Bette Davis Sings "Whatever Happened To Baby Jane" On The Andy Williams Show

Jaimie Kennedy And A Bus Load Of Tourists In Beverly Hills

"Malice In Wonderland" Is Up On Youtube!

The RARELY Seen TV Movie About Hollywood's Resident Two Old Battle Axes...Hedda is played by Jane Alexander, while Louella is Liz TAYLOR, and Romanoff's is played by Perino's! It's mindbending. Listening to Liz to that voice! Must watch, before it gets pulled, like the good stuff always does.

Malice In Wonderland (Part 1 of 10)

The Most Historic Hollywood Landmark Not In Hollywood

While driving betwixt the Frozen North, and Home in Hollywood, I decided to stop for lunch at my favorite restaurant in Chinatown, in SF. While there, I simpy HAD to check out the scene of the non-crime, the very room where Roscoe Arbuckle DID NOT RAPE ANYONE. Ste 1221-1223 of the St. Francis Hotel.

To my thrill, that part of the h0tel has never been remodled. I could tell the big heavy doors could have been no newer than 1920. It's had paint and carpet and that's all. Nice to see a city preserve their Hollywood Landmarks apropriately. I wish Hollywood would!

(And gutting an Historic building to turn it into some gauche club is not preservation, its vandalism. Just because you bought an indulgance from the council, doesn't make it anything but what it is).

Louella Parsons

August 7, 1921

NEW YORK TELEGRAPH

Roscoe Arbuckle has lost eight pounds. The hot weather in Chicago did it, assisted by the row he had with the waiter at the Congress Hotel.

Fatty Philosophizes on Taylor Case

Feb 17th, 1921

Jack Jungmeyer

LOS ANGELES RECORD

"The American public is ardent in its hero worship and quite asruthless in destroying its idols in any walk of life. "It elevates a man more quickly than any nation in the world, and castshim down more quickly--quite often on surmise or a mere hunch. "This latter disposition so curiously at variance with the American tradition and ideal of justice is just now being driven home particularly tothe motion picture people of Los Angeles on the heels of Billy Taylor'smysterious murder." Such was the comment today by "Fatty" Arbuckle on one aftermath angleof the noted picture director's assassination in his home here on the nightof February 1. He was decrying certain innuendos cast against WilliamDesmond Taylor, his life and his relationship with women screen stars whosenames have featured the investigations. Arbuckle is back in his West Adams mansion after his second courtordeal in connection with the death of Virginia Rappe in San Francisco. "It is the general inclination, when trouble happens to strike in filmcircles, for the thoughtless to whisper, malign and gossip and to speak withthat mock sagacity of the times of 'the inside dope' and 'the low down,'"continued Arbuckle. "This was brought out quite forcibly in my own case and has beenaccentuated in the case of William Taylor. That I will acquit myself I amquite sure, but poor Billy is not here to defend himself from speculationswhich have no basis in proven fact. "Taylor lived as he died--a square shooter, absolutely on the levelwith his fellow beings, charitable and kind. His death removed from themotion picture industry one of its outstanding characters. To this hundredswho knew him best testify. "And yet, because of that curious and pervading psychology of suspicionto which I have referred, Billy Taylor's name is in many quarters beingsmirched with utter disregard for the facts of his personal and professionallife. "That is far from the dominant trait of our forefathers, who held a maninnocent until proven guilty. And I know the full weight of thisvilification and innuendo because I was a victim of the same campaign. "Never in history, perhaps, have men and women been so quickly elevatedto prominence as have the successful folk in pictures. That is because ofthe millions before whom they appear via the screen almost nightly. Theirnames become household words. Their features widely familiar. They arevirtually next door neighbor to everyone in the land. "The man and woman who thus accepts as worthy of esteem this filmlandneighbor should do himself or herself the moral honor of refusing to accepttattle and shouldershrugs in place of fact--as he undoubtedly would in thecase of his respected physical neighbor."

"The Land Alone Is Worth MILLIONS!" -Tom LaBonge Upon Being Asked About The BUILDING Ablaze

R.I.P Laemmle Building 1931-2008
We Knew Ye, But Hardly Cared

For The Obituary Click Here

Doin' It Up Right! LA Style!

I was one of those sappy sentamentalists who was rather pleased that the Christmas (or X-mas, or Santa, or whatever they are calling it this year) Parade was wrested away from the "frugal" clutches of KTLA and would once again go down "Santa Claus Lane" as it was supposed to and always had (celebrated in popular song, in fact), rather than the sleazy part of Sunset, just so the station didn't have to spring for a remote. That small pleasure lasted until Johnny died.

So I dug up this old Postcard from Christmas, 1938 out of my collection.....

....and the picture here is from the Chamber of Commerce website, taken just a couple of years ago...

....and compared them to this last one I took myself a couple weeks ago at "Hollywood's Satan Parade" (SP?)...or "whatever they're calling it this year..."

I guess if it isn't a cheezeball, coke spun nightclub, raking in millions from posuers with more money than class or brains, The City really doesn't see where some establishments fit in on "The New" Hollywood Boulevard.

Or maybe they know EXACTLY where.

If La Bonge can figure out that an empty corner of Hollywood and Vine, freed from all preservation requirements is valuable (see May 2nd Post), he can certainly figure out that some places don't bring in that much money, for themselves or the city, and should be treated accordingly.

Treated like...Well, like someone who's not cool enough to get passed the vacuous velvet rope controlers in front of The Roosevelt Hotel (?!) It can just stand out on Hollywood Boulevard in the cold, surrounded by crappy tourists and stench.

That makes The Baby Santa cry.

Paladium Restored And Reopen...Isn't That Jus Wunnerful?!

I took this picture of it myself, last week...Hope it looks that good on the inside...

Dickie Does It.....

Say Goodnight Dick....

Dick Martin

Last updated: 11:00 PM BST 25/05/2008

Wisecracking co-star of Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In whose humour caught the zeitgeist of the late 1960s.
Dick Martin, who died on Saturday aged 86, was the zany half of the American comedy duo Rowan and Martin and co-star of Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In, which became a cult comedy fixture on both sides of the Atlantic in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Screened in Britain on BBC2, the show made stars of Goldie Hawn and Lily Tomlin and created such catchphrases as "Sock it to me!", "Here come de judge" and (Martin's own gnomic rejoinder) "You bet your sweet bippy".
After splitting with his partner Dan Rowan in the late 1970s, Martin went on to become one of American television's busiest directors.
Laugh-In, which was launched in January 1968, was unlike any comedy-variety show before it: rather than relying on tightly scripted song-and-dance segments, it offered a kaleidoscopic, almost stream-of-consciousness series of non sequitur jokes, political satire and wacky antics from a cast of talented young actors and comedians that included Ruth Buzzi, Arte Johnson, Henry Gibson, Jo Anne Worley, the British-born Judy Carne and the ear-cupping announcer Gary Owens.
Presiding over it all were Rowan and Martin, two veteran nightclub comics who put their own distinctive spin on the show. Their stand-up banter satirising the contemporary scene seemed to catch the liberated mood of the times.
Martin played the clown to Dan Rowan who, like all straight men, provided the voice of reason, striving to correct his partner's absurdities. Martin, meanwhile, was full of bogus, often risqué theories about life, to which he appeared to cling with unwavering certainty.
Around the sober-suited Rowan and Martin whirled a madhouse of stock characters, whose pop-up appearances and much-quoted catchphrases were redolent of the ITMA radio routines of wartime Britain.
The weekly galère included Lily Tomlin's nasal-toned switchboard girl; Arte Johnson's German soldier peering over a pot plant to observe: "Verrry interrrestink"; Goldie Hawn's giggling blonde; and Ruth Buzzi's umbrella-wielding old woman.
"We designed it so that we are two relatively normal guys wandering through a sea of madness," Martin explained. Each week Rowan and Martin would award their Flying Fickle Finger of Fate, host a gag-laden cocktail party and close each show with the programme's joke wall.
Richard Martin was born into a middle-class family on January 30 1922 at Battle Creek, Michigan. After leaving high school he elected to work at a Ford car assembly plant before making his way to Hollywood in 1943. While attempting to break into showbusiness, he earned his living as a bartender.
He was working in a cocktail lounge at Studio City, California, in 1952 when a mutual friend introduced him to Dan Rowan, a 30-year-old car salesman who was also trying to break into comedy. Within a fortnight they were appearing without pay at a supper club in Los Angeles with Rowan as straight man and Martin as his flippant partner.
In their first routine – which they kept in their act for years – Martin (the drunk) heckled Rowan (the Shakespearean actor) as he declaimed from Hamlet.
Once established on the American nightclub circuit, the pair signed a seven-year contract with NBC Television in 1957, only to cancel it by mutual agreement three years later after appearing regularly as hosts on the Colgate Comedy Hour.
In 1958 they starred in a feature film, Once Upon A Horse, but it flopped; and in 1962 Martin worked solo, appearing as Lucille Ball's boyfriend in her comeback situation comedy series The Lucy Show.
After Martin had rejoined Rowan on the nightclub circuit, in late 1967 NBC cautiously allowed the pair to film a "total comedy" pilot for Laugh-In, contracting them for a weekly series the following January. By the eighth show it was top of the ratings.
Much of the programme's success was down to the team of scriptwriters, whose jokes about gays, drugs and death were considered daring for 1968, especially by strait-laced Americans.
Martin remained unabashed at the show's frequent references to sex, explaining that his on-air persona – that of "a kind of inept lech" – made it possible for audiences to laugh at him rather than at what he said.
When Laugh-In was cancelled in 1973, Dick Martin pursued a new career as a director of television comedy, starting with The Bob Newhart Show in 1976. Later he was chief director of the 1980s sitcom Newhart.
At the height of his fame Martin (who was by then divorced from his first wife, Peggy Connelly) pursued a sybaritic lifestyle, throwing wild parties at his apartment in the hills above Sunset Strip. This existence was quite unlike that of Rowan, a quiet family man who died in 1987.
After his failed first marriage, Dick Martin married, in 1971, Dolly Read, a former bunny girl at the Playboy Club in London. They divorced in 1975 but remarried in 1978. She survives him with two sons of his first marriage.
Story from Telegraph News:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/2027643/Dick-Martin.html

LA Weekly Abandons "The Hollywood Reporter" Building On Sunset

LA Weekly goes Westside (From LA Observed)

Kevin Roderick • Bio • Email

Talk about culture shock. The LA Weekly is leaving its longtime physical and spiritual home on Sunset Boulevard in the heart of Hollywood for a sad stretch of Sepulveda Boulevard in Culver City, hard against the Venice Boulevard on-ramp to the northbound 405 Freeway. Nobody else wanted the building, apparently, but the Weekly grabbed it for ten years. Move-in is scheduled for next May, says the L.A. Business Journal.
Beth Sestanovich, publisher of LA Weekly, said that the new offices, which will feature prominent LA Weekly signage, are a significant upgrade from the newspaper’s current digs at 6715 Sunset Blvd.
“It is dated and old and it is a very difficult layout and as a result there is a lot of unusable space,” said Sestanovich. The newspaper has been at the Hollywood offices for about 15 years.
The new building is located in Culver City, just south of Venice Boulevard. The property backs up to the freeway, affording the newspaper signage that faces the freeway.
“It is a highly identifiable building on the 405 and it is an excellent opportunity,” said Blake Mirkin of CB Richard Ellis Group Inc., who represented the landlord. Mirkin said the building was on the market “for some time” because of its challenging location on the edge of two office submarkets.
Considering how many commutes will drastically change, not to mention after-work hangout habits — is this the end of LA Weekly bashes at Boardner's? — you have to wonder if it's Mike Lacey's revenge on the Weekly's pre-New Times staff. Lacey is known to prefer the Westside when he visits the L.A. outpost of his Village Voice Media empire

Columbia Square Developements (From The LA Weekly)

Molasky Pacific Leaves Columbia Square

by Patrick Range McDonald
April 30, 2008 8:09 AM

Molasky Pacific, a real estate development firm based in Las Vegas, will no longer take part in the effort to build a 40-story skyscraper on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood. Instead, the company asked its New York City-based partner, Apollo Real Estate Advisors, to buy them out for an undisclosed sum of money. "It was a timing thing," says Mark Cassidy, president of Molasky Pacific. Dean Pentikis, a partner at Apollo, says the developer will move ahead with the humongous project, which will dramatically alter the Los Angeles skyline and obscure views of the Hollywood sign and Hollywood Hills.

While many Angelenos know little about the big plans to build a 40-story skyscraper and a 14-story office tower on the site of the old CBS TV-and-radio complex at Sunset and Gower--it is currently being showcased on MTV as the fancy digs for the cast of the "Real World"--Molasky Pacific, the acknowledged day-to-day operator of the development project still working its way through City Hall, has been quietly seeking a major height limit change, among other things, for the studio lot since it delivered its approval application to the city's Planning Department in March, 2007. The firm and Apollo Real Estate Advisors bought the property in 2006 for a reported $66 million, and they have yet to release an "environmental impact report," which details traffic and environmental impacts on the surrounding neighborhood and what the developer wants from the city.

City Council President Eric Garcetti, who represents the 13th District, where the project has been proposed, was informed last week on April 22. Staffers received a phone call from Molasky Pacific in the late morning, while Garcetti was presiding over a City Council meeting. He later released this statement to the LA Weekly: "No matter who is the owner or developer of this project, I have the same concern: how is this going to impact the community, the environment, and traffic?"

Sounds good, but this Thursday the Weekly will publish an investigative story on how the reportedly $850-million project, the largest and most expensive in Hollywood to date, has moved through City Hall in a stealth-like way, with Garcetti and his staffers working closely with the developers and offering little information to the public he claims to care so much about.

The Burning Of Los Angeles: Magical Mystery Fire Destroys Another Protected Landmark Which Recently Changed Hands!

For The LA Times Article on the fire, click HERE.

WHAT A COINCIDENCE!

The lesson is...If you are a legally protected building with Historical Significance, and a developer with stars in their eyes buys you, you could soon be hearing the words of the Wicked Witch Of The West ringing from your storied walls at 4:30 in the morning...."Have a little FIRE, Scarecrow!"

This week the 1933 Carl Laemmle Building, the only building on Hollywood Boulevard designed by Richard Neutra, and with interiors by S. Charles Lee, became the latest in the long list of neighborhood Historical Treasures to vanish in a holocaust of 40 foot flames, begun somewhere between midnight and 6 am, and "already FULLY involved before firefighters arrived on the scene," even though the fire station is but three blocks away. The old Cahuenga station had a look out tower 50 feet above Selma Avenue, so the firemen of yore could spot smoke anytime of the day or night, from Mount Lee to the Ambassador Hotel. Perhaps they should have moved it down the street when they built the new station.

So, we can add the Laemmle Building and the landmark business Dan-Dee Shoe Repair with its historic neon sign, to the ABC Radio Studios, The Little Country Church Of Hollywood, The Vine Street Brown Derby, the Hillview Apartments (lucky da 'hood was in the mood for condos when that got torched!), The Pan Pacific Auditorium, and portions of The Garden Court Apartments. All places that developers had been in some sort of snit about before spontaneously combusting. While I certainly can't SAY FOR SURE what happened in the case of the Laemmle building, it did just change hands, and you will note, it is the only corner of the four at Hollywood and Vine, that is not a Condo Ready High Rise. Nope. It was one story and it was going to have to stay that way. Unlessssss......

One of our brave Councilmen, See No Evil Hear No Evil Never Call The D.A. Over Gangster Developers La Bonge, arrived on the scene to assess the loss of this landmark. When reporters asked him about how important the famed building was, he immediately replied...."The LAND alone is worth MILLIONS!" Thanks Tom.

We ALL knew that. But they asked you about the building. I believe it was Jesus who said "Out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaketh!" (Luke 6:45) Wonder if he'd met Tom?

(To learn a great deal more about how things work in the neighborhood these days, I encourage you to follow the link below and read the article from The Hollywood Heritage Newsletter on Page 5 and learn how this....

........Turns into THIS......


.....And NO ONE gets held accountable for it!
May 2007, Volume 26. No. 1 (special color double issue) )

While most media reports have stated that the only thing of note that happened in the building since 1933 was that a scene was shot for a remake of Oceans 11, a production as overblown as La Bonge's sense of self awareness, the building did, in fact, house many important restaurants over the years, and for anyone who grew up or lived in the neighborhood prior to the "old days" death throes in of the early 1990's, it was full of cherished memories.


As I said in the beginning, it was designed by Richard Neutra, and what was REALLY fantastic was that the building one door over, Sardi's (now the porn shop) was designed by R.M Schindler. Not TOO many places in town where the two had buildings 20 paces apart. When the Pig n' Whistle at Las Palmas outgrew it's tiny space next to the Egyptian, in the late 30's, it expanded into the Laemmle building, and later changed its name to "Melody Lane" while remaining in the "Pig N' Whistle" Chain. With the name change, the big guns were called in and S. Charles Lee was hired to give the entire building a Moderne look.

In the late 1950's and 60's it was transformed into a family oriented coffee shop named "Hody's" which was legendary for it's gigantic "clown head" sign trellis. Frankly, it scares the hell out of me, I can't IMAGINE how it didn't frighten children and hippies. None the less, it was there for years.

This is where the irony gets REALLY thick. After they let squatters in to burn The Vine Street Brown Derby (that's an old developer trick...leave holes in the fences and back doors unlocked in an unwanted building, so when it goes up, you can blame punk squatters and junkies before the cameras, then collect your insurance money), and Grant had it bulldozed against court order (I mean, Grant REALLY REALLY needed another parking lot!), the Hollywood Brown Derby, relocated into the Laemmle Building, and went discount, hoping to attract the Lucy Ricardo Tourists, looking for their long de-camped Bill Holdens. It closed in 1993, leaving Musso's the last man standing.

It was closed for several years, then became an ENORMOUS tattoo parlor. Finally, around the turn of the century, things were looking up for the neighborhood, and the tattoo joint was shunted to one side, making room for a ridiculous club full of poseurs and wannabees, the sort who think OTHER poseurs and wannabees with clipboards and lists should be what gets you into a club, rather than a decent suit of cloths, proper shoe leather, and a generous tip to the maitre 'd, like it should be (and still is in NY).

I mean, the Bush girls partied there to celebrate turning 21 so they could get shitfaced "legal." Need I say more?

Then they shot part of a crappy remake there, then it burned, while the learned Councilmen stood on the corner fancying himself a real estate appraiser. I will admit, he did better as an apraiser evaluating the corner of Hollywood and Vine than he did as an Historian, once claiming before assembled news media that the land beneath the Hollywood Sign had been left in perpetuity to the City Of Los Angeles by Griffith J. Griffith in 1911. It was in fact, privately owned and DONATED to the City in 1949, as anyone with even a cursory knowledge of neighborhood history knows...oh hell...THATS even in $2 tourist pamphlets sold to Iowans at World Book And News, on every Grey Line Tour, on The Chamber of Commerce website....tourists, and junkies walking out of the methadone clinic know that, if they've been in town more than two weeks! Tom had to shut up. I desperately with that THAT lesson had taken. (The Councilman is Pictured Here Announcing To A Shocked Local Press That His Name Is Jor-El As He Welcomes Them To His Newly Remodled Mansion On Mount Krypton)

Can't wait to see what goes up next in an early morning conflagration. Because the word is out. Fires "intentional" or "accidental" (in which case landlords should be held accountable for not having proper alarms and sprinkler systems!) and "accidental bulldozing without proper permits" (I'm certain they would have torched The Cocoanut Grove, if Boston hadn't already beat them to it) will go unpunished, by the Council, DA Cooley, Wilcox Station, the Fire Department (who is responsible for enforcing the fire code and inspecting the buildings, and doing arson investigations) and any other LA good old boy group that has visions of high rises dancing in their heads. Forget it Jake, it's Hollywood.

I'm actually glad our Dear Sainted Mayor of Hollywood is in a better place, and didn't have to look at smoke rising outside his window at the Roosevelt, yet again. And I hope where ever he is, he's as pissed as I am, and starts haunting some people who are hell bent on smashing up whats left of the neighborhood for those DREADFUL yuppies and their condos.