Times of the Sign

California Proposition 64 passed on Election Day November 2016 with over 57% voter approval and became law on November 9. California's Adult Use of Marijuana Act (AUMA) legalized recreational cannabis, allowing adults to possess up to an ounce of marijuana and to cultivate up to six marijuana plants at home.

On New Year's Eve 2016, in recognition of the state's new law, a prankster changed the letters on the iconic Hollywood Sign to read, "HOLLYWeeD." Recorded by security cameras, the perp, dressed in black, used white tarps to alter the sign.

Thirty-year-old Zachary Cole Fernandez was arrested just over a week after the prank. The Pomona artist, who took credit for the deed on social media, turned himself in to the police and was booked on misdemeanor trespassing. Fernandez, saying he wanted to bring positivity into the world, admitted he was inspired by a similar prank in the 1970s. In fact, the last time the sign was vandalized was in 1976 to honor the passage of a state law decriminalizing marijuana (pictured below).

Eighty-plus years prior to Mr. Fernandez' prank, the Hollywood Sign was the site of a singular tragedy. In mid-September 1932, a forlorn would-be starlet managed to climb the 45-foot tall "H" of then "Hollywoodland" sign and pitched to her death.

Millicent Lilian "Peg" Entwistle was a Welsh-born stage actress who appeared in several Broadway productions before migrating to Los Angeles in 1932 for a role in a play starring Billie Burke (who would become famous as Glinda the Good Witch in "The Wizard of Oz") and costarring Humphrey Bogart. The theater critic for the Los Angeles Examiner singled out Entwistle and Bogart for holding "first place in supporting the star and both give fine, serious performances. Miss Entwistle...presents a charming picture of youth."

Whatever Entwistle's show business dreams in Hollywood were, she appeared in only one motion picture, "Thirteen Women," starring Myrna Loy and Irene Dunne, which premiered apparently on the same day she killed herself. According to Entwistle's uncle, she had told him she was going for a walk to a nearby drugstore to visit friends. Her published suicide note enigmatically read, "I am afraid I am a coward. I am sorry for everything. If I had done this a long time ago, it would have saved a lot of pain." She was 24. Just after her death, a letter for her was delivered from a Beverly Hills theater, offering her the lead role in a play about a woman driven to suicide.

Peg Entwistle was briefly married to actor Robert Keith in the late 1920s, supposedly unaware that he had been previously married and was the father of a six-year-old son, future actor Brian Keith (best known as the gruff but lovable bachelor uncle in the late 1960s sitcom "Family Affair"). Coincidentally, Brian committed suicide in 1997, two months after his daughter killed herself.

Located on the slope of Mount Lee in the Hollywood Hills area of the Santa Monica Mountains, the sign was originally erected in 1923 as an advertisement for Hollywoodland, an upscale residential development that would go bust as a casualty of the Great Depression. Spelled out 350 feet long in 45-foot high letters, the sign, which cost $21,000 to manufacture and erect (nearly $300,000 today) was intended to last only a year-and-a-half, but as it drew increasing visitors, it remained standing.

The sign was studded with 4000 20-watt light bulbs that would flash in succession, beginning with "HOLLY," next "WOOD," then "LAND," and finally the entire sign. A searchlight below the sign attracted even more attention.

The Hollywoodland sign dominates the hillside of 1930s Los Angeles.

In 1949, the Hollywood Chamber Commerce repaired and renovated the sign, discarding the light bulbs to conserve electricity costs and removing "LAND" to reflect the change in the local housing development.

By 1978, thanks in a large part to a public drive to restore the sadly deteriorating landmark, led by Playboy magazine publisher Hugh Hefner, the entire sign was replaced with a more permanent, steel construction. Nine donors, including Hefner, former singing cowboy Gene Autry, crooner Andy Williams, and shock rocker Alice Cooper, chipped in $27,700 each to replace each of the nine letters. This new version was officially unveiled as part of a CBS-TV special commemorating the 75th anniversary of Hollywood's 1903 incorporation as a city. The sign was refurbished again in 2005.

For well over 90 years, the sign has dominated the landscape of the Hollywood hills. It has, understandably, become one of the most popular backdrops for tourist snapshots in Southern California, some of which have proved very creative.

It was only inevitable that such a prominent Tinseltown icon would become a familiar fixture in so many motion pictures and television programs. This outing in the Moviehouse aptly screens the Films of the Hollywood Sign.

John Schlesinger was a London-born filmmaker who viewed American culture through a lens darkly, in such bleak, nihilistic dramas as "Midnight Cowboy" (for which he won the Best Director Oscar), "Marathon Man," and "The Day of The Locust" (1975), which presented a nigh-on apocalyptic portrait of Hollywood as a bus stop of artificial glitter for a handful of desperate dreamers who encounter only alienation and disillusion while they, in the words of critic Roger Ebert, wait "for a bus that will never come."

Based on the 1939 novel by Nathanael West (a New York novelist who was hired as a screenwriter by Columbia Pictures in the mid-1930s and moved to California, where he and his wife were killed in an automobile accident at the end of 1940), which was a scathing satire of the betrayal of the American dream, the film featured William Atherton, Karen Black, Donald Sutherland, and Burgess Meredith as disparate Hollywood grotesques.

Karen Black, who portrays an aspiring but untalented actress, poses
in front of a mock-up of the Hollywood Sign. Black's bare-boned
performance earned her a Best Actress Golden Globe nomination.

The 1976 cult satire "Hollywood Bouldevard" came about as the result of a bet fledgling producer Jon Davison made with B-movie studio king Roger Corman that he could crank out a movie cheaper than any previous production distributed by Corman's New World Pictures. Davison later entered the major leagues as a producer of "Airplane!", "RoboCop," and, among others, "Starship Troopers."

Corman gave Davison a budget of $60,000 and restricted him to a ten-day shooting schedule. Co-directors Allan Arkush (best known for "Rock ''n' Roll High School") and Joe Dante (best known for "Gremlins") managed to concoct a threadbare plot about an unseen murderer terrorizing a struggling poverty-row studio, allowing the real-life filmmakers to cannibalize scenes from any number of earlier cheapies churned out by Corman himself.

The cast of Corman stock company regulars in "Hollywood Boulevard" included Paul Bartel (a director in his own right, known for "Death Race 2000" and "Eating Raoul") as the director of the movie-within-the-movie titled "Machetes of Mora Tau," Eric Von Lippe (named after Boris Karloff's character Baron Von Lippe in Roger Corman's "The Terror," which featured a young Jack Nicholson as a Napoleonic officer), and Dick Miller as actor-turned-agent Walter Paisley, which is the name of the character Miller first played in Corman's "Bucket of Blood" and repeated in cameos in such films as "The Howling" and "Chopping Mall."

(Top) Paul Bartel chews the scenery and directs the action as Eric Von
Lippe on the set of "Machetes of Mora Tau"; (bottom) Dick Miller
toasts costar Robbie the Robot on the set of "Hollywood Boulevard." 

Mary Woronov, a genre actress with a cult following of her own, who appeared opposite the aforementioned Paul Bartel in a number of films, including "Death Race 2000," "Rock 'n' Roll High School," "Eating Raoul," "Chopping Mall," and "Get Crazy," is revealed as the phantom killer who targets aspiring starlet-stunt driver Candice Rialson as her ultimate victim for murder at the base of the dilapidated Hollywood Sign, which collapses and crushes her before she can pull the trigger.

Mary Woronov is moments away from death-by-sign
in 1976's "Hollywood Boulevard."

In "Superman: The Movie" (1978), when criminal genius Lex Luthor (Gene Hackman) unleashes two nuclear missiles, Christopher Reeve's Man of Steel is only able to thwart the one targeting New Jersey, while the other explodes on the West Coast's San Andreas Fault, triggering devastating aftershocks. In the Hollywood Hills, the toppling Hollywood Sign endangers a troop of hiking girl scouts (pictured below).

It's only when Clark Kent's beloved Lois Lane smothers in the debris of a crevice caused by the quake that Superman reverses the rotation of the Earth to turn back time before the atomic destruction, saving Lois from otherwise certain death, not to mention sparing the errant patrol of girl scouts.

Steven Spielberg has made only a handful of turkeys, among them "Hook," "Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull," and "1941" (1979), the latter an especially annoying, supposedly funnier-if-it's-louder comedy that embarrasses an ensemble cast of elsewise intelligent thespians: Ned Beatty,  John Candy, Murray Hamilton, Christopher Lee, Toshiro Mifune, Warren Oates, Slim Pickens, Robert Stack, and Treat Williams. Based loosely in the loosest of senses on a false air raid alert in post-Pearl Harbor Los Angeles in 1942 and a minor naval attack by a lone Japanese submarine near Santa Barbara, the relentlessly noisy, excruciatingly humorless tedium was written by "Back to the Future" scenarists Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale, along with John Milius (best known for the laugh riots "Apocalypse Now," "Conan the Barbarian," and "Red Dawn").

At least the muddled mayhem offers an amusing explanation for the absence of the "land" portion of the hillside sign. Engaging in the so-called Battle of Los Angeles, Captain "Wild Bill" Kelso (John Belushi), an unbolted wing nut of the U.S. Army Air Corps, aggressively pursues what he perceives to be a Japanese Zero - actually an unarmed reconnaissance plane piloted by a horny captain ("Animal House's" Tim Matheson) and an aviaphile with an airplane fetish ("Carrie's" Nancy Allen) - above the searchlights of nighttime Hollywood Boulevard. In a buzz-by strafing, Kelso's guns aboard his Curtiss P-40 Warhawk manage to take out the tail end of the landmark sign, leaving only "Hollywood" standing.

"Chaplin" (1992), producer-director Richard Attenborough's sprawling biographical picture about the silent film era's comedy genius, Charlie Chaplin, featured an Oscar-nominated performance by Robert Downey Jr. in the title role. The impressive supporting cast boasted Anthony Hopkins, Marisa Tomei, Dan Ayroyd, Milla Jovovich, Diane Lane, James Woods, David Duchovny, Geraldine Chaplin (as her own grandmother), and Kevin Kline (pictured below, with Robert Downey Jr.), as Chaplin's best friend, silent movie swashbuckler Douglas Fairbanks Sr. In one memorable scene, Chaplin and Fairbanks are enjoying a horseback ride in the Hollywood hills when Douglas decides to climb the Hollywoodland sign and perform some gymnastic stunts atop one of the letters.

Also in 1992, an enormous cutout of "Holli Would," the sexy animated femme fatale (based on and voiced by Kim Basinger) in director Ralph Bakshi's "Roger Rabbit"-inspired live action-animated feature "Cool World,"was propped atop the letter "D" in the Hollywood Sign (pictured below). The addition riled local residents, who found the cartoon character "appalling" and "offensive to Los Angeles women."

The live-action cast in "Cool World" included
Gabriel Byrne, Brad Pitt, and Frank Sinatra Jr.

As posited in the 1993 science fiction opus "Demolition Man," a sociopathic crime lord (Wesley Snipes) and a rogue cop (Sylvester Stallone - gee, what a surprise!), cryogenically frozen in the 1990s, are thawed in a supposedly utopian, crime-fee society of 2023. Mayhem ensues. Including the Hollywood Sign in flames (pictured below).

The multifaceted cast of "Demolition Man" features Sandra Bullock,
Benjamin Bratt, comedian Denis Leary, Adam Sandler hanger-on
Rob Schneider (in his first of two supporting roles for Stallone,
preceding "Judge Dredd"), Bob Gunton (best known as the warden in
"The Shawshank Redempiton"), comic actor Jack Black, and former
Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura.

Director John Carpenter's anticipated sequel to 1981's "Escape from New York" and the long-awaited return of Kurt Russell as snarling, one-eyed antihero-for-hire Snake Plissken lingered in so-called development hell for well over a decade before finally being resurrected - inspired in part by the 1994 Los Angeles riots and the '94 earthquake in the San Fernando Valley - and released in 1996 as "Escape from L.A."

John Carpenter dismissed the original script for "Escape from L.A."
by Coleman Luck (who wrote numerous teleplays for the Edward
Woodward series "The Equalizer") as "too campy." What isn't campy
about the intentionally hokey rear-screen surfing duel between
Kurt Russell and aging Hollywood rebel Peter Fonda?...
Wouldn't a motorcycle matchup have been more appropriate?

Kurt Russell himself co-produced the sequel, with Carpenter's longtime producing partner Debra Hill, and co-wrote (with Carpenter and Hill) the screenplay, which depicts a post-quake LA as an isolated, corrupt, crime-ridden island. Among the ravaged Angeleno mainstays is, of course, the Hollywood Sign (pictured below).

Sixteen years after globe-trotting filmmakers Merian C. Cooper and Ernest Schoedsack unleashed the seminal giant ape movie "King Kong" in 1933, they reunited with "Kong" star Robert Armstrong and presented a smaller, cuter, family-friendly simian in 1949's "Mighty Joe Young," costarring Ben Johnson and Terry Moore. Director Ron Underwood (best known for "City Slickers" and the first "Tremors" film) remade "Mighty Joe Young" in 1998, starring Dennis Quaid and Charize Theron, and featuring a high-tech full body suit and animatronic gorilla mask created by multiple Academy Award-winning special makeup effects wizard Rick Baker. On a rampage in Los Angeles, Joe angrily plucks one of "O's" from the Hollywood Sign and hurls it (pictured below).

As depicted in German filmmaker Wim Wenders' wondrous 1987 fantasy "Wings of Desire," invisible, immortal angels roam among the living in Berlin, choosing to gather at such breathtaking sites as the shoulder of the statue of the Roman goddess Victory perched atop the Victory Column that looms 220 feet over the city's large intersection known as the Great Star (pictured below). At the beginning of the limp 1998 American remake, "City of Angels," starring Meg Ryan and deadpan Nicolas Cage as one of the dullest angels this side of heaven, the angels gather together atop the Hollywood Sign. At movie's end, the angels congregate on a Malibu beach to watch the sunrise.

Tom Berenger, Rod Steiger, and Burt Reynolds portrayed three has-been actors whose boozy reunion at the funeral of an agent leads them to the Hollywood Sign, where they stumble upon a man's corpse and uncover a scheme for a Las Vegas casino heist, which they hope will finance their planned comeback. It all sounds suspiciously Quentin-Tarantino-esque. Titled, appropriately, "The Hollywood Sign" (pictured below), the 2001 German-Dutch co-production was directed by German filmmaker Snöke Wortmann from a script by Dutch columnist-novelist Leon de Winter.

"The Hollywood Sign" was Rod Steiger's penultimate film, prior to
his role in 2002's "Poolhall Junkies" and his death in July 2002.

In 2002's "Austin Powers in Goldmember," the final installment of comedian Mike Myers' trilogy spoofing swinging super spies of the mod '60s, the secret lair of Dr. Evil and Mini-Me is revealed as having been built in the hill behind the Hollywood Sign.

The heck with global warming, as envisioned by writer-producer-director Roland Emmerich (best known for "Independence Day" and the really bad "Godzilla" reboot with Matthew Broderick), global cooling triggers a series of natural cataclysms worldwide that usher in a new, global ice age, in the ludicrously over-the-top disaster flick "The Day After Tomorrow" (2004). The Hollywood Sign is destroyed by a tornado (pictured below) as Jake Gyllenhaal, in New York, talks on the phone with dad Dennis Quaid.

In the post-apocalyptic Los Angeles of "Terminator: Salvation" (2009), when a member of a group of resistance fighters goes to Griffith Park to find a car to rebuild, the charred remains of the Hollywood Sign can be seen on nearby Mount Lee (pictured below). According to one blogger, "No disaster film is complete without the Hollywood Sign shown in pieces...that's when you know the world as we know it is in serious trouble!"

As discovered by the teenage protagonist (played by Logan Lerman) and his companions - in a modern-day mythological quest to retrieve Zeus' stolen lightning bolt - in the 2010 action-fantasy picture "Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief," the gateway to the Greek Underworld of Hades is in the Hollywood Sign. Some reviewers likened the film to a "Harry Potter" knockoff, which wasn't surprising as director Chris Columbus (who also made "Home Alone" and "Mrs. Doubtfire") was responsible for the first two installments of the long-running "Harry Potter" movie franchise.

Logan Lerman poses on the set of "Percy Jackson & the Olympians:
The Lightning Thief" at the base of the Hollywood Sign.

Another fantasy motion picture from 2010 to acknowledge the Hollywood Sign was "Resident Evil: Afterlife," the fourth entry (of six, to date) in the "Resident Evil" film series to feature Milla Jovovich as "Alice," a rebel security operative for the villainous Umbrella Corporation, a bioengineering company that created a zombie apocalypse by infecting Earth's population with its genetic mutating T-virus. The Moviehouse has always had a problem sifting through the jumbled, overstuffed, convoluted plots of any of the franchise's installments, and frankly, we don't know the difference between Milla Jovovich's  "Resident Evil" pictures and Kate Beckinsale's (five) "Underworld" films. Besides, they both dress like leather-corseted dominatrices with sassy hair.

Tell you the truth, when it comes to kickass women in sci-fi sagas,
we'll take stripped-down Sigourney Weaver in her skivvies any day.

Suffice it to say that in "Resident Evil: Afterlife," Jovovich's character discovers human survivors in a prison among the ruins of Los Angeles, which include a weathered and blasted Hollywood Sign.

Unquestionably the SyFy Channel's most popular in-house production ever, 2013's "Sharknado" - postulating that a freak hurricane off the coast of Southern California could literally scoop up assorted species of sharks in water spouts and wreak havoc in vortices of man-eating frenzy across the Los Angeles area - became an instant cult hit and has spawned, so far, three sequels, with a fourth planned for summer of this year.

One of the shark-infested tornados blows letters off the Hollywood Sign. Rescued from a school bus, a hapless teacher who moved from Wyoming to LA to become an actor utters, "My mom always told me that Hollywood would kill me!" before being pulverized to bloody bits by one of the flying letters from the sign.

There was a point in his career during the 1990s when actor Steve Guttenberg refused to be interviewed about his participation in the series of "Police Academy" comedies of the '80s. A low-rent variation on the snobs-vs-slobs anarchy of "Animal House," "Caddyshack," and "Stripes," the first four (of seven) films in the "Police Academy" presented Guttenberg as a smirky, cocksure, prankster named Mahoney. While his former costars openly reminisced about behind-the-scenes shenanigans, Guttenberg suspected writers just wanted to ridicule him.

What's not to ridicule about a character who makes his debut in
the first "Police Academy" movie in male daisy dukes and a
muscle-less muscle shirt with a sexist slogan?

What a difference three decades make. In 2015, Steve Guttenberg - playing Colton West, a washed-up action movie hero reduced to battling big bugs in bargain basement-budgeted potboilers - hooked back up with "Police Academy" costars Michael Winslow, Leslie Easterbrook, and Marion Ramsey in the SyFy Channel's tongue-in-cheek apocalyptic romp "Lavalantula," a creature feature about volcanic eruptions in Los Angeles that unleash torrents of lava and swarms of gigantic, fire-breathing tarantulas.

Onetime "Police Academy" cadets Michael Winslow, Steve
Guttenberg, and Marion Ramsey cowboy up to open a can of
whoop-ass on furry, flame-throwing freaks in "Lavalantula."

Ian Ziering, the star of the "Sharknado" films, repeated his role from that franchise as former surfer "Fin" Shepard for a cameo in "Lavalantula." Likewise, Guttenberg popped up in his "Lavalantula" character Colton West for a cameo in "Sharknado 4: The Fourth Awakens," confirming, in the words of the International Film Movie Database, that the two SyFy flicks exist "in the same universe." The incendiary arachnids predictably reduce such LA landmarks as the Hollywood Sign to ashes (depicted below in publicity artwork).

For almost 50 years producer-screenwriter-director David Cronenberg has forged a singular career, creating inimitable works that often explore the visceral horror of people's fear of bodily transformation, mutation, and infection, stitching together psychological dread and physical terror in such films as "Rabid," "Scanners," "Videodrome," "The Fly," and "Crash." Perhaps viewed as a change of pace for the director, but nonetheless unique, was 2014's "Maps to the Stars," a satirical drama about a particular Hollywood dynasty that includes a TV psychologist; his son, a 13-year-old child star just out of rehab; his daughter, who was recently released from a sanitarium for treatment of criminal pyromania; and his client, a washed-up actress haunted by memories of abuse from her movie-star mother.

The prestigious cast of "Maps to the Stars" included John Cusack, Julianne Moore, Mia Wasikowska, and Robert Pattinson, with an amusing cameo by Carrie Fisher as herself.

During the production of the film, some media attention was drawn to director Cronenberg's illumination of the Hollywood Sign for night shooting, 65 years after the famous flashing bulbs had been unscrewed from the Hollywoodland structure. Instead of contending with bureaucratic red tape, the filmmakers irradiated the sign with powerful 4K Hydrargyrum medium-arc iodide (HMI) lamps from a mile-and-a-half away. Cronenberg explained, "It's no different than shining a light from a helicopter. I was frankly just surprised to learn the sign wasn't lit in the first place. If it were Paris, it would be lit at night!"

Dwayne Johnson starred as a stalwart Los Angeles Fire Department Air Rescue pilot dealing with an impending divorce and planning a trip to San Francisco with his daughter when a series of devastating earthquakes cause massive destruction along the fault line from LA to the Frisco Bay in the 2015 disaster spectacle "San Andreas." Predictably, one of the movie's early tremors topples the Hollywood Sign (pictured below), reinforcing the aforementioned quip by the internet wit who said, "No disaster film is complete without the Hollywood Sign shown in pieces," because "that's when you know the world as we know it is in serious trouble!"

Postscript:

As opposed to the exploitation, abuse, and downright destruction the storied Hollywood Sign has repeatedly endured in motion pictures, 20th Century Fox paid overdue homage to the iconic emblem of Tinseltown by including it, even if subtly, in its revamped logo in 2009 (pictured below).

Afterthought:

Once upon a time, there was an Atlanta-based hip-hop group called Ghost Town DJ's. In 1996, they released their only single, "My Boo." In 2016, the song resurged in popularity and became a hit viral meme known as "The Running Man Challenge," in which participants were filmed performing a dance as if running to the song. Not to be outdone by other contenders, the Los Angeles Police Department good-naturedly accepted the challenge and went viral on YouTube by recording their best '90s dance moves in such locations as Dodger Stadium and the Hollywood Sign. It is a joyous, smile-inducing wonder to behold!

Parting Shot:

Hooray for Hollywood!
That screwy ballyhooey Hollywood!
Where any office boy or young mechanic
Can be a panic...
Where any barmaid can be a star maid...
(1937) Lyrics: Johnny Mercer