Sunday, April 24, 2011

Hooray For Hollywood!

No visit to the Los Angeles area is complete without a day in Hollywood and ours was enjoyable. In past visits to LA we saw the Walk of Fame, Grauman's Chinese Theater and Universal.  As this is likely to be our last visit here, we mixed in some uncommon things with the things we'd not done already. 
The famous Hollywood sign.



Couldn't resist a snapshot of the Santa Monica Boulevard sign.
Yea, we hummed that stupid song all afternoon.  Don't know the words... just that the street name is in there.



We ate lunch in this little Beverly Hills park.
Wayne looked up the addresses of all the old movie studios: Hal Roach Studios,Twentieth Century Fox, Paramount, MGM, Universal, but most were long gone.  The old Hal Roach studio building remains but isn't a studio anymore and we were never able to position ourselves to get a picture.  Of course there were no places to park.  MGM, Universal and Twentieth Century (now Sony) are just  big buildings.  However, Paramount remains on the original site and the famous entrances remain as we've seen them in old pictures.
The Melrose Avenue gate.

This old Capitol Records building has been around for a very long time.

Approaching the famous intersection of Hollywood and Vine.

The highlight of our Los Angeles visit may seem strange but anyone who knows Wayne and me know we love old movies.  Well... we went on a graveyard hunt looking for the burial places of movie stars.  Here's some of what we found:

Mel Blanc - voice of Bugs Bunny.
That's All Folks!

The cylinder in the foreground is a memorial to Hattie McDaniel of Gone With The Wind Fame.
She is not buried here as negroes were not allowed to be buried here at the time of her death.

Cecil B. DeMille and his wife.

Douglas Fairbanks

This bench marks the grave of Tyrone Power
Estelle Getty played on Golden Girls.
We found lots more graves, including Bing Crosby, Peter Lorrie, Jayne Mansfield and oh so many others, but didn't take pictures. 

No there are no recent star graves we'd be interested in seeing.   Just the old ones.

No comments:

Post a Comment