The initial sign had thousands of light bulbs on it so that it could be seen at night. In 1939, the real estate developers who had erected the sign sixteen years earlier decided to stop maintenance on it. Roughly two years later, a drunk driver ran into the ‘H’ and it came crashing down. By 1949, the once glamorous sign was run down and ready to be sold as scrap. This was when the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce (HCC) decided to step up to the plate and take control of the sign. The HCC agreed to take financial responsibility of the sign and repair it, but under one condition. In order to keep their costs more manageable, the Chamber wanted to remove the last four letters of the sign. And like that, the L-A-N-D of the Hollywoodland was gone.

Since very few people are aware of this bit of Hollywood trivia, filmmakers have occasionally offered their own interpretation of the removal of the L-A-N-D. Steven Spielberg had John Belushi’s Wild Bill Kelso crash into the last four letters in 1941 and Joe Johnston had flaming debris from a blimp explosion knock them down in his movie, The Rocketeer.

Given the timeline of the Hollywoodland sign–namely that it no longer existed in 1949–it’s strange to consider that Universal titled their film about events taking place in 1959, Hollywoodland.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK #1

"No, I’m not over here."

- Sara Roemer let’s her mother know where she isn’t in Disturbia.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK #2

"Steve was freaking. He said he was going to go away for murder and we should just disappear. Sail off to the Bahamas or Belize. Dump the woman’s body and steal her boat… You know, typical Steve stuff."

-a twenty-something female suspect talks to investigators about her boyfriend, Steve, in CSI Miami.

The latter quote is a personal favorite of mine. It works well on the page, but is even better on screen. I can’t quite express how brilliant the actress’ delivery is. She is trying to explain what happened after her boyfriend murdered a woman aboard a boat and is going fine until she decides to add ‘you know, typical Steve stuff’. Yup, murdering people, getting rid of their bodies and stealing boats, that’s just a typical day for Steve.

PUBLICIST TALES

For those who don’t know, publicists are hired representatives who work with the press in order to promote both movies and individual talent. They serve as liaisons between the Hollywood stars and journalists, spokespeople for stars in trouble and as the occasional facilitator of stories benefiting their clients/projects. Often, they are also incredibly horrible, comically stupid people. The stories told here are all real and, though it might seem hard to believe, not inflated in any way.

Younger publicists refuse to ever say anything bad about the movies/clients they’re representing. This occasionally becomes an issue with me when the product in question is really bad or involves Eric Roberts in some way. Amazing and fantastic are two of a publicist’s favorite words. When pitching their clients, everything and everyone is amazing and fantastic. I’m a strong believer in the fact that if everything is amazing, then nothing is amazing, so I always ask for perspective. When a publicist tells me that X project or actor is fantastic, I’ll ask her to give me something that she thinks isn’t amazing, so I can see how our tastes match.

Good publicists will use this question as an out and say something to the effect of, "Okay, this new Billy Dee Williams movie isn’t Oscar worthy, but it’s interesting because it was shot over a five year time span. It’s got a lot of intriguing angles to it." Publicists on the opposite end of the spectrum will attempt to actually answer my question. And I say ‘attempt’ because if they’re trying to answer it, they will never have a satisfactory response… because in their eyes everything is amazing.

A twenty-something publicist who was working on the DVD release of Will Ferrell’s Talledega Nights called me last year and informed me that I had to see the movie because it was, of course, amazing. I asked her to give me the title of a movie that she’d seen recently and didn’t like. And she was stumped. She couldn’t do it.

"Then give me the name of one movie you’ve seen in your life that you haven’t liked," I said. There was a long pause before the publicist told me she still couldn’t think of one movie that fit the billing.

At this point, I had a choice to make: I could have gracefully exited the conversation letting her off easy or I could have pushed forward. Fascinated by the fact that this woman was telling me that she couldn’t think of a single film she’d ever seen and hated (I can think of two that I’ve seen in the last five days, Zodiac and Shooter), I opted for the latter choice and steamrolled forth, telling myself that I wasn’t being an asshole, instead I was conducting a sociological experiment.

"What about books you’ve read that you haven’t liked?" I questioned. More nervous stammering. "Food you don’t like?" I asked attempting to cover my ever-growing incredulity.

"I’m pretty easy when it comes to food," she told me. "I’ll eat whatever."

"How about fashion?" I tried. "There has to be some style of clothing you don’t like."

The publicist took a deep breath and said, "You’re right and I know there have to be some."

"Bell-bottoms? Flipping your collar up? Uggs? Tight rolling your jeans?" I asked, trying to help her out by mentioning several of the more egregious fashion blunders of the last two decades. Her ears perked up after hearing my last suggestion. "The last one!" she said triumphantly. "I don’t like guys who wear jeans."

That comment I let slide, not sure that I was quite ready to learn why the only thing this particular publicist didn’t like was the most universally approved fashion product of the last two centuries.

Greener publicists often break when they realize that they are just spinning lies to people; they haven’t completely accepted this part of the job yet. You could spend 10 minutes talking to an experienced publicist whose most famous client had just been arrested for driving drunk in a stolen car with his baby sitting in the front seat on top of a brick of cocaine and his mother’s dead body in the backseat and that publicist could be hard-pressed to find a negative thing to say about the person. On the other side of things is this exchange I had with a young female publicist for the movie Disturbia in the lobby prior to its screening.

ME: Is this movie going to suck as much as I think it’s going to?

PUBLICIST: Everyone I’ve been talking to has been giving it mixed reviews!

ME: (pregnant pause) Uh, I’ll take that as a yes.

PUBLICIST: You have to remember that this movie was made for teens.

ME: An emphatic yes.

PUBLICIST: I really liked it!

ME: So it sucks, huh?

PUBLICIST: (long sigh and then resignedly) Yeah…

PRESS PHOTO IN THE SPOTLIGHT