Welcome to Hollywood! Please Temper Your Expectations

There was a time when Hollywood Boulevard was a truly glamorous destination.

During the 1920s, the film industry was booming and the municipality of Hollywood was freshly incorporated into the city of Los Angeles. Prospect Avenue was renamed Hollywood Boulevard, and a flurry of tony hotels, palatial theaters and glitzy boutiques opened along the stretch between Vine Street and Highland Avenue. Dreamers from all around the country made their way west to be discovered along the boulevard — at the soda fountain of Schwab’s Pharmacy (corner of Cosmo) or Café Montmartre (between Highland and McCadden). Most movie stars of the time lived above the boulevard in the Hollywood Hills, and the first Academy Awards ceremony took place at the Hollywood Roosevelt hotel (a venue that seems inconceivable today).

But that is not a Hollywood I have ever experienced. The Hollywood & Highland shopping center — a failed attempt to revitalize the neighborhood à la Times Square during the 1990s — opened in 2001, when I was 14. The Academy Awards ceremony took up permanent residency at the Kodak (now Dolby) Theatre inside that same shopping center (a forced marriage if ever there was one) in 2002. But even the Oscars couldn’t bring back Hollywood’s lost glory.

Like most Angelenos, I rarely visit Hollywood today, except for the occasional nostalgic dinner at Musso & Frank or a Sunday morning stroll through the farmers market. Yet I found myself there on a recent weekday afternoon, walking down Vine to Trader Joe’s. As I did, I read the starred names at my feet: Bob Burns, Frank Crumit, Audie Murphy … I’m ashamed to admit I had no idea who these people were, and the tourists around me seemed no wiser. They, too, struggled to identify figures along the Walk of Fame that spoke to them. Michael Jackson’s star got a photo, as did Jennifer Aniston’s, while Judy Garland’s star only got a finger point and countless others drew nothing more than an oblivious glance. And even with new stars added almost weekly, it’s hard to imagine how relevant the Walk of Fame, or the handprints in front of what was once known as Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, will be in the coming years as film and TV stars increasingly cede the spotlight to a raft of new media celebrities. Will MrBeast and Bella Poarch one day have landmarks dedicated to their legacies? Probably. Will they be in Hollywood? Probably not.

Then what are tourists coming here hoping to find? Are they even coming at all?

As the traditional entertainment industry continues to contract, Hollywood’s allure to visitors clearly loses its appeal — and that has massive implications for L.A., which for decades has counted on Hollywood to bring in billions in tourism dollars.

According to the Hollywood Partnership, a nonprofit dedicated to the beautification and economic vitality of the neighborhood, foot traffic around the entertainment district has dropped about 50 percent the past year and has never fully recovered to pre-pandemic levels. And it’s clear why: The area is neglected, dirty, uncomfortable to be in. Plus, what is there really to see or do in Hollywood? Get hustled by a knockoff Spider-Man in front of the Chinese Theatre, then eat at Wetzel’s Pretzels as you wander past the various Scientology centers along the boulevard?

Gone are the days of sitting in the audience for a live taping of a hit show. If, as Eve Babitz wrote, “there was never any visible Hollywood,” then even the invisible Hollywood is fading. The neighborhood is no longer the center of film and television production. And Los Angeles more broadly is no longer where many of the people who make up the industry live.

I was beginning to despair about this grim outlook. I called Eric Avila, professor of Chicano studies and urban planning at UCLA and a preeminent historian of Los Angeles. Surely he could give me some perspective. “For those of us who do not live in Hollywood or the Westside, there’s never been the issue of Hollywood and L.A. being the same thing,” he says. Yet this feeling of the industry crumbling “goes back decades. It was really in the late ’60s and ’70s that Hollywood [the neighborhood] started becoming less ‘Hollywood’ because production was leaving the L.A. basin.”

Film production dwindled in Culver City around the same time, Avila explains. Both MGM and Culver Studios changed hands between multiple investors from the late 1950s into the early 1970s. Meanwhile, a string of box office flops led 20th Century Fox to sell off much of its backlot, just north of the 10 Freeway, to real estate developers in 1961, creating what would be Century City. As for the studios in Hollywood proper, “Production began leaving in the ’70s, and it was in that decade when you really saw the neighborhood become seedy,” Avila notes. In other words: Los Angeles has been through this before.

Still, I couldn’t shake the feeling that this time is different, that the city is quickly shedding part of its core image as a dream factory, the ultimate destination for fame seekers.

“The pandemic showed people that you don’t have to live here to be in Hollywood,” John Terzian tells me when I express my concern about our hometown. As the co-owner of The h.wood Group, Terzian runs such celebrity hotspots as the Bird Streets Club, The Nice Guy and Delilah and has a sense of where the cultural winds are blowing. And he doesn’t seem overly concerned. “Maybe the rich are leaving, sure,” he says, “but that doesn’t change much. The glitz and glamour of L.A. will always be there.”

As for that nagging sense that L.A. never fully bounced back from the pandemic, Terzian argues that feeling is widespread. “It’s Miami, it’s New York, I’m even seeing it in London,” he says. “Cities are really going through something right now. But fundamentally, I think this is the greatest city in the world, and I think we’re just going through a rough period.”

The impact of COVID and the accompanying lockdowns might have been universal, but Los Angeles has suffered a series of blows since then that has left the city reeling: a four-month general strike by SAG-AFTRA and the WGA, followed by the Palisades and Eaton fires and now the ICE raids that have dragged on since the summer — to say nothing of the recent spate of layoffs, studio consolidation and the looming threats of AI.

“The pandemic was rough, but what I think is more impactful right now are immigration policies,” says Avila. Immigration and diversity have long been L.A.’s strength, and it was immigration that has revitalized the city time and again, as it did after production left Hollywood. The neighborhood deteriorated throughout the 1980s and ’90s, even as newcomers from Central America, Southeast Asia and the Soviet Union poured in. East Hollywood, specifically, “became a very ethnically and racially diverse part of the city,” Avila says. During the early ’90s, Thai Town and Little Armenia were born in conjunction with a redevelopment plan for Hollywood, “but it was all centered around tourism and making tourism the anchor of new economic activity in the face of film production leaving the area.”

Is that what Hollywood needs today, redevelopment?

No, says Leo Pustilnikov, one of L.A.’s most prolific real estate developers. “A great example is the Hollywood & Highland center. It was promised to be the rebirth of Hollywood in 2001, and then it didn’t do well. Then it got resold, had new plans approved, and it didn’t do well again. And so it got resold, they were going to redo it again, and it’s still not doing well.”

Luckily for Los Angeles, we are not just Hollywood. The city’s self-image may be tied to the entertainment business, but that is not our largest employer (it’s far behind the public sector, education, health care and hospitality). So as the industry changes, and as production jobs leave, holding on to the past will only lead to the city’s stagnation and ultimately its collapse. Just look at Detroit, the quintessential one-industry town, which is only now starting to recover from decades of urban failure. The rows of souvenir shops selling 4-inch-tall plastic Oscar statuettes are not the permanent fate of Hollywood Boulevard.

“The only constant thing about L.A., especially its identity, is that it’s always been changing,” concludes Avila. “Hollywood was a powerful force in defining the identity of L.A., but that wasn’t permanent.”

After all, it wasn’t until the 1920s that a loose collection of barley fields and citrus groves on the western edge of the continent reinvented itself almost overnight into the epicenter of global media production. The Hollywood of the past is disappearing fast, but something new will surely emerge, something that will transform it once again. If anyone knows how to do a bigger, more expensive sequel, it’s Hollywood.

This story appeared in the Nov. 5 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.