The Hollywood Dream (1): A Land Acknowledgement
This is the first of a series of articles examining the shape and grace of ‘Hollywood’. What does the word mean in the 2020s and beyond?
As it stumbles into its second century, the complicated socio-cultural-commercial-geographical-historical concept known as ‘Hollywood’ seems to be fracturing. Films have always been the tainted fruit of a tenuous collaboration between art and commerce. This summer’s union disputes suggest that relationship is flailing, is possibly even fatally doomed. City Hall doesn’t seem to care as historic buildings and trees are bulldozed to make way for generic concrete blocks. A distracted global audience means there are fewer and fewer ‘four quadrant’ movie hits, and these rely on aging stars, with no young challengers rising in their wake. What will ‘Hollywood’ represent to future generations? Has Tinsel Town lost its intrinsic sparkle? Is movie magic, which has sustained our collective global dreams for more than a hundred years, on its way to a final FADE OUT?
Let’s begin our exploration with a land acknowledgment. City dwellers are notoriously bad at this. We ignore the soil and rock layers beneath the asphalt, forget the rivers driven underground by long-dead engineers, and fail to notice as the ground underpinning the freeway shifts from granite to marsh. We focus on metal and concrete instead—ephemera. Thinking geologically is never easy.
Stand in the place where you are/Now face north…
We must remember that cities only sprout where—and when—the land allows it. 1.8 million years ago the entire Los Angeles basin was at the bottom of the ocean. Then came earthquakes, driving the Santa Monica mountains above sea level, stemming the tides and leading to silt deposits and the development of marshland. The coastline receded west as the glaciers of the Younger Dryas Ice Age shrank the ocean around 12,900 to 11,700 years ago. Only then did the first people come, the Clovis, the spear-carriers who (so the archeological records suggest) settled across the Americas as far south as Venezuela. They hunted and gathered, their community sustained by the abundance of the wetlands.
The first recorded human inhabitant of the basin, ‘La Brea Woman’, was sucked into a tar pit 9000 years ago, re-emerging in 1914. She set the pace for subsequent Hollywood women, embroiled in controversy, violence and conflict from the get-go. Questions still swirl about her origins, whether or not she was murdered, and the exploitation of her image.
The Clovis were followed by the Chumash, attracted by the good fishing, who were in turn displaced (apart from in Malibu) by the Tongva (also known as the Kizh). The Tongva learned the contours of the land and began to shape it to their own ends. Their feet beat the path through Sepulveda Canyon that became the track that is now the 405. One of their biggest villages, Yaanga was situated in what is now DTLA. The land was good to the Tongva, as they settled communities throughout the San Gabriel valley. It provided, amply, for their material needs, giving them the time and space to weave mythologies. It birthed a god for them, Wuyoot (or Weywot), in the sacred village of Puvungha. Wuyoot was the Sky God, laid low by his lust for the Frog Lady. He wanted her and then he didn’t, so she poisoned him and he flew up into the night sky and hangs there still, the moon.
The exact location of Puvungha is unknown, but it’s thought to be somewhere along the 405 in Long Beach. Another god, of the underworld, is said to reside further north, on the south side of the modern Cahuenga Pass, near the Tongva village of Cahug-Na/Kahwengna. He was buried, not born, in this land—or at least a part of him was.
The Divine Appendage
Osiris, son of the sky goddess Nut and the earth god Geb, brother/husband to Isis and bad-blood-brother to Set, represented death and rebirth to the ancient Egyptians. He was the first pharaoh of Egypt, a good and wise ruler, but Set conspired against him, killed and dismembered him, and tossed the fourteen pieces of his body into the Nile.
Isis, assisted by her sister, Nephthys and Anubis, god of embalming, retrieved all the body parts, bar one, his penis. She used her magic to restore her brother-husband and replaced his missing bits using either her thumb or a wood carving. Resurrected, he ruled the underworld. Osiris was widely venerated as the gatekeeper to the afterlife, king of the realm beyond the veil. The fate of his penis is one of the great mysteries of Egyptian mythology. Some say it was eaten by a fish.
Others, that it ended up underneath the Hollywood Hills.
Linda Goodman popularized astrology for the Me Generation in the 1970s with the wildly successful Sun Signs (1968). In her follow-up, Star Signs (1987), she describes an encounter with an “uninvited but most welcome visitor” on New Year’s Day, 1970. “A plump man, shaped rather like a Buddha” wearing “a snow-white turban fastened in the center with a pearl stickpin” knocked on the door of her Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel room. They talked for hours, “like old friends”, about everything from the Barbra Streisand movie On A Clear Day to Goodman’s past and future soulmate.
Although she dances around it coyly in Star Signs, promising only further revelations about Horus, son of Isis and Osiris, the mysterious visitor seems to have sent Goodman on a quest “to the mountains”. She ends her account of the visit by writing that she “sank down into the plump sofa chair by the window that looked out on the small white cross, planted on the far hill behind Graumann’s Chinese Theatre”. From 1970 onwards, Goodman made a point of spending Decembers (a good month for the gods of death and rebirth) in Hollywood, always staying at the Roosevelt. On December 8th (the Feast of the Immaculate Conception and Bodhi Day) she would take a small group of friends on a pilgrimage to the cross.
Could the Hollywood Hills indeed be the resting place of Osiris’ penis? Could the artifact that had lain dormant for centuries suddenly surge back into action as it found itself, once again, surrounded by simpatico souls? From the very earliest days, filmmakers were fascinated by Egyptology. The first (of many) screen Cleopatras was Florence Lawrence in 1908, while Theda Bara moved from New York to LA to give her take on the Egyptian queen in the (now tragically lost) $500,000 epic Cleopatra (1917).
Grauman’s Egyptian Theatre was one of the first commercial buildings to open along Hollywood Boulevard in 1922–the same year Howard Carter discovered the entrance to Tutankhamen’s tomb. Over the next decade, new buildings in Los Angeles, from the main public library downtown to apartments (such as the Karnak) in Hollywood, were constructed with Egyptian styling, reflecting the ‘Tutmania’ sweeping the world.
There was a second wave of Tutmania in the 1970s, as the contents of the boy-king’s tomb toured the USA. This is Goodman’s era. The hill, and what might be entombed within, became an obsession for the astrologer. She allegedly spent tens of thousands of dollars on ground radar scans and concluded that there was indeed a pyramid-shaped hollow chamber inside the hill. Unfortunately, when she died in 1995, these scans were not among her papers, despite various friends swearing up and down that they’d seen them.
So the circular hill remains a mystery. If it wasn’t for the iconic 34-foot white cross at its summit, it would be just another foothill. As so often happens with sacred spaces, later inhabitants of the area sensed the hill was special in some way and decided to mark it as their own shrine. A wooden cross was placed there in 1923, a Christian memorial to Christine Wetherhill Stevenson, one of the founders of the Hollywood Bowl. Stevenson wanted the Bowl to be a place of Christian worship, a venue for staging passion plays. When that didn’t work out, she built another amphitheatre on the opposite side of the Cahuenga Pass, the Pilgrimage Play Theatre––later known as the Ford. She died shortly after its successful first summer season, in 1922.
The cross and the hill it stands on have a storied 20th century history, as ownership has passed back and forth between the city and various religious groups. For periods of time, regular services of worship were held here. Nazi supporters used white lime to daub a giant swastika on the lower slopes in the summer of 1941. The original wooden cross perished in a brush fire in 1965, and was replaced by a steel and plexiglass version. This was virtually destroyed by vandals and storms in 1984, but was restored—resurrected perhaps?—in 1993, when it was re-dedicated to local philanthropist Jane Boeckmann by the then-owners, High Adventure Ministries. It’s stood as Hollywood’s protective beacon since then, shining over commuters stuck on the 101 and audiences walking to and from the Bowl.
As with so many of the underlying mythologies that have intertwined to give us ‘Hollywood’ over the years, as so many different peoples and cultures have washed in and out of the area, syncretism is a powerful force. Although Christian scholars energetically refute the links between Jesus and Osiris, they are both supposed to sit in judgment of the dead. It’s not difficult to imagine their energies co-existing within the same metaphysical space, a shared Golgotha. The Tongva seemed to have been aware of the unique power of this area too: their name for it, Cahug-Na, means “place of the hill”.
Much of what we recognize as ‘Hollywood’ has been shaped by the people who have been drawn to this spot, many of them spiritual seekers, desirous of a higher plane of existence, yearning for incandescence. It seems this city, this cultural concept, was built on more than days of endless sunshine, variegated terrain, or fresh sea breezes. Unseen forces of attraction throb deep within the soil—just as they do in sacred sites like Glastonbury Tor, also once underwater, and also swirling with associations from pagan burials to the court of King Arthur to next month’s music festival. When we talk about the ‘magic of Hollywood’, perhaps we should look beyond the silver screen to the forces of enchantment that have been here for centuries longer than the first movie studio, emanating from the hills beneath the iconic sign?
Stand in the place where you are. Acknowledge the land—even if you’re not quite sure what lies beneath your feet.
You, and this, are brilliant!