The history of the Hollywood sign, from public nuisance to symbol of stardom
This composition is edited from The discussion under a Creative Commons license. Read the original composition, which was published March 1, 2018.
Every time at the Oscars, the cameras dis to the celebrated Hollywood sign and its bold white letters.
Ask someone moment what the sign symbolizes, and the same words will probably crop up pictures. Stardom. Glamour.
But as I point in my book on the Hollywood sign, the sign did n’t always represent fame and fortune. As the megacity changed, so did the meaning of the sign, which, at one point, was indeed considered a public nuisance.
Come to Hollywoodland?
California has long held the lure of material and particular fulfillment.
What started as a destination for those hoping to strike gold came, in the late 19th century, a mecca for anyone with real or imagined affections. The state’s temperate climate and natural springs, guidebooks claimed, held “ restorative powers for weakened dispositions. ”
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The state’s gold has ago been drained, and the hunt for perfect health has spread to rest of the country. But the construction of the celebrated Hollywood sign in 1923 marked the launch of another phase, one still with us moment.
During that decade, a real estate development group, one of whose top backers was Los Angeles Times publisher Harry Chandler, erected a large sign – basically a billboard – on an unnamed mountain between the Los Angeles receptacle and the San Fernando Valley.
“ Hollywoodland, ” the sign read. Its 40,000 blinking light bulbs announced a new casing development erected to accommodate the megacity’s surging population, which further than doubled during the 1920s to come the fifth largest in the country, as the megacity drew people from each over the country for its rainfall, open spaces and jobs.
The megacity of Hollywood had been absorbed into Los Angeles only a decade before. At the time, it was a fat area that had grudgingly accepted the movie business. numerous palaces dotted the hillsides below the sign, and romantic communities like Krotona, theU.S. headquarters of a mystical association called the Theosophical Society, had sprung up in the foothills and on the apartments.
Consequently, early advertising for Hollywoodland emphasized the development’s exclusivity. It would offer an escape from the gauze, dirt and unpleasant neighbors of town Los Angeles.
Saving the sign
Because the sign holds such a prominent place in the nation’s artistic imagination moment, it may be surprising to learn that it was n’t until fairly lately that it achieved its iconic status.
In the 1930s and 1940s, the sign makes an appearance in only a many of the pictures that were about Hollywood or the movie assiduity. Other Hollywood institutions, like the Brown Derby eatery, tended to represent the film world.
In the 1940s, Los Angeles – as both megacity and symbol – started to change. A thick gauze settled over the megalopolis, which would be featured as the grim, shadowy setting of noir flicks like “ The Big Sleep ” and “ Double Indemnity. ”
The sign – a little dingier, a little more uncomely – reflected the changing megacity. Since it was firstly intended as an announcement, many had considered its permanence or long– term significance.
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The hillside where it had been erected was dangerously steep; workers had cut the letters from thin distance essence, which they turned onto telephone poles. Heavy winds could fluently rip the letters down, and by the late 1940s, there had been so important deterioration that the megacity of Los Angeles proposed to gash it down, calling it a dangerous public nuisance.
That dismissive view of the sign began to change in 1949, when the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce told the megacity that it would take over its power and conservation. With that exchange, the “ land ” suffix was dropped. We could say that this is the point that the Hollywood sign we know moment was actually born.
still, advancements and conservation passed in fits and thresholds. By the early 1970s, panels were being formed to “ save ” the sign in order to restore it beyond shy makeup jobs and patchwork repairs.
Eventually, in 1978 a commission headed by Hugh Hefner and Alice Cooper collected the finances – aboutUS$ 27,000 per letter – to not simply form, but rebuild the sign.
moment the big white letters are a endless institution in the Los Angeles geography, and it’s indeed resisted the attempts of audacious defacers to emulate the art pupil who, in 1976, tweaked the sign to read “ Hollyweed. ”
In their own way, these defacers are trying to sculpt out their own slice of the Hollywood dream – a hunt not for gold or for health, but for recognition and fame, whether by gift, ambition or selfie.
Written by Leo Braudy, LeoS. Bing Chair in English and American Literature, USC Dornsife College of Letters, trades and lores.
