7/18/22
Newsletter45
The Ass Crack of Dawn
I pull my shade and its night. Why do I bother lowering the shade?
I don’t know about you, but I’m still pissed off about the 1950 Oscars. Bette Davis was nominated for her astounding performance in “All About Eve,” Gloria Swanson gave a one-of-a-kind performance that only she could do in “Sunset Boulevard,” and the Oscar went to Judy Holliday in “Born Yesterday”? Judy Holliday? She plays a dumb blonde, and does fine, but it’s completely unmemorable, as is Judy Holliday herself. Beyond that, the movie, “Born Yesterday,” isn’t very good and hasn’t aged well. Since Bette Davis had already won two Oscars by then, it obviously had to go to Gloria Swanson. And nobody but her could have played her part, whereas a dozen actresses in Hollywood could have easily played Holliday’s part. It’s a travesty, and I’m still angry (even though I wasn’t born until eight years later).
When I first moved to Hollywood in 1976 the Hollywood sign was dilapidated and falling apart. The top half of the first O had broken off making it a small u, and the third O had just fallen off, so it read, HuLLYWO D. It was covered with graffiti and in a big wind garage door-sized hunks of sheet metal would come flying off. And since Hollywood in 1976 was such a shithole, the sign seemed so perfectly appropriate that nobody did anything about it. Built in 1923 reading HOLLYWOODLAND, it was meant as a temporary advertisement for the housing complex below it in Beachwood Canyon. At some point in the 1940s the sign’s watchman drunkenly drove his car into the H and knocked it down, but they put it back up. Finally, in 1978 a restoration committee was formed by Hugh Hefner and Alice Cooper, and the sign was rebuilt.
Also, when I lived in Hollywood in 1976-78, there was an astoundingly shitty movie theater at the eastern end of Hollywood Blvd, where it dead ends into Sunset Blvd. (and where the Babylon set for D.W. Griffith’s 1915 “Intolerance” rotted for 23 years), called The World Theater. It showed triple-bills of the worst garbage movies for 99-cents. You paid a dollar and got a ticket and a penny. It was about a 500-seat house, and probably a third of the seats were broken. The audience never shut up, yelling anything they felt like all the time. In some crappy Charles Bronson cop movie, his partner was an attractive Asian girl. Every time she appeared, some black dude in the audience would yell, “China Girl!” The World Theater miraculously showed a good movie by mistake. I love the movie “Carrie.” Since it had already played its theatrical circuit, it was now stuck in the middle of a triple-bill between (get this) “Torso” and “Day of the Animals.” So, I’m trying to watch “Carrie” for the fifth time and a guy right in front of me is talking full blast. I politely say, “Shut the fuck up.” He replies, “It’s OK, I’m an actor.” Right, I thought, I’m in Hollywood.
In 1976 I lived in an apartment kitty-corner from Paramount Pictures, on Melrose and Van Ness, for $65 a month. Directly across the street was the side of an old sound stage that you could just make out “Clune” which is what it was called in 1915. I would go for breakfast sometimes at that film studio, now called the Producer’s Studio. It was just open, and you could walk freely in or out. It contained many low-end production companies, the biggest being Sherwood Schwartz Productions, producers of “Gilligan’s Island” and “The Brady Bunch.” I saw Mr. Schwartz in the commissary a few times, but never spoke to him. That building is now Raleigh Studios.
The illumination of dawn brings the awareness that it’s trash day.