Sign of the times

How a giant ad on a hill became one of world’s most famous places

There is an old complaint about Los Angeles. The Weimar intellectuals who fled there in the 1930s loved the sunshine but decried the lack of civic culture. Los Angeles did not have the cafe society of Paris or Berlin; instead it had consumers in their automobiles navigating an endless sprawl of single-family homes.

Nearly a century on, the Weimar critics would hardly be surprised that a giant advertisement on a hill, monitored 24 hours a day by surveillance cameras, may still be the closest thing Los Angeles has to a town square.

The Hollywood sign, originally constructed as an advertisement for a local property development, turns 100 this year.

On a sunny winter morning the trails beneath the sign are crowded with visitors in athleisure doing a kind of Hollywood calisthenics, lifting hands and contorting bodies so they can appear, in their tiny camera phone photos, to be tapping or lifting the letters.

The Hollywood sign may be one the most recognisable places on Earth, but the process of getting close can be tortuous. The letters are near the top of a steep, barren hill, guarded by wild coyotes and the occasional rattlesnake. You can’t drive there. Your phone may not even give you the correct walking directions.

Some choose to hike to the sign via one of the trails, several miles long, that wind through Griffith Park, a 4,000-acre wilderness area that the sign sits within. Others take a shortcut through Beachwood Canyon, a wealthy neighbourhood in the hills beneath the sign, where there are no pavements and street parking is forbidden.

If you ask Google Maps how to drive to the sign, it will send you to a completely different landmark, the Griffith Observatory. From there, you can hike until you reach the vicinity of the sign itself. Even then, you will be peering down at the letters through a wire fence. The public aren’t allowed past the security fence, but if you have the opportunity to get through, as I did during a centennial press tour, the view is magical.

People who meet movie stars often say they’re genuinely beautiful up close, although much shorter than they look on screen. The Hollywood sign is like that, but the opposite: it is genuinely gorgeous and surprisingly huge.

“In a city that doesn’t have a centre, it feels like a real place to go,” Jesse Holcomb, one of the sign’s PR reps, says.

Like the Eiffel Tower, the Hollywood sign was supposed to be temporary, built to last 18 months as a flashy advertisement for the Hollywoodland property development. But the sign stayed.

There’s no precise record of when developers first put the letters, which originally read HOLLYWOODLAND, on the hill. The first passing newspaper references to the “electric” sign, which was covered in lights that blinked at night, came in December 1923; the development it advertised broke ground earlier that year.

The letters became infamous in 1932, when Peg Entwistle, a 24-year-old British-born actress and aspiring movie star, killed herself at the sign, which came to symbolise both the lure and the danger of film industry stardom. During the Great Depression, the development the sign advertised struggled economically, and eventually became defunct.

“It is silly to say that Hollywood, or any other city, is ‘unreal’,” the British writer Christopher Isherwood wrote upon his arrival in 1939. “But what the arriving traveller first sees are merely advertisements for a city which doesn’t exist.”

By the 1940s, the letters were crumbling and dilapidated, and officially given to the city to manage. “A recent windstorm made a cockney out of Hollywoodland,” the Los Angeles Times observed in 1944, with the sign now reading “OLLYWOODLAND”. In 1949, the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce finally made a deal to restore the sign while removing the “LAND”.

By the late 1970s, with the sign again in disrepair, the original letters were finally replaced after the Playboy founder, Hugh Hefner, led a campaign to save them. The length and girth of the new sign became a matter of pride: 450ft long, with 45ft-high letters, and a total weight, in steel and concrete, of 480,000lb.

More recently the sign has become the scene of repeated pranks, which have changed the letters to read “Hollyweed” and “Hollyboob”. It has become a favourite setting for disaster films, getting destroyed on screen at least eight times.

Access to the sign has sparked years of fierce local battles, which have played out through pressure on tech companies to change their GPS directions to the sign, as well as in many lawsuits. The neighbourhoods beneath the letters are full of stern warnings: “NO ACCESS to the Hollywood Sign”, and some of the wealthy residents who live beneath the sign continue to argue that starstruck visitors clogging their steep, winding streets represent a health hazard. “If Disneyland had this sort of operation, they would close it in 10 seconds,” one resident said in 2015 of the chaos that tourism brought to the neighbourhood.

Recognising the problems, the Hollywood Sign Trust, which manages the monument, announced it would use the sign’s centenary to raise funds for an official visitor centre, complete with lecture halls, a cinema, museum, gift shop and, presumably, toilets, something sign visitors have lacked for years.

This sounds like a great solution, until you learn that the proposed locations for the visitor centre are still several miles away from the sign.

The current inaccessibility does have an upside. The area around the giant letters has remained a little patch of wild earth, a sanctuary for deer, foxes, coyotes, even the city’s celebrity mountain lions. “For some reason, the crows and hawks are always circling by the letters,” Holcomb, the PR rep, says. “The gusts of wind must be fun to ride.”