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The Hollywood "Sign," 1923-1980s
--KABC Talk Radio (AM 79) Display Ad, L.A. Times, 17 January 1973
To mention it in the same breath with the Eiffel Tower and the Empire State Building is an insult to the intelligence.
--Charlotte L. Grable, L.A. Times, 3 February 1973
--- --- ---
The Hollywood Sign declares that from this place arose our mass visual culture that displaced print culture, represented by a textual icon that has no author.
With its distinctive dog-eared block letters and sinuous setting on a mountain slope, The Hollywood Sign is the mother of all backdrops, reproduced ad infinitum across the globe as if branding Los Angeles into every corner of every continent. If Los Angeles has a single leading visual icon, then the Hollywood Sign is certainly a leading candidate. But no other city of world-historic scale has ever had such an unlikely colossal visual monument: unintended, shallow, and cheap. The creators of the HOLLYWOODLAND sign (its original form) had no sense of history whatsoever. They built a giant billboard from cheap materials to advertise small residential plots and their business constructing single-family homes. The Hollywoodland Development Company—whose investors included DW Griffith and Edgar Rice Burroughs, erected the thirteen 50-foot tall letters in 1923, using the impermanent materials of telephone poles, wood framing, and sheet-metal facing. It was “not designed to survive the sale of the last lot."[1]
Colossal kitsch might be its formal aesthetic classification. Unplanned, unintended, unsigned and even uncreated in a profound way—in effect a "found" object--it has nevertheless ascended to the very Pantheon of global urban icons. Considered as a structure, the Hollywood Sign is the complete inverse of the Eiffel Tower, the Statue of Liberty, the Golden Gate Bridge, the Sydney Opera House, The Kremlin, and Big Ben. From the ancient Colossus of Rhodes onward, urban icons have been monumental structures, built to make a very serious statement about their city’s grandeur. The HOLLYWOODLAND sign was built only to promote a single neighborhood in a city that as yet had no grandeur.
Situated on the slopes of Mt. Lee 1,000 feet above the city (1,700 feet above sea level), it is legible from a distance of 20 miles. Originally illuminated by 4,000 light bulbs, it was maintained for years by a caretaker named Albert Kothe, who lived in a cabin behind the first "L." Koethe, a beloved figure in his neighborhood below the HOLLYWOODLAND sign, may in fact have helped to build it, according to a fascinating, photographically documented look at this life, by the Under the Hollywood Sign Wordpress blog.
Actress Peg Entwistle, despondent over her failure to achieve stardom in Hollywood, killed herself in a jump from the top of the H in 1932. It would have taken so much effort for her to reach this site for suicide that she must have been determined to make a statement. Did she mean to say, simply, that she had been killed by Hollywood? Was she being tragic? Or sarcastic, in a real-death spectacle that nobody witnessed?
Apparently having made a spectacular leap to her death from the top of the fifty-foot letter "H" in the flaming electric sign "Hollywoodland," which for years has flashed its message nightly over the city, the crumpled body of an attractive but unidentified woman was found in the Hollywood Hills last night by the police.[2]
The real tragedy of it, Peg never knew. A letter offering her a part arrived in her mailbox the day after her death. Eventually, when the Hollywood Sign emerged as an urban icon, Peg Entwistle would rise again, as the patron martyr of Hollywood’s innumerable failed actors, making that H the Tomb of the Unknown Actors.
The Hollywoodland Development Company’s maintenance fund ran out in 1939, so its managers dismissed Mr. Kothe. In 1945 they donated (off-loaded) the sign along with hundreds of acres of unbuildable surrounding mountainside to the Los Angeles City Recreation and Parks Commission. Both parties mostly likely saw this as a donation of the acreage, not the sign itself, which the City never even considered maintaining. In 1949 a windstorm toppled the letter "H" and the Recreation and Parks Commission decided to raze the whole eyesore. Faced with its impending loss, some Angelenos (and only some) were for the first time prompted to assess the value of the HOLLYWOODLAND sign. City Councilman Lloyd C. Davies "said his district was sensitive about becoming known as ' 'ollywoodland.'"[3]
The Hollywood Chamber of Commerce was the first to the rescue. The businessmen of Hollywood understood the potential of garish, eye-catching roadside billboards. Los Angeles had swallowed the once-independent City of Hollywood in 1910 in a merger known as "consolidation," and the community ever since had struggled to maintain its identity. The sign’s second lease on life emerged from the same logic as it birth: local promotion. The Chamber of Commerce men cleverly offered to restore the sign provided they could delete the last four letters, "LAND". The City Council and the Recreation and Parks Commission, seeing a way to avoid to cost of demolition, approved and the "Hollywood Sign" began its life in 1949.
Technically, then, the "Hollywood Sign" was never even created. It came into being through the decay of an earlier sign. The HOLLYWOODLAND sign (1923-1949) was certainly well known, but there is no evidence that anyone considered it to be a metonym for "Los Angeles" or to represent anything larger than itself. In a passing reference in 1940, Hedda Hopper (the powerful movie gossip columnist) referred to it as "the famed Hollywoodland sign," but prior to this, the only other mention of the sign in the Los Angeles Times, appear in the coverage of Peg Entwistle’s 1932 suicide.[4]
Public discussion of the Hollywood Sign only began to emerge in the years of Los Angeles’s ascending Golden Age in the 1950s, when it became a metropole of global economy and culture. The massive expansion that took place during the Second World War continued with the aerospace contractors of the Cold War. The large internal migration in the 1950s was drawn by the military-industrial complex, by cheap homebuilding, and by the spreading fame in the mass media of a "Southern California Lifestyle" generated sustained attention to the many distinctive places and features of Los Angeles.
With that newfound attention, some Angelenos suddenly felt the need for a Icon, as though it were the admission price to Great City status. Of course, these proposals assumed that Los Angeles had no such icon. The Hollywood Sign was simply ignored in these debates. In 1951 the sculptor Roger Noble Burnham was riding a local wave of celebrity after winning the commission to sculpt the 12-foot bronze statue of General Douglas MacArthur that stands sentry over MacArthur (formerly Westlake) Park. Carried away with the spirit of God and County, Burnham proposed a truly gigantic statue of Christ to stand at the very crest of Mt. Lee: a 150-foot white marble Christ—nearly three times the height of the Christ of the Andes and 50 feet taller than the Statue of Liberty (measured from her toes). The renderings of this unbuilt colossus place it just behind and above the Hollywood Sign, as if to vanquish wanton Hollywood under the bleeding feet of the Redeemer.[5]
Several years later, a homesick Angeleno named George St. George wrote a letter to the Los Angeles Times, reporting "a recurring dream" that "had followed me from Egypt to Iceland to London." He saw "the outlines of the hills beyond the Hollywood sign, and upon the highest point, a magnificent statue of the Virgin Mary, somewhat in the style of the Christ statue upon the Corcovado in Rio, but more splendid and imposing. Her arms open toward the city named after Her." St. George opined "that America’s fourth largest city deserves a distinctive landmark which could rival the Statue of Liberty or the Eiffel Tower.”[6] St. George was right, at least, that the official guardian deity of Los Angeles is Our Lady, Queen of the Angels, the Holy Mother of God. But Roman Catholics don’t erect colossal statues to her, like Athena. Instead, she is emblazoned on every street corner as La Virgen de Guadalupe, throughout Latino LA.
These proposed colossal sculptures would have been dwarfed by the even more symbolic 500-foot television tower—one of the first commercial television broadcasting ventures anywhere—that was built atop Mt. Lee in 1939-40 by the now-defunct Don Lee Broadcasting Company.[7] Through perhaps the Second World War, the HOLLYWOODLAND sign and the Hollywood Sign mostly likely stood for little more than the original real estate development and the locality of Hollywood. That locality, of course, also stood for the entire Motion Picture industry. The conflation of "Hollywood" with the movies took place quite independently from the HOLLYWOODLAND sign, constituting a complex story in itself.[8] That locality was indeed the birthplace of the American motion picture industry, but by the 1930s more movies were made in Culver City (M-G-M) and Glendale (Universal) than in Hollywood proper.
Doubtless, it was the global movie business that gave the locality its fame, and not vice versa. Once the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce truncated "LAND" from the real estate sign, its anchor to the local ground was lifted. It could now float freely to signify "the movies." The next step would be for the sign also to signify "Los Angeles," which by transitivity involved the further conflation of Los Angeles with its most distinctive export. Regardless, however, of this symbolic detachment, the 50-foot letters remained at 1,700 foot altitude on Mt. Lee, a vantage point visible from nearly every point in the metropolis south of Mt. Lee. The chemistry of the sign’s association with the global movie industry and with the larger metropolis eventually crystallized into the urban icon we know today.
Sometime between the two attempts to tear it down in 1949 and 1973, it is most likely that the Hollywood Sign underwent its transformation from a mere local landmark of eccentric notoriety into a global icon. Future historians will need to pin down a better date for that transition, but it is clear that public discussion of the Hollywood Sign by the early 1970s had reached a very different plane. "What is the sign’s real value?" asked John Pastier in an insightful Los Angeles Times article of 1973. "For one thing, it reassures tourists, in properly eccentric fashion, that Hollywood exists." The 1949 intent of the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce seems clearly borne out in this observation. Pastier’s next sentence is more significant: "Even for many residents of long standing, Los Angeles would not be itself without those nine letters of confirmation; for 50 years, millions of Angelenos have seen the sign daily, and sheer longevity has made it rich with meaning."[9]
The 1970s crisis of the sign’s decay produced an outpouring of public opinion, debate, and at least one mark of a true urban icon’s birth: its arrival in serious art. If not the first, then certainly the most visible arrival was the sign’s treatment by the singer-songwriter Dory Previn, in her song "Mary C. Brown and the Hollywood Sign," written in 1972. Previn, along with her ex-husband André Previn (they separated in 1965), had a commitment to art that rode the boundary between the popular and the refined. Her lyrics from this period were intensely autobiographical. Identifying with Sylvia Plath, her thoughts often turned to the tragic. The "Mary C. Brown" of the title is based on Peg Entwistle. "I was going to have lunch with a friend one day in the Beachwood area when I saw the sign up close for the first time. It was like Stonehenge, the remnants of an old civilization, an ancient totem. I ran right home and wrote the lyrics."[10]
The result is an ironic play on Emma Lazarus’ great epigraph on the base of the Statue of Liberty. The first stanza invokes not the Statue of Liberty, but the Christ of the Andes—a remarkably common reference, as we have seen: "you know / the hollywood sign / that stands / in the hollywood hills / i don't think / the christ of the andes / ever blessed / so many ills." The poem/lyrics continue: "Give me your poor/ your tired your pimps/ your carhops/ your cowboys/ your midgets…"[11] Before the year was out, Previn had teamed up with producer Zev Bufman to write and stage a Broadway play by the same name. The set design, of course, was dominated by huge letters (only the first six, due to their size). But the previews went horribly and Bufman cancelled the show before it even opened.[12]
"Mary C. Brown and the Hollywood Sign" collapsed in New York, but it may have achieved for the sign just enough recognition to motivate Angelenos to embrace the sign in a serious way for the first time. In 1973 pranksters altered the sign to read, temporarily, "Hollyweed:" an indication of its newfound media attention. But the City officials were moved only to announce, once again, its intention to tear the dangerous shipwreck down. Then began a remarkable mobilization. The Hollywood Chamber of Commerce once again spearheaded the campaign, teaming-up this time with KABC Talk Radio. KABC and the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce launched, on 17 January 1973, its "Save the Sign" campaign. KABC ran a full-page ad in the LA Times with the slogan "Today the Sign, Tomorrow Grauman’s!"[13] Notice especially that by this point the public could understand "the Sign" to mean "the Hollywood Sign."
It only took $15,000 to reinforce the nine letters. As John Pastier observed, "The city’s behavior is inexplicable: it has owned this landmark for 30 years, but has renounced all responsibility for its upkeep." Indeed, the dilapidation of The Sign had no cause other than government negligence. City officials must have genuinely hated it. But the KABC campaign was a success. By April the donations to the "Save the Sign Committee" topped $15,000. A month later, 100 cyclists completed a 20-mile fundraising race. And the Hollywood delegations to City Hall had their effect. The City of Los Angeles Cultural Heritage Board officially listed the sign as a historic landmark, "Monument # 111."
The ceremony celebrating the victory of the Save the Sign Campaign, hosted by Gloria Swanson, was spoiled by a thick fog. But the fog may have been a courtesy, for the Sign, like the silent film stars, was in serious decline. The $15,000, it turns out, was only enough to keep the bulldozers at bay. The decay was now so irreversible that the letters simply needed to be rebuilt from the ground up, at a cost of almost $30,000 per letter (a total of $180,000). By 1978, the top of the D and the entire third O fell to the ground, and arsonists badly burned the first L. It was during this period of pathetic spectacle that Ed Ruscha realized that The Sign would serve his experiments in (photo)graphic depiction of the vernacular landscape. In the mid- to late-1970s he executed a series of views of the Hollywood Sign, such as The Back of Hollywood (1977)
Ruscha’s foray into the vernacular landscape was not an embrace but a rejection, at least of the Sign:
I looked outside my window here and I saw the sign Hollywood and it became a subject for me. It only lasted for a while, so the actual remnants of the sign are not even important to me. I don’t even think it should stay. It doesn’t even mean landmark to me. It might as well fall down. That’s more Hollywood, to have it fall down or be removed. But in the end it’s more Hollywood to put it back up.[14]
In contrast with Pop art cofounder Ruscha, Art Seidenbaum, the Los Angeles Times’ influential cultural columnist, drew a bright line between the refined and the vulgar, with the headline "Down With Hollywood.”: "I have seen the sign," Seidenbaum sniffed, “It is shabby by disrepair. It has been used as a prop for Gypsy Boots in a bad movie called ‘Mondo Hollywood’ if bad memory is correct. It served as a background for some of the scenes in ‘The Loved One,’ which was Marty Ransohoff’s good-bad translation of Waugh’s novel on death as a production number. It was in the title of Dory Previn’s recent play which died before opening. Not much of a cultural heritage.”[15]
Seidenbaum’s column provoked days of letter-writing to the editor of the Los Angeles Times. One woman sent a check with her personal motivation: "My little girl in 1925 learned to spell from the sign" (apparently with a reduced alphabet). Others quite agreed with Seidenbaum: "The ugliness of the sign, which is so clear from our home below it, and its utter lack of worth are reason enough to tear it down." But the ugliness of the sign was largely a function of distance. "Sure it’s ugly up close," one reader pointed out, "but so is an oil painting by Rembrandt." Others hardly took the debate seriously: "I think they ought to build up the sign and tear down Hollywood" wrote Joe Marr of Santa Monica. A few readers even reflected on the underlying issues: "Perhaps in these days of rapid, disorienting change, wrote Elaine Burke of Los Angeles, it’s wise to retain familiar, comfortable symbols that are not positively unesthetic. In this, and in other matters, when it doubt, let’s not destroy." That note of "familiarity," no matter how "unaesthetic," is a common theme among the sign’s supporters. "The Hollywood Sign has been a friend for seven years," Charles Allen of Los Angeles wrote: "It tells me how clear the air is, or otherwise, on the way to work."[16] The artist Ed Ruscha also used it as a “smog indicator” near his studio on Western Avenue.[17]
In the debate over the destruction or preservation of the Hollywood Sign we may be witnessing the birth of an icon—that moment when it leaves the local and the particular and enters the global and the universal. It is especially telling that "the Sign" so emerged in such an accidental way, as if the Sign, by default in the absence of any rival, and by common acclaim among locals who had adopted it as their visual landmark in an otherwise disorienting city.
Cities that excel in the innovative technological economic cultures of a given epoch tend to become exemplars of that epoch and often become lightning-rods of global culture.[19][18] So it is not surprising that the attention of the world was directed toward Los Angeles at this moment. And there was the Sign, the lightning-rod for all that attention. That it was cheap and vulgar, redolent of the shallow facades of the back-lot "dream dumps" that Nathanael West satirized, recommended it all the more to the exalted role of Urban Icon. If it "said" Hollywood (as in the movie business), then it was all the more fit to stand metonymically for a metropolis whose fame was first and most globally spread by that industry. Another colossal structure may have served just as well, had any existed in such a salient, visible location. For size and location seem to be prerequisites of successful urban icons, and the Hollywood Sign certainly had these. Los Angeles had already made itself into a global landmark; the world simply needed a universal way to "see" it, and the Hollywood Sign was not only there and visible, but it also said so much more about the way the city was "seen" (as scene) than a statue of the Virgin Mary (Queen of the Angels) could ever have.
Urban icons seem to crystallize just as a classic era of a given culture turns into the stone of "the past." The past of Classic Hollywood under the Eight Studios and the star system had just passed by the 1970s and the whole period from the 1920s through 1950s—essentially the pre-televison era—was celebrated in literature and ossified in movies like Chinatown (Dir. Roman Polanski, 1974) and That’s Entertainment ( Dir. Jack Haley, Jr., 1974).
The ultimate restoration (a complete rebuilding, as dictated by its longtime sponsor, the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce) of the Sign took place in 1978, as stars packed into Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Mansion for an auction that should be portrayed someday in Sesame Street: "individual Sign letters were ‘auctioned’ off at $27,700 per letter….Alice Cooper ‘bought’ an "O" (in honor of Groucho Marx), while singing cowboy Gene Autry sponsored an "L" and Paul Williams sponsored the ‘W."[20][19]
The Hollywood Sign emerged in the 1980s as a shrine, carefully restored and fortified with barbed wire to deter further suicides and defacings. There are numerous web-sites devoted to it, led by the non-profit Hollywood Sign Foundation, established by the successive Chamber of Commerce campaigns.[21][20] The Hollywood Sign had become a billboard for Los Angeles, from "The Industry"--as it is called here, to the City itself. A verbal sign, it is quintessentially visual: without its blocky, S-curve profile it only reads "Hollywood." Seen (not merely written) as a structure in the landscape, it means a Los Angeles that is epitomized by the mass visual entertainment transformation of world culture.
By forcing verbal signs into an irreducibly visual posture, the Hollywood Sign represents the triumph of the visual over the verbal, but its legible form on the slopes of Mt. Lee, catching the sunlight at sunset or shining like a daylight neon beacon through the smog—the only legible thing in that haze—the Hollywood Sign also verifies—in a vaporous and even vapid way—the centrality of place in all urban cultural forms.
[1] John Pastier, "The Hollywood Sign—One of the Best of Our Los Angeles Symbols," Los Angeles Times, 6 February 1973.
[2] "Girl Leaps to Death from Sign," Los Angeles Times, 19 September 1932.
[3] "Hollywood Sensitive About Dropped ‘H’ on Hillside Sign," Los Angeles Times, 11 January 1949.
[4] Hedda Hopper, "Hedda Hopper’s HOLLYWOOD,’ Los Angeles Times, 14 April 1940.
[5] Norris Leap, "Colossal Statue of Christ Planned," Los Angeles Times, 8 May 1951.
[6] George St. George, "He Dreams of Queen," (Letter to the Editor) Los Angeles Times, 27 May 1957.
[7] "Station Planned for Television," Los Angeles Times, 9 April 1939.
[8] For the rise of "Holllywood" as the identity of the corporate identity of the Big Eight studios, see Ross (1998): 121-239.
[9] John Pastier, "The Hollywood Sign—One of the Best of Our Los Angeles Symbols," Los Angeles Times 6 February 1973.
[10] Digby Diehl, "Dory Previn’s Poetic Journey to Sanity," Los Angeles Times 12 September 1971; On Previn’s style in this period see Robert Hilburn, "Discovering Dory Previn in Person," Los Angeles Times, 4 December 1973.
[11] Previn (1971), pp. ***
[12] Dan Sullivan, "On the Wreck of the ‘Mary C. Brown,’ Los Angeles Times, 3 December 1972.
[13] The preservationist movement in Los Angeles dates in general from the 1970s as well. Its leading organization, The Los Angeles Conservancy, was founded in 1978, growing from the successful effort to save the Los Angeles Central Library from demolition. http://www.laconservancy.org/about/about_main.php4 (Last accessed 26 January 2006).
[14] Ruscha quoted in the film, L.A. Suggested by the Art of Edward Ruscha, (produced and directed by Gary Conklin, Mystic Fire Video, 1981). Transcript in Ruscha (2002): 220–24.
[15] Los Angeles Times, 23 Jan 1973.
[16] Pastier, "The Hollywood Sign," Los Angeles Times 6 February 1973; "Love Hollywood, Love That Sign?" [letters to the editor] Los Angeles Times, 3 February 1973; "Hollywood Sign," [letters to the editor] Los Angeles Times 14 February 1973.
[17] Isenberg (2001): ***
[18] Hall (1998).
[19] "The Hollywood Sign," at www.hollywoodsign.org, p. 10.
[20] http://www.hollywoodsign.org/; http://www.npr.org/programs/morning/features/patc/hollywoodsign/
This page has paths:
- Topoi: Hollywood Sign, Port of Los Angeles, Case Study #22, and Watts Towers Phil Ethington
- structured media gallery test Curtis Fletcher
- Places and Paths of Los Angeles Phil Ethington
- Narrative Essays Phil Ethington
- Ghost Metropolis: Los Angeles and Its Places in Global History, From the Pleistocene to the Present Phil Ethington
