Sometimes I see pictures of old Hollywood, and I just can’t believe what this place used to be.
The above is the palatial Hollywood Hotel, built on Hollywood Blvd in 1906 and demolished in 1956; below it is the Hollywood & Highland shopping complex, built at the same address in 2001.
If you ever read Raymond Chandler books, you often find his detective, Philip Marlowe, bemoaning the state of Hollywood while reminiscing about how nice it once was. “I used to like this town,” he says in The Little Sister. “A long time ago.” As a modern reader, this can be confusing. Wasn’t Chandler writing in the 1940s, during the Golden Age of Hollywood? Wasn’t that the high point? What previous version of Hollywood is he referring to?
If you go back to the days when the hotel was built in a pre-movie era, Hollywood was a rural farm town, filled with citrus orchards and only dotted with newly-built homes. For those who lived in downtown Los Angeles, Hollywood was considered a relaxing weekend getaway to the country, about an hour away via the transportation available at the time.
Then, around 1910, the silent film business arrived due to two major benefits that Hollywood offered in abundance: sun and land. Back then, film stock was very primitive and required a ton of light for proper exposure, and the simplest solution was to simply use sunlight in open-roof studios (often, a studio was simply an old barn with its roof removed).
As Hollywood had year-round great weather and no shortage of land, it quickly became the obvious place to relocate the industry to (and yes, distance from Edison and his pesky patent claims).
And then, over the subsequent decades, HOLLYWOOD arrived, with all its good – and especially its bad. By the time is Chandler is writing, Hollywood is nearly unrecognizable as the former pastoral eden it once was, and he endlessly lathers on his disdain for the grift and seediness that now seems to have infected the soul of the city.
In hindsight, Chandler couldn’t have guessed how much worse it would get. The studios eventually vacated Hollywood in search of more land, leaving only a handful behind. It became more of a music and TV mecca during the 60s/70s. And then, when the 80s hit, things took a dark turn.
What is it today? The analogy I think about a lot (about pretty much everything, honestly, as I grow older) is that of a gold mine. At one point, a gold mine exists to mine gold. And then one day, the vein runs dry, so what then? You sell t-shirts and give mine tours.
I think there’s still some gold left in the mine. Paramount has been at its current site in Hollywood for a century this year, and there are still plenty of independent studios clustered on Sunset and elsewhere. At the same time, it’s hard to walk Hollywood Blvd today past Hollywood & Highland and not think that you missed out on something one-of-a-kind, an era that will simply cannot and will not ever happen again.
It’s ultimately a good reminder to always be on the lookout what is flourishing in the years you’re given. As Chandler experienced, such epochs are often hard to identify in the midst of it.
But you always know when they’re over.
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