The stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame are almost as well known as the names that they hold, and now, just like certain celebrities; some of these stars are going to get facelifts. The fabulous folks over at yahoo.com give us the details:
Workers have been busy fixing broken sidewalk stars and cracked terrazzo on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in front of the Kodak Theatre, where the glitzy Oscar ceremony will be held Feb. 25.
“We wanted it to look good for the Academy Awards,” said Hollywood honorary mayor Johnny Grant…The $80,000 in repair work is viewed as a test project that could also determine the true cause of the buckling. The city has been investigating the problem since 2002. About 121 damaged terrazzo squares, plus 16 others with stars in them, are being replaced. Workers are experimenting with a concrete base up to 8 inches thick to hold the new squares in place. The buckling sidewalk’s base is about 3 inches thick.
Living down in L.A. these day I have the great privilege of seeing the Hollywood walk of fame pretty much whenever my heart desires and it is a little dinged up in spots, so this is a good idea. In a town where image is everything you can’t have the most popular tourist destination in L.A. to look run down.
At least not on the surface, anyhow.
Back when movies were still being made in L.A. Hollywood was always kind of intense. I don’t know why, exactly. The studios aren’t there. It’s just kind of a symbol of the movie industry without really being home to the movie industry. But it was always really crazy. I lived there for a few years in the mid-80’s and saw things that are hard for most people to really understand. Now it’s lost all that energy. The music industry is pretty much dead, so there aren’t even a lot of bands playing anymore. It used to be that you could go through BAM and count a few hundred bands with advertised gigs every week. Now there are a handful. Movies aren’t really being shot in L.A. anymore. The studios are mainly shooting television. Movies shoot where it’s a lot less expensive to shoot. So now Hollywood is just a cesspool with no real purpose at all. There’s no positive energy there. Nothing productive happening. Just a place where photo-ops can be staged for movie promotions, even though the movies were filmed in Vancouver or Sydney or Bucharest. Pretty sad, really.
Hollywood is a piece of shit. Especially Hollywood Blvd. I seriously look at parents that bring their kids there on vacation as nut cases. The palce is gross and infested with druggies and who knows who is REALLY in that Shrek costume or that Elmo costume. The costumes are dirty as shit and the guys in them could be druggies or bums. Who knows? And yes, the squares look like shit.
Heh…Hollywood is even more of a hellhole now than it was when I lived there in the 80’s. My old apartment was about 500 feet from where the Kodak Theater ended up being built. Back then the town was a lot more hoppin’ since it hadn’t become irrelevant to the movie business yet, but it was still a sewer. Now about the only thing you can say about Hollywood is that it makes a nice backdrop for press events…as long as you don’t pan the camera away from the red carpet and accidentally catch the locals.