Springs) were fairly straightforward from a logistical standpoint. 

The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures (which opened in the fall of 2021 so it's brand new as of this writing) is open every day of the week and advance purchase tickets are available. We did buy in advance and it made the admission process (which included a COVID vaccination check) super easy. If you do that, of course, you are locked into a time of the day which isn't always convenient when dealing with Los Angeles traffic. There is an add on experience at the Museum called The Oscars Experience which as we understand it is some sort of VR thing where you get your name called winning an Academy Award. We skipped that part. It's an extra $15 on top of the $25 admission price. Not cheap when buying both.

The Warner Brothers Studio Tour runs daily except Tuesdays and Wednesdays. We took the standard Studio Tour which was the only one running when we visited in late March 2022 (although other options are now available as of early April). We bought our tickets in advance for this like we did for the Academy Museum although it seemed like there were plenty of people there when we got there who hadn't. There was a television show called The Big Salad and a movie called Pinch filming when we were on the lot. It will be interesting to see if those things ever get released under those names and if we realize what was right near us when we were on site.

Pink's Hot Dogs is open daily from 9:30 a.m. to late (11 p.m. except Friday and Saturday when they are open until 1 a.m.). This is pretty basic food. Honestly, and I can't believe I'm writing this about a hot dog, I thought the food lacked salt. From my two visits to Pink's, I'll say it's way cooler and more of an experience to go at night (like you actually can make yourself think that some celebrity is going to join you in line) but way quicker during the day. 

The most complicated thing we did was go to the Kimmel Show. Tickets can be requested from a site called 1iota.com, which hosts ticket requests for a number of live shows and events as well as movie screenings (and not just in Los Angeles). You can pick the day of your request, which is good if you are limited to specific days like we were.

There's no guarantee (from our experience and talking to one other dude who was there trying to get into the Kimmel show who had also requested tickets through the site) that your request will be honored. In every request, there is what I'll call an essay question part, where you have the opportunity to advocate for why you should be in the audience. For three of the four requests we made, we were probably less enthusiastic than we needed to be. But for the Kimmel request, we (and by we, I mean my wife) pulled out all the stops trying to demonstrate a deep and historic love of all things Jimmy Kimmel. We weren't faking or anything; our desire to attend this show taping was genuine. It seemed to us that our response to the essay question part of the request made all the difference.

We made our requests about five weeks ahead of the show taping, although it didn't seem like there was any advantage or disadvantage to that timing. We heard back one week before the actual taping. We never heard back on our other three requests.

Our first-in-line experience here started at about 2 p.m. with our arrival in Hollywood in front of the theater. About 15 minutes later they started rolling out the signage for the show line which we stood in for about 90 minutes before we entered the theater. If you want to do this, have patience. You can't wander off and do other stuff once you are in line. Sometimes to do something exclusive you just have to wait it out. 

---

Straight Outta Compton

Years ago, when all I was interested in doing on vacation was visiting buildings and drinking beer at breweries and microbreweries, I made a map of Los Angeles. Well, "made" is probably giving me a little more credit than I deserve. I BOUGHT a map of L.A. and marked on it the location of all the buildings I ever wanted to see in and around the city. That map, which was finalized about 15 years ago between my second and third trips to Los Angeles, included a companion bound volume with information about each of the buildings. I'm a nerd, I know. Over the last 23 plus years, I've methodically visited almost every one of the spots on that map.

But not number 88. Not quite anyway. Number 88 on my map sits at the end of East 107th Street in the Watts neighborhood just across the 105 (or I-105 for those of you not familiar with the highways of L.A.) to the north of Compton. And Compton's not exactly a spot tourists flock to. Number 88 is the site of the Watts Towers and as of a little more than a month ago, it was the number one unvisited building on my map. Although calling it a building might be either stretching the truth or not giving the Towers enough credit, depending on your point of view. Today, it's no longer on the unvisited portion of the list.

I'd wanted to visit the Watts Towers almost as soon as I discovered the architecture of Los Angeles but somehow it always slipped to the bottom of my agenda for any particular trip as I opted to visit the Getty Center or one of many Frank Lloyd Wright houses or some building of Frank Gehry's or whatever else took my fancy. I did actually drive by and stop at the Towers once in 2003 but wasn't allowed to linger any longer than it took to snap a quick picture because my girlfriend at the time had visions of Crips and Bloods dueling in the streets in broad daylight. So I took what I could get then and now I know I was cheated. I don't feel cheated anymore.

Most people have likely never heard of the Watts Towers, so let me explain a little. Imagine you live on a smallish plot of land in a house you've worked hard all your life to afford. You like the neighborhood. The folks that live around you are mostly just like you: hardworking people pulling nine to five shifts (or longer) to make their lives and the lives of their children better every day. Your neighbors have pride in their properties and some of them might even choose to spend a good amount of their free time developing their garden and yard, making it into something they are supremely proud of.

Now imagine your neighbor is Simon Rodia, an Italian immigrant who is employed as a construction worker whenever he can find work. Like some of your other neighbors, Simon spends a lot of time in his yard. But instead of planting his garden with perennials or annuals or maybe even starting a small vegetable plot, he does something different. Way different. In fact, he spends pretty much all his time from the early 1920s until 1954 building a series of towers out of scrap steel, concrete and broken bottles and plates. These towers over time fill his entire property, ultimately topping out at about 100 feet. And you thought your neighbors were a little odd.

That's about the best way I can introduce you to the Watts Towers.

The Towers are pretty much the ultimate work of folk art. They are simple, crude, unsophisticated, born of a single person's passion, an incredible feat of structural engineering and surprisingly beautiful and complex in their elegance and detail. As a point of reference, they closely resemble the works of the Spanish Art Nouveau architect Antoni Gaudi and not just because both men used broken tiles or pottery or soda bottles (in Rodia's case) as surface treatment embedded in concrete walls. There is a lightness and structural purity in the works of both men. But whereas Gaudi drew and others built, Rodia didn't draw but instead built the whole thing straight out of his imagination.

Simon Rodia was born in Rivottoli, Italy in the late 1870s. He came to the United States when his parents emigrated to Pennsylvania along with his older brother sometime around 1894. Eventually he made his way west, settling in Seattle, Washington. He married, had three children and then one day, according to our tour guide, he just picked up and left and never saw his family again. Not exactly the coolest thing to do. 

In 1921, after making his way south from Seattle to Los Angeles while working jobs along the way, he bought a plot of land at 1765 East 107th Street and shortly thereafter he began to build. Up. He built almost continuously for the next 33 years, erecting a monument to his new home and the ship that brought him to the United States. He called his sculpture Nuestro Pueblo (or "our town"), making towers that were also masts and even equipping the finished product with a wheel, which reminded him of the wheel of the ship that brought him and his family across the Atlantic Ocean.

The Towers, which he built with no scaffolding and only tile setter's tools, would consume his life. He poured everything he had into the enterprise. All his free time and all his spare money, even keeping it going through the Great Depression of the 1930s. He re-married but this time, she left him, a result of all the time he spent building and building.

Then in 1954, Rodia quit. He deeded his property to a neighbor and moved to Martinez, California, never to return. Within a year, his house at 1765 East 107th Street burned down but the Towers remained. 62 years later they are still there. They have been passed from organization to organization but now belong to the Watts Towers Arts Center. They have survived both sideways looks from neighbors and demolition efforts from the City of Los Angeles, who gave up after the Towers broke the crane they were using to demolish Rodia's work of art.

The Center offers tours Thursday through Sunday and they are definitely worth the trip. The tours are cheap and short. And by that I mean like $7 cheap and 15 minutes. But they are the only way to get inside the fence and walk among the Towers that Rodia created. And this experience for me was not to be missed. Despite the whirlwind tour, you can always go back and peek through the fence once the tour and the ensuing video (which shows Rodia in action and is awesome) are done.

There's real genius here. His work is almost derivative of Catalan architects of the early 20th century but it's really impossible for him to have known anything much about their work considering he was more or less a contemporary and he was an ocean and a continent away. Rodia for sure was no model father or husband but what he left to the world can be admired on its own level. If nothing else, you have to admire the drive and determination it took him to get out there pretty much every day and build something almost 100 feet high on his spare time over a 33 year period.

I love both the overall lightness of what he created and the details he used to pull it all together. It's astounding on a big picture level how he could have pulled this thing off and on a micro level he adorned every surface with detail which is either relatable in scale or content. I love the concrete corn cobs made from cornbread molds and the flowers stamped from faucet handles. I also love the array of tile colors which are really just cups and saucers and things like 7 Up bottles. It's all pop art and folk art and individual determination and strange neighbor behavior.

Number 88 is in the books and there's still a lot left for me to discover of Los Angeles. It didn't take long but it was definitely worth it. The Towers (and indeed the adjacent Watts Towers Art Center) are perspective altering. The point of travel for me is to see life from another point of view and Watts and the Watts Towers and Compton are worlds away from Arlington, Virginia. You don't need to go halfway around the world to get a different perspective. I'm glad I spent an hour or so in this world.

Walking In L.A.

If there is a place on Earth that I fell in love with at first sight, it is Los Angeles. From the first trip I ever took there in 1993 when I explored the Hollywood Hills looking for Frank Lloyd Wright houses, I've been smitten by the City of Angels. It was the first exception to the "I've been there once, I don't need to ever go back!" rule that I use to push myself to seek out new sights and experiences. L.A. is an exception quite simply because there's so much to do out there. And because there is, I keep going back. I arrived at LAX earlier this month on my fifth trip and I'm still picking things off my wish list. I absolutely LOVE Los Angeles.

One of the unchecked boxes on my L.A. list was to see the Hollywood Sign closer than I ever had before and as it turned out, 2016 was the year to start working on that. I know, what's the big deal, right? In its simplest form, the Sign is a series of nine long-ago, hastily erected 45 foot high plain white letters sitting on a hill without much of a flat spot which causes the word to look a little crooked. But on the deepest of deep levels, the Hollywood Sign represents the City of Los Angeles and symbolizes the hopes and dreams of everyone who's ever moved out west to make it big and become a star. The Hollywood Sign IS the city. It's some pretty complex stuff.

Now I had for sure seen this thing before on one or more of my vacations to the left coast but I never really spent much time trying to get near it or give its history much thought. Yes, I knew it was originally a sign that read "Hollywoodland" to advertise a housing development somewhere in the hills north of town and I could maybe pinpoint the date of its creation to sometime in the first half of the twentieth century, but I'd struggle to tell you much more than that. Now I can tell you a whole lot more (and will, if you read on) including how to get a spectacular view of the front of the Sign without a whole lot of effort.

The story of the Sign began in 1923, when Los Angeles Times publisher Harry Chandler dropped $21,000 to have sheet metal, pipes, telephone poles and 4,000 20-watt bulbs hauled up the top of Mount Lee by a series of mules to cobble together a lighted sign that would spell out Hollywoodland. At night, the sign flashed alternately "HOLLY", "WOOD", "LAND", "HOLLYWOODLAND" and those bulbs burned out frequently so Chandler and his partners hired someone who lived nearby to go change the bulbs whenever they kicked. Good gig if you can get it I guess.

Of course, once the Sign was up, it needed maintenance, especially considering the flimsy nature of the materials used to put the thing together in the first place. And maintain it the owners of Hollywoodland did. Well, until 1939 when they just stopped altogether. Something had to be done.

In 1949, the ownership of the Sign was transferred to the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce (which still owns the licensing rights to this day) and they tore down the last four letters to make it into the first true Hollywood Sign. They also restored the "H" a little bit and then let it sit for a couple of decades. By the early 1970s, it was in sad shape. The last "O" was gone, the first "L" looked like an "I" and a few of the other letters were looking pretty ragged. 

Enter Hugh Hefner, Andy Williams, Alice Cooper, Warner Brothers, Gene Autry and a couple of other characters who banded together to save the Sign and make it what it is today. Each paid for the complete reconstruction of a single letter. First the Sign was on the edge of collapse, then it was gone and then it reappeared looking shiny and new. The Hollywood Sign Trust was formed to make ongoing repairs to make sure the sign never looked anything less than brand new from then on.

When I first contemplated getting a closer look at the Sign, I of course turned to the internet. And found relatively little in the way of good directions. Sure, there are a series of amateur bloggers like me who have written about their personal quests as well as the odd newspaper article that gives some tips for a good view. But everything I read either seemed to show a whole bunch of contextless photos of dirt trails and trees; close up pictures of signs; or two dimensional maps of a place on this planet which is decidedly not two dimensional. Hopefully this post can be clearer than most of the other advice I combed through before heading west.

If there was a consistent theme about how to get a better look at the Sign, it was take a hike in Griffith Park starting near the Griffith Observatory. That was perfect for me: even if my journey didn't get me a good look at some letters, I'd never been to Griffith Park and I'd also never taken a hike in Los Angeles. Who knew you could even do that? Nobody walks in L.A., right?

The detail behind the advice I read about Griffith Park was pretty consistent: walk up Mount Hollywood starting at the Charlie Turner Trailhead for a view of the Sign and get there early to find parking. The Hollywood Sign, funnily enough, is not on Mount Hollywood; it's on Mount Lee, which is one hill over to the west (or left if you are at the Observatory parking lot looking toward the Sign). And the advice about getting there early is correct. Very correct. We got there at about 6:45 on Saturday morning and the lot was already full. We only got a parking spot because someone was leaving, having already finished their morning hike or workout, I guess. Get there early is very good advice. You can park further down the hill but a couple of hours later, all those spots will likely be gone too.

Once you find a place to leave your vehicle, it's time to find the trail and start walking. This, I thought, might take some searching. The only directions I'd found to the trail, which I imagined as a barely visible path marked only by a small blue sign, was that it was somewhere towards the north of the parking lot. Well, it is in the north end of the parking lot but it's impossible to miss. As it turns out the Mount Hollywood Hiking Trail is the only trail we could find up at the top of Griffith Park and it's about fifteen feet wide, is glaringly obviously a trail and full of people. The north end of the parking lot, for those of you who might be directionally challenged, is where you enter the lot. Time to take a walk.

Roughly speaking, a walk to the top of Mount Hollywood up the very wide and very well used trail involves walking straight for a while; then hanging a hard left and walking uphill; pulling a uey then climbing straight to the top of Mount Hollywood. It's an easy hike so it's not really surprising so many people were out in Los Angeles early in the morning doing it. But even though that's exactly what we came to do and we were right there, we never did get to the top.

The closest you can get to the Hollywood Sign on the Mount Hollywood Trail is at the spot where you make a U-turn, which is sponsored by Tiffany & Co. (it is officially the Tiffany & Co. Foundation Overlook). Our objective that day was to get as close to the Sign as possible. If we kept going to the top of the hill, we would be a lot further away than we were at the Overlook and that didn't seem to make a whole lot of sense. So we didn't do it. Looking north from the Griffith Observatory, you can just about make out the trail and the point where it doubles back. I've highlighted that spot with a blue arrow in the photograph above.

When you get to the blue arrow in real life, it's pretty obvious that you shouldn't keep going to get closer to the Sign. In fact, it looked like the best spot to get a great view was a rocky peak much lower and directly in front of Mount Lee. That peak, which is accessed via a path which looks exactly like what I thought I'd be looking for when I got to the Observatory parking lot (i.e. about two feet wide and not in any way flat), is really just a rocky outcropping. But it's probably the best closest view of the Sign you can get in Griffith Park. It's shown using a red arrow both in the photograph above and below.

Getting over to the red arrow takes some doing. The path that the two dudes in the photograph above are walking down runs along a ridge; it's narrow and uneven and ends in a pretty big slope (shown below) that features a chain link fence to catch rock slides (I guess although it might also catch you). We made it fine but we were careful going down and back up the slippery slope. Before you descend, remember you have to go back up.

From there, all you have to do is cross a paved road (watch out for traffic); walk around a chain link fence which is clearly in place to keep people out but which people have clearly found an obvious way around; make your way along a slightly more treacherous ridge; and finally up a gap in the rocks to the graffiti tagged top of the hill. Your reward is the view of the Hollywood Sign in the second photograph above and a spectacular look at Los Angeles to the west (shown below).

If all that seems like a lot of effort for not much of a payoff, you'd be correct. If you want a walk in Griffith Park and an amazing look at the city of L.A. drive to the Observatory, park and take a walk up to the top of Mount Hollywood. If you want a close look at the Hollywood Sign without a lot of effort, don't do what I've written above. There's a way easier way to get an awesome view. And it's so simple.

Folks living in the Hollywood Hills aren't exactly crazy about Sign seekers. Depending on how hard you are willing to look, you'll find signs like the one at the top of this post or makeshift barriers stretched across residential streets with "Road Closed Locals Only" signs and gaps barely wide enough for a single car. I guess I can understand that to a certain degree. You don't want tourists traipsing around your neighborhoods in their cheap rental cars. On the other hand, don't buy a house in this part of town if you want to get away from tourists.

But there's one spot really close to the Sign that they can't keep you out of: Lake Hollywood Park and the roads leading to it. It's a public park, after all.

The original gates to Hollywoodland.

Type "Lake Hollywood Park" into Google Maps or whatever (less effective) mapping program you opt to use and the spot pops up easily. Getting there from Griffith Park (where we happened to be) involves a quick 5.8 mile drive, although for the best views of the sign, you actually want to park before you get to the Park and walk a little bit back the way you came. Hang a right on Los Feliz when you exit Griffith Park and merge onto Franklin before making another right turn onto Beechwood Drive. Now you are heading for the Hills.

Stay on Beechwood for a bit and you'll pass through the original gates to Hollywoodland, two masonry structures on either side of the road just before it jogs left a bit and starts the climb. The structure on the left is a simple arch; the more elaborate tower with a plaque describing the historic significance of the place you have just passed through is on the right. Stop if you want and if you can find parking; it's kind of cool but you aren't going to be hanging out here too long. Besides, the real prize is coming up.

Take a left off Beechwood onto Canyon Lake Drive and things get really good. If you've never driven throughout the neighborhoods in the hills surrounding Los Angeles, you are in for a surprise. Even if you have but have not been on these roads, you might still be in for some treats. Roads and houses shouldn't be in these hills. It's completely unnatural. They are far too twisty and narrow to make any sense at all and around every other bend are views of housed perched precariously on some tiny spot of flat ground or more often than not on some silly looking columns braced nine ways to Sunday to prevent the whole enterprise coming crashing down in an earthquake. All this for a great view and a place away from riff raff like me.

After what seems like a crazy amount of twists and turns, you'll finally see the Hollywood Sign. And it's really really close. It's about three times closer than the closest point we stood in Griffith Park. Unfortunately, when you first see the Sign this close, there's nowhere to pull off and park. After all, you are still driving on a street probably a bit too tight even for two way traffic.

Keep going. About a half mile further just before you reach Lake Hollywood Park, there are places to dump the car in a parking lane on either side of the road. And there's a sidewalk heading back up the hill. Pull over, take a quick pic like the one above and start hoofing it. It's a really easy walk and pretty soon, you'll be standing in front of what you have traveled however far you have traveled to see.

From our spot on the side of the road, we got an amazing view of the front of the Sign. It's in some ways not very impressive at all. It is, you might say, just nine letters. But I'm a believer in symbolism and objects meaning way more than they appear to be. From the location we walked to we were close enough to see the letters in detail and the structure behind. We could also see far better the crazy way the letters are arrayed over the otherwise untouched slope of Mount Lee. More than all that, we were standing in front of an American icon. And that's what we came for. All of this was way worth the three or so hour investment. One more Los Angeles box checked!

From our spot on the side of the road, we could see people above the Sign looking at its back. There's an official way to hike there and probably a few more non-official ways but we didn't have time on this trip. Maybe next time we'll do that or just ignore the Locals Only signs in the roads. If you are fascinated with the Hollywood Sign and don't have a lot of time to spend finding it, I'd suggest you do what we did and head to Lake Hollywood Park. It's the best, easiest way to get a great look.

The money shot!