I'm Goin' to Hollywood
I spent this past weekend in Los Angeles, my first time to visit the city (except for that layover I had at LAX). I suppose this was an important trip for me since I should consider LA as a potential city for me in the future. So onto LA...
We setup base at Cort's sprawling 3/4 bedroom house which was close to the airport. Cort is a friend of Dan's from Pepperdine who is currently working as Michael Apted's personal assistant. Of course, we had several interesting discussions. Another member of the Pepperdine clan, Dave, drove up from Newport Beach to hang out with us. I had met Dave about 1.5 years ago with the rest of Dan's friends in San Francisco. Dave and Cort are both great guys and I enjoyed having them and Dan show me around the city.
We headed down to the most obvious of all LA attractions, Hollywood. The tell-tale signs of a tourist trap were blatant: $15 admission into the wax and other "historical" museums, t-shirt stores and more star-maps than there are celebrities. In front of their large building, the Scientology people were out in full force pushing L. Ron Hubbard's latest literary work and asking people to take their personality test. No takers here, thank you very much.
I did enjoy walking around The Kodak Theater, where the Academy Award ceremony will be next month. As you walk in, they have illuminated blocks on the pillars listing every Best Picture winner since the awards' inception through today, as well as nameless blocks through the year 2040. Yet the Kodak becomes a trap itself as a line of high end retail outlets have embedded themselves into the building. Hollywood and Highland, at some angles, looks like a shopping district.
The reason we were down there was to watch a movie at The Chinese Theater. Unfortunately, the offering was a steaming pile of shit known as Darkness Falls. Now, the Chinese Theater just isn't some stadium seating theater with decent seats with the smell of stale popcorn and a decent sound system. This theater can easily seat 1,000 people, has an incredible THX-certified sound system, and obviously does not dim their projector bulb as the enormous screen was bright and vivid. Cort told me about the premiere of Ali and when Michael Mann was not satisfied with the acoustics of the theater during a "screen check" earlier in the day, he ordered 60+ bed mattresses to be hung on the walls to reduce any "echoing" effect. I didn't notice any problems.
After the movie, we returned to Cort's house thinking of ways we could forget the 85 minutes we had lost on Darkness Falls. We settled on some conventional ailments and a selection from Cort's Academy Screener DVD's, Bowling for Columbine. This would be my second time to see it and I enjoyed it just as much. Then we headed back to West Hollywood/Los Angeles to Belly, a swank lounge where one of Cort's development colleagues was having a birthday party. I enjoyed the bar a lot, great crowd, decent music and the ever-so comfortable atmosphere that lounge bars provide. I like lounge bars...a lot.
After dining at Fatburger, we ended the late evening watching another Academy screener, Road to Perdition. Sipping on some clove-infused grain alcohol from Prague, I watched some beautiful cinematography by the late Conrad Hall. And that was the end of that evening.
