Esotouric · a day trip

Hollywood Afternoon

Four stops — a grave on Santa Monica Boulevard, then the boulevard the man in it spent thirty years defending: a bookshop named for someone who died in 1941, a city built in miniature by a cabinetmaker, and an alley where Chaplin, Keaton and Lloyd all worked inside three years.

Map of the four stops 1234
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Start at the cemetery. The other three are a mile north and within two blocks of each other.
Detail: Hollywood Boulevard 234
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The boulevard. Bookshop, Resource Center and alley — all on foot.

A man drew a city in miniature for five years and nobody asked him to. A librarian typed index cards nobody was grading. The afternoon is about what survives because somebody decided it should.

1

Robert Nudelman’s grave

Hollywood Forever — Hollywood Memorial Park until 1998 — 6000 Santa Monica Blvd

For thirty years Robert Wood Nudelman (1956–2008) was present at essentially every meeting and hearing that touched Hollywood’s built fabric — Hollywood Heritage’s Director of Preservation Issues, a past president, curator of its museum. He spearheaded the campaigns around the El Capitan, the Cinerama Dome and the ABC/Merv Griffin facade, and supplied the historical documentation behind Grauman’s Chinese, the Egyptian, the Pantages and Schwab’s. He had started years earlier on MGM’s Lot 2 and the Wiltern.

He died at 52 in Tucson in May 2008, having gone there to visit his ailing father; he was found at his father’s home on the Tuesday, and Fran Offenhauser of Hollywood Heritage confirmed it to the Los Angeles Times. He was working on fifty-eight preservation projects when he died.

Colleagues described an encyclopedic memory, and something rarer: a man who made friends of enemies.

2

Larry Edmunds Bookshop

6644 Hollywood Blvd

Larry Edmunds opened the shop in 1939, buying Sam Reiser’s store on North Cahuenga after working at Book of the Day on La Brea. He took Milton Luboviski as a partner in 1940 and killed himself in 1941, and the shop has carried a dead man’s name ever since. It began at the obscure end of the literature trade, finding books for studio executives, writers and directors — rare editions to William Faulkner among others, sometimes delivered in brown paper bags to clients eating at Musso and Frank.

The turn to film was Git Luboviski’s. In 1952 she hit on a fold-out catalogue to sell Hollywood material by mail; advertised in the trades, it ran past two hundred pages by the mid-sixties and made this the first true film bookstore. It moved to 6658 Hollywood in 1955 and to 6644 in 1990. Jeffrey Mantor started there that year and took over in 2007.

More than fifteen bookshops on this boulevard closed around 2000. This one did not.

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Hollywood Heritage’s Preservation Resource Center

6411 Hollywood Blvd

In 1940 Joe Pellkofer, who owned the Superior Cabinet Company, began building a miniature Hollywood: more than four hundred and fifty buildings on an eleven-by-twelve-foot platform. He finished in 1945. It went on public view on 4 January 1946 to considerable acclaim, and then it vanished for decades.

Hollywood Heritage has it now, and it can be seen by appointment. Christy McAvoy’s argument about it is the thesis of the whole afternoon: conservation starts with a story, and the research and the telling are the most compelling part of the work. A cabinetmaker spent five years building a city nobody asked him to build, and it survived because somebody kept it.

Which is the index card and the drawer, in wood.

4

The Chaplin-Keaton-Lloyd Alley

South of Hollywood Blvd, between Cahuenga and Cosmo

Three films in the National Film Registry were shot in this one alley within three years. Chaplin’s The Kid (1921) opens here, the Little Tramp finding the abandoned baby — Jackie Coogan — looking south, with the reverse angle showing him running north. Keaton’s Cops (1922) uses the west end at Cahuenga for the one-handed grab of a passing car while fleeing the police. Lloyd’s Safety Last! (1923) used the east end as the back of his department store, with the Palmer Building behind.

Hollywood Heritage dedicated a plaque here on 29 September 2021, National Silent Movie Day. The alley is still walkable, though a patio dining area now blocks part of the sightline and a 1935 art deco building narrowed the passage.

You can stand where each of the three of them stood.