Hollywood inhabits a seminal place in Los Angeles as well as the broader geography of American enterprise, cities, and popular culture. Hollywood carries a multiple valence as an economic, spatial, and symbolic site. Hollywood comprises an industry, place, and a Acommunity.= By industry I mean a factory complex, a machinery of mass cultural production comprised of studios, actors, writers and producers who control and represent some defining features of our collective life. By place I mean a spatial location, a Abright-light@ district which is demarcated by buildings, boulevards, and symbol-laden sites. Communal sentiments are furthermore situated and enacted in the location of Hollywood through place-based rituals such as parades, premieres, and awards ceremonies. By Acommunity@ I mean a state of mind or an imagined community, a collective representation of dominant images, icons, and stories of American mass popular culture. There are motion picture colonies and bright-light districts across America and the globe, but in few other places (save perhaps Hong Kong and Bombay=s ABollywood@) does the machinery of mass culture so centrally typify the economy and identity of a metropolis, an ideology of collective life, and a particular landscape of global capitalism.

Following the Asociocultural A or symbolic interactionist school of urban sociology, (Firey 1945, Wohl and Strauss 1958, Suttles 1984, Lofland 1991), the symbolic Hollywood persists in our urban collective consciousness through the cumulative durability of a number of mawkish seasonal rituals and suggestive sites. These include the Academy Awards, blockbuster film premieres at marvelous movie palaces such as the Grauman=s Chinese Theater, celebrity hand and foot ceremonies in the Chinese Theater courtyard, sidewalk inscriptions on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, the Santa Claus Lane parade, and the penultimate iconographic landmarkBthe Hollywood sign--which fabulously advertises the metropolis from Mt. Lee. Cultural spectacles and civic place history did not spring or evolve naturalistically out of Hollywood, but were created and perpetuated by impresarios, showmen, entrepreneurs, and boosters, intent on serving private capitalist interest as much as public or community purpose. A study of Hollywood can thus be informed by the political-economic perspective of the Anew urban sociology@ (Gottdiener and Feagin 1988, Logan and Molotch 1988), especially the critical cultural school (Zukin 1995, Gottdiener 1997), as we discern how metropolitan fortunes and identities under postindustrialism are increasingly derived from the fabrication of thematic sites and symbols.

From a critical cultural studies vantage point, a perspective on Hollywood is not necessarily place-based, being also represented through the semiotic cuisinart of supermarket tabloids and gushing television gossip serials such as AAccess Hollywood@ and AEntertainment Tonight.@ The international theme restaurant franchise, Planet Hollywood, invites association with cinema stars as part and parcel of an exclusive culinary and entertainment experience. This celebrity venture capitalizes upon the hegemonic position of Hollywood stars and film exports in the global cultural economy. The power of the Hollywood studios as a machinery of mass culture informs a number of trends associated with globalization discourse: a) that culture industries are integral features of the new global economy, b) that the culture industries and consumption-driven capitalism is dominated by a cadre of giant corporate players, and c) that American cultural products dominate the global landscape of consumer capitalism (Barber 1996, Sklair).

Hollywood is also ideologically contested. As an industry, place, and community, it is also implicated in broader structures and discourses of capitalism, politics, and cultural mores. Conservatives have derided Hollywood for its immorality (evangelicals in the 1920s), its radicalism (McCarthy in the 1950s), its liberal Acultural elitism@ (Dan Quayle vs. AMurphy Brown@ in the 1980s) and its permissive employment policies (Southern Baptist Convention vs. Disney Corporation in the 1990s). Artists and leftists have denounced Hollywood for its tendencies towards oligopolistic corporate control, its triviality, its tendency to quell artistic creativity in favor of mass profitability, and its lack of attention to, or misrepresentation of racial and cultural minorities.

Like America=s other major Abright-light@ district, Times Square, Hollywood has recurrently attracted its raffish mephisto, the Ared-light@ district of tattoo parlors, cheap amusement arcades, and the sex industries, which are attracted by the high density of nocturnal urban sojourners. There is a marked disjuncture between the historic image of Hollywood as a glamorous celluloid Adream factory@ and the reality of its human ecology as a rather seedy zone in transition, marked by infrastructural deterioration, commercial decline, and a motley Acommunity@ of residentially overcrowded immigrants, homeless youth, and urban transients. The tawdry underside to Tinseltown as a place populated by vacuous starlets and spectators, underemployed screenwriter, and megalomaniacal or tragically-heroic studio moguls has morever been a recurring literary representation such as in Nathaniel West=s The Day of the Locust (1933) and F. Scott Fitzgerald=s The Last Tycoon (1941). Californian historian Carey McWilliams described Hollywood as a Aterrifying town ... a place of opportunists and confidence men, petty chiselers and racketeers ... of people desperately on the makeA (1973 [1946]: 334). Another intellectual critique of Hollywood was perpetrated by the Frankfurt School of social theory, precursor to the Amass culture@ critique of American capitalism and society.

The growing galaxy of literature on Los Angeles has until now emphasized economic globalization (Sassen, Scott, Storper), social control in the Afortress city@ (Friedmann and Wolff, Davis), or the simulated theme park character of the city (Baudrillard, Soja, Sorkin, Zukin). Within urban studies, only Susan Ruddick=s study (1996) of homeless youth and subcultural spaces has given sustained attention to Hollywood as a place, while Michael Storper (1989) has informed our understanding of the industry. Through this analytical window on Hollywood, I intend to augment our understanding of Los Angeles as a world city while contributing to our theoretical and empirical understanding of the connections between globalization, consumption, and urban sociology.

The Industry: Hollywood as Machinery of Mass Cultural Production

Walter Benjamin, in his seminal essay, AThe Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,@ (1968 [1936]) critically reflected upon the emergence of the mass reproduction media (such as lithography, photography, and film), which had promoted the contemporary decay of what he perceived as the original Aaura@ of art and artistic experience. He stated:

The European critique of Hollywood has been historically matched by the assessments of American writers and intellectuals from the East Coast (such as John Dos Passos, William Faulkner, Aldous Huxley, and Dorothy Parker), who were drawn to the studios by the lucrative salaries offered for formulaic screen writing in the 1920s and 30s, but often appalled at the corrupting effects on their artistic creativity. The controversial AHollywood as destroyer@ legend is best personified by the experience of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Fine: 3-6), who advantageously worked with the studios at the height of his career, but ended his life in indebted despair and drunkenness as an underemployed Hollywood screenwriter with his half-completed final manuscript, (The Love of) The Last Tycoon, which was posthumously published in 1941.

The work at which these writers labored was mundane, hackneyed screen writing and adaptations for the kind of production conventions that typified early Hollywood, such as screwball comedies, musicals, gangster films, and detective noir. These genres persist, but were subsequently supplemented by family melodrama, westerns, and war films, up to the current predilection for blockbuster disasters, science fiction, teen films, and animation (Schatz 1983). The inclination in Hollywood (and its stepchild, network television) to serialize, sequelize, and routinize its production repertoires illustrates the fundamental nature of cinema (and other media such as print journalism, television, and radio) as a mass production machinery of icons, stories, and fantasies, a meaning implicit in the moniker, Adream factory.@

This axiomatic tension between artistic creativity and industrial routinization relates to another fundamental problematic of the motion picture industry, the recurring tendency for a cadre of central players to monopolistically dominate the production, distribution, and exhibitionary apparatus of the cultural production system. The U.S. Justice Department has periodically brought antitrust legislation against the motion picture industry and related mass media, to reduce the concentration of power in an oligopoly of companies, a structure which impedes free enterprise in the marketplace of ideas, thus violating the Sherman and Clayton Antitrust Act and eroding the vitality of the First Amendment. Two landmark cases are relevant.

The first case, Motion Picture Patents Company, was taken against a cartel or trust led by Thomas Edison, Biograph Pictures, and fourteen other inventors who exploited their patents on cameras, projectors, film, and other integrated components, and completely dominated the nascent film industry. William Fox, an independent operator, filed an antitrust suit later joined by the Department of Justice which eventually reached the Supreme Court, which ruled against the Trust in 1918. Concurrently, a number of maverick independent companies armed with bootlegged equipment were emerging, some through the collusion of disgruntled Trust members. Seeking to evade Trust-ordered court injunctions, U.S. marshals, and privately-hired Pinkerton detectives, these independents gravitated to the hospitable climate of Los Angeles for their filming, a location which also afforded easy escape to the Mexican border if discovered and prosecuted.

The dismantling of the Trust paved the way for the emergence of the classic ABig 5" studios of the Agolden age of Hollywood,@ a group which included Twentieth-Century Fox, Metro Goldwyn Mayer (MGM), Warner Brothers, RKO, and Paramount. Adolph Zukor of Paramount pioneered a system vertical integrating the three major stages of film makingBproduction, distribution, and exhibitionBunder one company, a structure which began to be emulated by the others. He established the Astar system@ with lucrative contracts to talent such as Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, and Gloria Swanson, fostering simultaneously both the studio=s reputation and consumer loyalty. These stars of the silent film era, along with Charlie Chaplin, through the power of pantomime, christened the modern film industry as a universal language of mass culture which transgressed boundaries of cultural and linguistic difference in the polyglot immigrant working classes of America, the cinema=s main audience.

Like Zukor, like other early studio entrepreneurs such as Harry Cohn, William Fox, Samuel Goldfish (later Goldwyn), Carl Laemmle, Marcus Loew, Louis B. Mayer, and the Warner Brothers, were all Jewish. Among the founding studio bosses, only Walt Disney was not Jewish. They typically came from East Coast careers in garments and haberdashery (Goldwyn had been a glove salesman, Zukor and Loew had been furriers (Hall: 529)), where they learned tenacity and hard-sell techniques, or vaudeville, where they defined showmanship and were attuned to the dreams and aspirations of the immigrant masses. Neal Gabler (1988) presents the provocative thesis that the Jews, finding themselves impeded from mobility into the Eastern aristocracy, migrated westward and Ainvented Hollywood@ as an Aempire of their own@ complete with their own palatial estates and conspicuous rituals of a nouveaux riches society.

The WASP public and cultural elite was both fascinated and threatened by the rapid rise of the enterprising, showy, movie Amoguls,@ viewing them as Apart splendid emperors, part barbarian invaders@ (Sklar 46), thus labeling them with a cultural patina of megalomania, Jewish foreignness, immigrant coarseness, and non-Gentile permissiveness in the kind of morality they condoned. Hollywood was being nationally publicized through the scandalous behavior of personalities such as the film comedian Roscoe (AFatty@) Arbuckle, charged in 1921 with murder of an actress at a raucous party abundant with bootleg liquor. Forming the Motion Picture Producers Association, the studios retained the Postmaster Will ADeacon@ Hays to litigate a clean-up campaign, which he obliged through a morals clause written into all acting contracts.

By 1925, the ABig 5" or the Amajors@ dominated in the production of AA@ quality films, while an associated ALittle Three@ (Universal, Columbia, and United Artists) produced lower-budget AB@ grade films. Acting in collusion, the Big 5 controlled enough first-run theaters to maintain a profitable nationwide exhibition showcase for their shared production output (including the output of the Little 3, which were charged stiff distribution and exhibition fees). Control came through the use of contracted exhibitors or cinema chains in which the studios had partial investments or controlling interests). First-run movie houses, which got films first and charged higher prices, predominated in downtown bright-light districts, while second runs went to neighborhood houses. The Aformula picture@ (of standardized genres such as dramas, romances, action pictures, westerns, shockers and comedies) and the star system were central features of an effective mass manufacturing system that provided a total output of 400-500 feature length films a year, which through sequential release, fulfilled their block bookings in the retailing stage (Hall 1998, Litman 1998).

This pattern of monopolization and price fixing in the film industry again incurred the intervention of the Antitrust Division of the U.S. Justice Department beginning in 1938, which opened litigation against Paramount. An initial consent decree was decided, then the case reinstated in district court, followed by appeal to the Supreme Court, then a remand back to the district court, which in its climactic 1949 ruling ordered the studios to divest themselves of their cinema chains, thus severing the system of vertical integration. A competitive bidding system for motion picture licensing was suggested, but not mandated. The arrival of television at almost precisely the same point as the final Paramount ruling sealed the end of Hollywood=s golden era. Suburbanization also wrought major changes in urban geography and the character of consumer demand for motion pictures. Hollywood the location and the industry suffered a decline after a major decline in the 1950s and 1960s of these combined trends. Hollywood=s locational decline continued until the 1990s, but the industry has been through some complex and intriguing changes that defy facile categorization.

After divestiture of their exhibition complexes, Hollywood began a slow move into network television programming. Profitability continued to decline in the 1970s, however, and they began to divest themselves of property such as sound stages, back-lots, and film libraries. This vertical disintegration (now occurring in the production rather than exhibition stage) spread through the industry as location (versus studio and back-lot) shooting began to proliferate. By the 1980s, independent studios were producing the bulk of films (e.g. Lucasfilm), by the 1990s, independents such as Miramax were demonstrating an ability to produce award winning films. The major studios, meanwhile, had settled into a new system of subcontracting out most functions to a shifting terrain of specialist companies in pre-production, film processing, and post-production activities. Storper (1989) finds this transition to Aflexible specialization@ in the film industry to be a paradigm of Apost-fordism@ in the advanced capitalist economies.

There is evidence of continuing concentration of power, however, particularly on the distribution level. As Table 1 reports, the top four film distributors increased their share of the market from 57.4% in 1990 to 64.1% in 1995. When the top eight film distributors are considered, the increased was from 90.8% in 1990 to 94.5% in 1995. It is significant to observe that the Disney Corporation (not among the major studios in the earlier era of Hollywood) has now become the most productive studio (especially since its acquisition of the indepedent Miramax).

Storper also recognizes, and perhaps under emphasizes, a growing Arecomposition@ of the motion picture industry into an Aentertainment industrial complex@ wherein the original studios have diversified through merger, acquisition, and sale into related markets such as network and cable television, publishing, recorded music, theme parks, professional sports, multimedia, and telecommunications (Wasko 1994, Barber 1995, Litman 1998). Table 2 reports on the diversified activities of some of the largest entertainment and media conglomerates. Some examples include: a) the 1966 purchase of Paramount by Gulf & Western (which changed its name back to Paramount in 1989), b) the 1985 purchase of Fox Broadcasting by Rupert Murdoch=s News Corporation, c) Turner Broadcasting=s 1985 purchase of MGM/United Artists, d) Sony=s 1989 purchase of Columbia Pictures, e) Time Inc.=s purchase of Warner Communications in 1989 to create Time Warner, and f) Viacom=s 1994 purchase of Paramount and Blockbuster Video. By the 1990s, 17 media conglomerates collected half of total revenues across the array of culture industries, including film, television, recordings, cable, and videocassettes (Barber: 138).

The growing size of American media conglomerates also threatens the global cultural endowment. American films, television programming, and recorded music dominate in overseas markets. The global reach of American media corporations have provoked the ire of nations such as China, France, and Iran, fostering allegations of media imperialism and fears of cultural homogenization, and practices of censorship, protectionism, or economic blockade. The global critique of Hollywood=s domination in the world market is not new, having been voiced in the 1920s during the earlier phase of U.S. motion picture industry growth. The American media conglomerates have grown bigger and more diversified, however, and the proliferation of their products abroad has been accelerated by ongoing revolutions in technologies of cultural reproduction, the compression of time and space through innovations in telecommunications and transcontinental transport, and the collapse of the socialist trading system into an expanded capitalist world-economy. As the mass culture critique meets globalization in the 1990s, the critique has become both renewed and amplified.

The Location: Dream Palaces, Mass Spectacles, and Urban Iconography

Milla Alihan (1938) is sometimes credited with inaugurating the Asociocultural critique@ of human ecology. Walter Firey (1945) subsequently offered a codification of this perspective, through his attention to the way that certain places in Boston (e.g., historic parks such as the ACommons,@ ancestral cemeteries, aristocratic quarters, and ethnic districts), withstood competitive real estate pressures in the central business district, through the strength of sentimental attachments and symbolic meanings ascribed to these sites by the populace. Richard Wohl and Anselm Strauss (1958) followed with an article that observed how the vast size and complexity of the metropolis could be reduced or simplified through certain iconographic landmarks (evoked also through verse, song, and literature) which symbolically represented the identity or Abiography@ of a city. To illustrate, the Hollywood sign and the Grauman=s Chinese Theater are two major storied sites which personify the character of Los Angeles.

Gerald Suttles (1968) refined the sociocultural position by more systematically clarifying how urban culture is marked in the spatial quotidian (through statuary, place names, commemorated buildings, and bumper stickers) and generalized as collective belief (through journalism and popular cultural catchphrases, folklore, and sports legends). Urban boosters create the myths and artifacts which celebrate the memories of the founders, entrepreneurs, and heroes of the city, while authors, artists, and journalists (especially critics, columnists and experts) formulate and qualify the tastes, aesthetics, and reputations of local culture. Suttles blasts Firey for interpreting local urban culture retrospectively. Suttles see culture not just serving a Aresidual@ or Arestorative@ (pp. 283-286) function that gradually acquires the patina of antique or artifact, but something that is actively promoted, created, and interpreted by boosters, artists, and journalists in the Ashock cities@ of the American urban frontier.

The notion of Ashock cities@ which Suttles borrows from Asa Briggs draws us close to the characterization that John Logan and Harvey Molotch (1988) offer of American cities as Agrowth machines,@ wherein place entrepreneurs and developmental elites promote public consent and sanction through the joining of civic boosterism with a rhetoric of value-free economic development. The sociocultural school could be strengthened by the kind of critique of capitalism offered by the Anew urban sociology,@ (Zukin 1980, Gottdiener and Feagin 1988) which debunks human ecology for disregarding the centrality of political and economic interests in the process of urbanization and the discourses of urbanism. Critical cultural studies is increasingly part and parcel of the new urban sociology, as we discern the growing deployment of thematic and symbolic metaphors in urban development under postindustrialism (Zukin 1995, Gottdiener 1988). The vitality of cities under advanced capitalism is decreasingly derived from the production of manufactured goods, but increasingly instead from their ability to competitively orchestrate the mass production and consumption of culture (through devices such as festival marketplaces, heritage tourism and urban theme parking, sports and convention complexes, and entertainment functions). A study of Hollywood as both a seminal apparatus and a location of mass cultural production, can be a highly instructive case for analysis.

Hollywood the Place and Icon

Hollywood originated in 1887 as a subdivision developed by a Kansas prohibitionist named Horace Henderson (Harvey) Wilcox. The name was suggested by his wife Daieda, purportedly inspired through conversation with a woman passenger on a train bound for the East, who described her suburban Chicago summer home as Hollywood (Torrence: 25). Driven by the need for water, the development was annexed to the City of Los Angeles in 1910, which was then relatively water flush with arterial wells and in the process of building the Owens River Aqueduct. The association with the movie industry became regularized during the 1910s, as the emergent independent studios began to locate there, fleeing the court injunctions issued by Edison=s Trust.

The Hollywood Chamber of Commerce was formed in 1921, with its first major activity the formation of a special committee which convinced Hollywood Boulevard merchants to leave their lights on after 9 p.m., to stem the air of desolation that descended on the street each night, and enhance the boulevard=s image as the Great White Way of the West. Department stores, boutiques and hotels were lured to the district. In 1924, the Retail Merchants Bureau, a division of the Chamber of Commerce, instituted the Santa Claus Lane Parade, led by a movie celebrity in a sleigh drawn by reindeer. The pageant broadened to include marching bands, equestrian teams, public officials, and more film personalities, and began drawing larger crowds in the 1930s. It remains an important device of the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce to this very day, purportedly attracting one million spectators each year. Beginning about 1925, guides began sprouting along Hollywood boulevard offering tours to the studios and the homes of the stars.

The Hollywood sign was originally erected in 1923 as a means of advertising Hollywoodland, a prestigious real estate subdivision financed by a syndicate that included Harry Chandler of the Los Angeles Times, a development which still rests below Mount Lee. The 50-foot high and 30-foot wide letters were initially conceived as an advertising gimmick that would only last a year, but carried on because of its popularity as a Los Angeles icon. Four thousand lightbulbs originally studded the border of each letter to brilliantly emblazon the Los Angeles night until 1939, when maintenance of the sign was discontinued. By 1949, serious dilapidation had set in (symbolizing also the film industry=s uncertain fortunes with the Paramount anti-trust case of 1948 and the growing impact of television). The Hollywood Chamber of Commerce stepped in, and restored the sign without the last four letters to read just AHollywood,@ but continuing deterioration led to recurring fund-raising campaigns in the 1960s and 1970s. The sign was designated a historic-cultural monument by the Los Angeles Cultural Heritage Board in 1973, and in 1978, a new campaign kicked off by a fund-raising dinner hosted by Hugh Hefner at the Playboy Mansion West ultimately brought in over $300,000 to finance demolition and erection of a modernized sign.

The Hollywood Walk of Fame is another iconographic device which is literally inscribed upon the sidewalks of Hollywood Boulevard and Vine Street. It was conceived and patented by the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce in the 1950s, as a promotional device specifically aimed at reglamorizing the fading luster of the district. The commemorative sidewalk is comprised of a sequence of charcoal terrazzo squares embedded with coral terrazzo stars outlined in brass, with each star=s name also imprinted in brass inside the stars. A Hollywood Improvement Association was formed, which raised $1.25 million for the sidewalk and streetlight improvements through a special assessment on property owners. The first eight stars to be commemorated in the 1960 groundbreaking included Preston Foster, Joanne Woodward, Ernest Torrence, Olive Borden, Edward Sedgwick, Louise Fazenda, Ronald Coleman, and Burt Lancaster (Torrence: 240). By the time that construction was completed sixteen months later, nearly 1600 stars had been dedicated to personalities in five major artistic categories, including motion pictures, television, radio, recorded music, and live theater. Since then, a new star has been added each month to bring the current total to over 2000.

Dream Palaces and Mass Spectacles

The prosperity of the 1920s had stimulated movie going, which in turn spurred film production and the construction of motion picture exhibition places. A succession of ostentatious Hollywood movie palaces were built in this era, including Sid Grauman=s Million Dollar, Metropolitan, Egyptian and Chinese Theaters, the Warner Brothers Theater, and the Hollywood Pantages. These spectacular pleasure palaces built upon a formula that theater manager Samuel ARoxy@ Rothafel (formerly Rothapfel) had pioneered in New York City, at the Strand and Roxy Theaters, and penultimately, at Radio City Music Hall. Extravagant architecture, opulent interiors, and impeccable service were joined to create sensuous and refined environments that would elevate the movie going experience from its vaudeville and nickelodeon roots. Neal Gabler attributes this quote to Roxy:

Back in Los Angeles, theater impresario Sid Grauman introduced the red-carpet AHollywood Premiere@ in 1922 at the Egyptian Theater, complete with searchlights and celebrities arriving in limousines. The Chinese Theater, which also showcased premieres, eventually became an American landmark when Grauman began promoting hand and footprint ceremonies to forever memorialize Hollywood stars in the cement of the front courtyard, with the opening honors going to Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks in 1927. Considerable debate surrounds the original inspiration for this extravagant device, but the ritual has endured to become a central spectacle which ensures the continued imprimature of Hollywood as both focal location and collective representation in American popular life.

The annual awards ceremony for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is perhaps Hollywood=s most distinct seasonal spectacle, but has never been associated with a consistent location. The Roosevelt Hotel, across the street from the Grauman=s Chinese Theater, was the site of the first Academy Awards ceremony in 1929. The event was then moved out of Hollywood except for two periods, 1944-46, when it was held at the Grauman=s Chinese Theater, and 1951-60, when the Pantages Theater was employed. For the past three decades, the ceremonies have alternated between the Shrine Auditorium and the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, which are both downtown.

Like sporting events, festivals, and performances, which occur seasonally throughout the urban milieu, Hollywood premieres, rituals, and award ceremonies generate Durkheimian moments of effervescence, when the spirit of our collective consciousness and group life percolates to the surface and insinuates itself. As cultural events, these rites also testify to the current fashion by which our urban culture is enacted, exhibited, and consumed through regularized procedures of entertainment, spectatorship and tourism, as a break from the mundane realities of routinized labor processes. In a capitalist society increasingly marked by massification in commodity production as well as consumption, the mass media promote the possibilities for universal accessibility through reproductive technologies like film, cable television, videotape, and the internet. While the act of cultural consumption has been hypothetically democratized, control over the production and distribution of cultural products is still threatened by the hegemony of some dominant corporate players. Our role as active participants has morever been diminished relative to our growing status as passive spectators. The writing of the Situationist critic of commodity fetishism, Guy Debord, is here relevant:

Redevelopment and the Re-presentation of Hollywood

Dramatic change is underway in Hollywood, the location. Promotion and improvement schemes have been endemic since the 1920s, and wholesale redevelopment scenarios have been floated since the 1950s. In the 1980s, competing proposals were offered, one emphasizing the inventory of sites along the Hollywood Boulevard (this urban theme parking scheme was promoted by the Community Redevelopment Agency), the other proposing a shopping mall at the intersection of Hollywood and Vine (Ruddick 169-172). These projects both died, victim to the regional recession and public controversy over the use of city subsidies. By the 1990s, however, different versions of the mall and theme park scheme had metamorphosed to a cumulative crescendo.

The beginnings of the recent turnaround are often attributed to the Walt Disney Corporation, which spent $6 million on a refurbishment of the El Capitan theater for a 1991 reopening. The theater, a flagship venue for Disney=s family and childrens= oriented films, is now one of the top per-screen grossers in the nation. In September 1996, the Los Angeles City Council approved the formation of a Hollywood Business Improvement District (BID). The 41 members of the BID have agreed to a special assessment totalling $600,000 a year for street cleaning and armed security patrols (the BID is still one-tenth the size of its Times Square counterpart). The Warner Hollywood Theater was refurbished and reopened in late 1997 as a new home for live musicals, followed by the reopening of the Egyptian Theater in early 1998. The Egyptian Theater, renovated by the City of Los Angeles, has been leased to American Cinemathique, a non-profit organization that features international films, classic and art-house films, and retrospectives on American film makers and actors, often in festival format.

The centerpiece of the redevelopment effort is the Trizec-Hahn Corporation=s monstrous plan for a $388 million Aurban destination entertainment@ center which includes a 12-screen multiplex theater operated by Mann Theaters Corporation, interactive entertainment, exhibition space, and a shopping mall. The site covers eight and a half acres behind the Grauman=s Chinese Theater at the intersection of Hollywood Boulevard and Highland Avenue. To make the location a transportation nexus, the City of Los Angeles is also constructing a new subway station at the site.

The project will address what one Hollywood Chamber of Commerce representative has identified as the problem of the Afifteen minute tourist@ who arrives on Hollywood Boulevard primarily to see the Grauman=s Chinese Theater courtyard, but after viewing the urban decline that besets the Boulevard, departs subsequently for more sanitized locations such as the Universal Studios theme park, and its associated open-air shopping arcade (the CityWalk), or Disneyland. The redevelopment effort seeks to@ create satisfaction and meet expectations@ of the tourists.¹¹ Tourists have a vision of Hollywood as a tinseltown populated by glamorous celebrities, and the various rituals and iconographic sites offer tourists the tantilizing possibility of proximity to the stars, which is a primary motivation for the journey to Hollywood.¹² Tourists are lured on board Hollywood sightseeing trolleys with the titillating, incessant reminder that AYou May Even See A Star! You May Even See A Star! You May Even See A Star!@

The Trizec-Hahn project is the brainchild of David Malmuth, a developer whose reputation stems from his successful renovation of the New Amsterdam Theater in New York=s Times Square for the Disney Corporation, a project widely regarded as a keystone of the recent revival of district. Malmuth then unsuccessfully lobbied with Disney=s head, Michael Eisner, to submit a bid for the Hollywood and Highland site. When Disney balked, Malmuth moved on to the San Diego-based Trizec-Hahn, and directed their winning proposal. The key to Malmuth=s pitch to the Los Angeles Community Redevelopment Agency (CRA) were his deft negotiations to bring the Academy Awards back to Hollywood (scheduled for March 2001) from their present venue at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion downtown (Goldin 1998). A 3,500 seat auditorium specially wired for live broadcast is being built at the back of site. Visitors entering from Hollywood Boulevard through a giant curtained 70-foot high portal will have to walk through a series of grand arches in the shopping arcade to the Academy Theater.

Considerable controversy swirled around the project from the inception of planning, especially given the planned $90 million subsidy the City of Los Angeles will incur through tax abatements and financial contributions toward construction of the Academy Theater and the giant underground parking garage. Small business and middle-class residents were concerned about the monstrous scale of the project, and implications such as noise, traffic congestion and parking problems, rising property taxes, and primary and secondary displacement of businesses and residents. Other critics drew attention to the host of social problems besetting the low-income immigrant population of Hollywood that could be addressed. .

Hollywood has in fact emerged in the past three decades as a reception center for a cross-section the new immigrant flows to Los Angeles, who are drawn to the district=s availability of affordable multi-unit rental housing and proximity to employment opportunities in the urban core and the affluent Westside. Many of these apartment complexes and manor houses (some grandiose but many cheaply constructed) were built initially to house the corps of aspiring actors, screenwriter, and other personnel that converged upon the district in the early days of the film industry. Today, the district houses populations of newly arrived immigrants of considerable race and ethnic diversity, including Russian Jews and Armenians, Central Americans (including Guatemalans and Salvadorans), and Asians (Filipino and Thai). Much of this new population is marked by poverty and residential overcrowding.

There is indeed a glaring disjuncture between the boosterish fantasy of reduplicating a Aboulevard of dreams@ which recalls the glamorous Hollywood of yore when the majority of the present day Hollywood lives a separate reality. A linkage plan negotiated by city councillor Jackie Goldberg offers public subsidy in return for a Aliving wage@ agreement by Trizec-Hahn ($7.50/hr plus benefits) to be applied to salaries of security and service personnel hired at the finished site. A Afirst source@ agreement stipulates that personnel hired will be primarily drawn from the Hollywood Community Redevelopment Agency zone, or from Los Angeles census tracts with high poverty levels. Hires from these two categories are expected to be 30% of all personnel. The language for this agreement was derived from a similar compact negotiated in Oakland. Goldberg is trying to pressure the CRA board to accept first source hiring agreements in all CRA project areas.¹³

Conclusion

The sociocultural school drew initial urban sociological attention to the defining salience of symbolic representations and culture in metropolitan life and geography long before the current vogue in critical cultural studies. The sociocultural school, however, could benefit from a strong dose of political-economy, in recognizing that the production of urban symbolic sites is shot through with issues of political and capitalistic interest. The critical cultural school of the new urban sociology provides the best analytic window on the historical emergence and current status of symbolic sites in Hollywood. A critical perspective on urban culture recognizes that many of the defining symbols, rituals, and meanings of urban places are produced through direct capitalistic intent. This perspective is revealing as we witness how the fabrication of thematic sites and symbolic references is currently proliferating as a strategy of postindustrial profit-making in American cities. The critical cultural school is sensitive to the issues raised by the mass culture critique of consumption-based capitalism. They raise fundamental questions about the nature of aesthetics, the prospects for artistic freedom and public discourse, and issues of power and control, as our cultural production systems grow increasingly massified (Zukin 1995: 1-47, Gottdiener 1997: 143-159).

As the industrial machinery of Hollywood recomposes and horizontally integrates into the growing repertoire of culture industries in the new global-economy, the mass culture critique has acquired revived relevance. As the machinery of mass culture acquires a truly global reach, the production studios of Hollywood are increasingly just another link in the programming and marketing portfolios of the diversified media conglomerates. A similar trend is apparent in the original location of Hollywood itself where redevelopment has incorporated both the principles of the theme park and the shopping mall. The linkage agreement negotiated by representatives of the City Councillor Jackie Goldberg=s office addresses only some of the glaring of disjunctures between the redevelopmental vision of Hollywood and the social reality of Hollywood as a neighborhood populated by the immigrant urban poor. Like a blockbuster urban Aspace invader,@ the Trizec-Hahn project fabricates a new Hollywood which reproduces a consumption and entertainment formula to which we are already remarkably attuned.

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