Heading to Hollywood
As Kim and I stumble our way into the holidays, we listen to more than our share of Christmas music on the various Sirius holiday channels and watch more than our share of holiday movies. I have little use for the Hallmark holiday movies that Kim so very much loves, but give me a regular holiday movie and I’m very happy. We maintain our list of top classics like White Christmas, It’s a Wonderful Life, Miracle on 34th Street, Elf and Love Actually, and always watch those together. Then there are the second string like Four Christmases and The Holiday. But the streaming services are hurting these days and they understand us well enough to know that if they throw more obscure old holiday movies our way, we are likely to bite. So, tonight we stumbled on Holiday Inn with Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire. Many people confuse Holiday Inn and White Christmas for good reason. Bing is the anchor character in both and the former has Fred in the co-star role while the later has Danny Kaye to do the dancing in that part. They both have two dames and they both use the exact same Inn setting except in the former its in Connecticut where in the later its in Pinetree, Vermont. I wouldn’t be surprised if the sleigh they use is the same in both. They both have a zany housekeeper except the earlier one (Holiday Inn, made in 1942) uses a large black woman ala Gone With the Wind, whereas White Christmas, which was made in 1954, found a Hazel-like good old gal to play the part.
There is no doubt that the producers took the best songs and best bits from Holiday Inn and used them in White Christmas, dropped all the horribly inappropriate blackface Lincoln’s Birthday skits, and made a far superior Christmas classic. But the thing that both of these movies cannot completely get away from is the theme of everyone wanting to be a star and to go to Hollywood. In 1942, Hollywood had only been the Mecca of the star-struck for twenty or so years, but but still when the wannabe starlets talk about having agents from Hollywood in to see the show with the prospect of heading out to the coast to make it in the big leagues, it sounds very much like the Holy Grail for any red-blooded American. By 1954, the big time is still implicitly Hollywood, but the the lead-in of the TV variety show via the Ed Harrison Show made the Big Apple the first stop on the road to Hollywood. And here we are a full century since the founding of Hollywood as a film capital and nothing has yet replaced it as the iconic endgame of anyone wanting to make it in show business, except maybe the lure of Broadway. And yet, for the most part, the money is much better and the work much more reasonable in Hollywood.
The biggest problem with Hollywood is that it is deeply imbedded in Los Angeles, and as such, one must cross into the surrealistic land of LALA to get there. I used to think that was worth of the problem, but now,having lived out here in Southern California for four years, I am more convinced than ever that the LA Basin is somewhere to avoid at all costs. I feel as though even we are a mere two hour drive into the heart of the beast, we are light years away from all the ills that Angelenos must suffer each day. This 470 square mile sprawl, which is The City of Angeles is 50% bigger in coverage than all of New York City. The city proper only has 3.8 million people versus New York’s 8.5 million, but the way the Census Bureau defines Urbanized Areas, LA has 11.8 million people versus New York’s 17.8 million. Given the difference in land mass, that leads the reality of Los Angeles to be that it has a 34% higher people density ratio. That and the increases sprawl nature of the city means that there are 6.4 million cars there versus 7.8 million in NYC. One would imagine that what LA has in urban people density it gives up in urban car density, but that belies the reality of public transportation or the lack thereof. Let’s face it, everyone in LA is in their cars every day, but not so with most of New York.
I recently read that there are now parts of Manhattan where a driver must pay $15 just to enter that presumably highly congested area. I’m thinking that LA might use the same approach to solve its fiscal issues, the only problem being in defining the most congested areas. The truth is that the LA basin is about as busy in every corner of it compared to the extreme congestion in Manhattan, the slightly lesser congestion in the other burroughs and the far lesser so in the outer areas.
This is all on my mind this morning because we are driving up to LA in the next hour or so to spend the day and night in town in order to attend the 80th Birthday party and holiday soirée for our friend Gary and his sidekick Oswaldo. We are actually less going to Los Angeles than we are specifically heading to Hollywood. In fact, we are staying at the W Hollywood and the party, as it was last year, will be on the rooftop of the W Hotel with the famous Hollywood sign up the hill and to its back and the Tower Records Building and Grauman’s Chinese Theater at its feet. Last year it was a resplendent evening with just enough briskness in the air to make warmer holiday finery a good choice of attire. We are looking forward to the party and will spend the morning driving up to meet my half-sister Diane and her husband Page for brunch in the Melrose area. Diane and Page live in Santa Monica now, having moved down off the hill in Encino for a smaller and more convenient spot.
This is all good preparation for our trip next weekend to New York, where we will stay once again at the centrally located Cornell Club and father several times with friends and family in the Midtown area for holiday cheer. There is a distinctly different feeling about partying in Hollywood and partying in Midtown Manhattan, but I won’t deny that we are fortunate to be able to enjoy both in one season. The only thing more enjoyable to me is that we get to sip that wine and are not required to gulp it. That is, we will be in Hollywood for one night and in New York for four nights. That is long enough for both places for us to get our fill of the urban luxury experience without having to suffer the longer term effects of a protracted stay. We like our hilltop with the distant views and the overall lack of traffic and congestion here in what is called the North County of San Diego. I will not both trying to figure out the people or car density of the area because I know it will be sufficiently less burdensome than either New York City or Hollywood. But then again, our backgrounds and connections will probably forever draw us to both of the urban locales of Los Angeles and New York City. Hollywood is more friend focused and for us, New York is more family focused though both have elements of both. So it seems appropriate that our dress rehearsal tonight is friend focused and the main event next weekend is family focused. So, as soon as Kim gets out of the shower, we are heading to Hollywood with all that means for a one-night stay.