Just Above Sunset Photography

Friday, 9 June 2006

Oddities: Fooling the Eye in Hollywood
Topic: Insider Stuff

Oddities: Fooling the Eye in Hollywood

Palace Costume, 835 North Fairfax Avenue, Los Angeles - storefront details

This in an interesting film industry supplier just down the hill, a company that rents vintage clothing to the entertainment industry, and not open to the public at all - but it always catches your eye as you drive by.

The place is Palace Costume and Prop Company, 835 North Fairfax Avenue - founded in 1970 after starting out as a vintage clothing store down on Melrose Avenue.

From the Los Angeles Business Journal, October 26, 1998, this -

Melody Barnett's costumes have been featured in thousands of television shows and movies, and studio costume designers rave about her store's huge selection and excellent customer service. On a recent afternoon, the phone at her Palace Costume & Prop Co. was ringing off the hook as a steady stream of costume designers and stylists came into the store.

"It's very accessible. I can't think of any other place in L.A. that's like Palace Costume where you call just walk in once you're on account and not have to make an appointment or give them your first child," said costume designer Mark Bridges, who has worked in the industry for 15 years.

... The offerings include more than half a million pieces of distinctive clothing - racks and racks of men's jackets and shirts, women's fur coats and exotic costumes and jewelry from Africa, China and India.

In fact, Barnett's collections have adorned the bodies of the beautiful and famous in thousands of television shows and movies, including "Austin Powers," "Chinatown," "Forrest Gump" and "What's Love Got To Do With It."

... "Every film with a period piece in it probably utilizes Palace Costume," said Tom Bronson, director of the costume department at Burbank-based Walt Disney Studios. "Her clothes are in great shape. Some people think she's overprotective of her clothes. If shoots run longer than expected she will charge more and she should. It's her livelihood and it's extremely difficult to replace or even find an authentic piece of vintage clothing."

Years of amassing everything from Victorian dresses to '80s power suits have required Barnett to keep expanding her space, adding about 1,000 square feet to the shop every year.

... Rather than put unsightly iron gates across the building's exterior. Barnett had a wooden/stucco facade constructed that features hand-painted characters in period costumes.

And that's what you see here.

It's very odd, next to a nursing home, across the street from a seedy hot dog stand, and in a neighborhood where most everyone speaks Russian. On the other hand, the site says Palace provided some of the some of the costumes for Lasse Hallström's Chocolat (2000, Miramax), so Juliette Binoche, Judi Dench and Johnny Depp might have been wearing what was rented here. And that was a classy film, or wanted to be.

Of course places not open to the public should offer the public something, and in this case the public is offered eye candy.

Palace Costume, 835 North Fairfax Avenue, Los Angeles - storefront details

Photos - Friday, June 9, 2006

Posted by Alan at 7:10 PM PDT | Post Comment | Permalink
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Updated: Friday, 9 June 2006 7:18 PM PDT

Thursday, 8 June 2006

Architectural Detail and Hollywood History
Topic: Historic Hollywood

Architectural Detail and Hollywood History

To the right, a lamppost at the Hollywood Guaranty Building, 6331 Hollywood Boulevard at Ivar, a twelve-story 1923 Beaux Arts office building by the architects John C. Austin and Frederick M. Ashley.

Charlie Chaplin and Cecil B. De Mille invested in this building and the gossip columnist Hedda Hopper worked here. Charlie Chaplin, Al Jolson and Cecil B. De Mille all once had their offices in this building. The Bank of America owned it for a time, and the building was sold in 1988 to the Church of Scientology in a straight cash transaction. It's now the executive offices for the international operations of those folks.

The building is dull. The lamppost is cool.

Below, details of the Security Pacific Bank Building at 6383 Hollywood Boulevard, at Cahuenga, from 1921 by the architects John and Donald B. Parkinson - also know as the Cahuenga Building, Philip Marlowe's office in Raymond Chandlers The Long Goodbye. It's part of Raymond Chandler Square, previously covered in these pages here. The building has interesting detail.

Details of the Security Pacific Bank Building at 6383 Hollywood Boulevard, at Cahuenga, from 1921 by the architects John and Donald B. Parkinson

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Pickford Center for Motion Picture Study, 1313 North Vine at Fountain, built in 1947-48 as a radio and television studio facility and designed by Claude Beelman and his associate, Herman Spackler, and recently restored by Offenhauser/Mekeel Architects. It's amusing.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Pickford Center for Motion Picture Study, 1313 North Vine at Fountain

Notes -

The Academy's Pickford Center for Motion Picture Study was dedicated in honor of Mary Pickford, the legendary silent film actress, in 2002. In addition to the 286-seat Dunn Theater, the building houses several Academy departments, including the offices and collections of the Academy Film Archive and the Science and Technology Council.

? It is the oldest surviving structure in Hollywood that was originally designed specifically with television in mind.

Cadillac dealer Don Lee got into broadcasting to stay competitive with his friend Earle C. Anthony, a Packard dealer, who bought radio station KFI as a method of appealing to his customers. Lee bought KRFC in San Francisco and KHJ in Los Angeles, ultimately building the chain to 12 west coast stations. On Wednesday, November 5, 1930, Don Lee station KHJ and Paramount station KNX broadcast the third annual Academy Awards on Lee's Pacific Coast network.

Lee began dabbling in television in 1930 by hiring Harry Lubcke, a laid-off assistant to Philo Farnsworth, the inventor of television. Lubcke set up a station on the top floor of Don Lee's Cadillac headquarters at Seventh and Bixel streets. The station used the call letters W6XAO. Since tv receivers didn't exist yet, Lubcke designed and provided free schematics to electronics enthusiasts in the Los Angeles area to build their own. After 100 or so had built receivers, W6XAO, Channel 1, began to broadcast an hour a day, six days a week.

Though named for him, Lee, who had died 14 years earlier, never saw this building.

The building was the original home of Los Angeles Channel 2, which is now KCBS-TV, through the 1950s.

It was the studio for Johnny Carson's earliest mid-'50s television appearances before "The Tonight Show," including "Carson's Cellar" and "The New Johnny Carson Show."

It was the original home, from 1964 through 1971, of California Community Television, which grew into PBS station KCET.

It was the home of KHJ-TV in the 1950s.

It was ABC's headquarters for the Los Angeles 1984 Olympics and the home of many ABC television shows.

Among other shows broadcast from 1313 North Vine Street were: Queen for a Day, Heart's Desire, What's the Name of That Song?, Don Lee Music Hall, My Friend Irma, Jimmy Wakely Show, Bill Stulla Show, Oxydol Show, Your Claim to Fame, Joey Bishop Show, Barney Miller, Dating Game, Newlywed Game and The Andersonville Trial.

Ah but for real Hollywood history you can't the Knickerbocker Hotel, 1714 North Ivar Avenue, just off Hollywood Boulevard, built in the early twenties. It has a cool history, first a luxury apartment building, then a hotel, now apartments for seniors, almost all of them Russian. In the old days Rudolph Valentino hung out at the hotel bar, and liked to tango there. Harry Houdini made a deal with his wife Bess that if he died before she did he would try to contact her from the great beyond. On Halloween 1926, exactly one year after he died, she conducted a séance on the roof of the Knickerbocker, but he, or his spirit or whatever, didn't show. She tried that each Halloween up on the roof for the next ten years. No good. Oh well.

And then there's D.W. Griffith. He died of a stroke on July 21, 1948 under the crystal chandelier in the lobby. And that strange actress Frances Farmer was arrested here in 1942, dragged from her room, and that ended in her lobotomy and all. They made a film about it. The word is William Faulkner and Meta Carpenter, a script girl at Fox, began their eighteen-year affair here. Marilyn Monroe honeymooned here with Joe Dimaggio in January of 1954, and Elvis Presley stayed in suite 1016 back in 1956 while he was shooting "Love Me Tender." Who else lived here? Frank Sinatra, Barbara Stanwyck, Lana Turner, Mae West, Laurel and Hardy, Larry Fine of the Three Stooges, and Cecil B. DeMille. And William Frawley, who played Fred Mertz on "I Love Lucy," lived here for decades and on March 3, 1966, died of a heart attack on the sidewalk in front of the place.

Knickerbocker Hotel, 1714 North Ivar Avenue, just off Hollywood Boulevard

Quite a place. You can't get in now, even to see the chandelier in the lobby. History is over. The building has been "repurposed."

Posted by Alan at 8:23 PM PDT | Post Comment | Permalink
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Updated: Thursday, 8 June 2006 8:49 PM PDT

Wednesday, 7 June 2006

Details, details, details...
Topic: Color Studies

Details, details, details...

Just three color studies. And hibiscus does come in yellow.

Tuesday, June 6, 2006, at the curb, Foothill and Lomitas, Beverly Hills -

Hibiscus at the curb, Foothill and Lomitas, Beverly Hills

Bloom at the curb, Foothill and Lomitas, Beverly Hills

Hibiscus at the curb, Foothill and Lomitas, Beverly Hills

Posted by Alan at 5:42 PM PDT | Post Comment | Permalink
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Tuesday, 6 June 2006

Treacherous Unbrightness
Topic: Light and Shadow

Treacherous Unbrightness

June gloom, Laurel Avenue, Hollywood, a raven in a palm in early evening -

The tourist sites say the only month to avoid Los Angeles is June. The ocean temperatures mix with the air temperatures to create a layer of fog that basically lasts all day, every day, the entire month. This is known here as "June Gloom." It's gone be the time July rolls around.

D.J. Waldie, the author of "Where We Are Now: Notes from Los Angeles," explains in the Los Angeles Times here -

Spring and early summer in Los Angeles, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, deliver an average of just 11 clear days in May and 14 in June. The definitions of "clear" and "cloudy" are subjective, but on even the partly cloudy days, the daylight hours are at least half obscured.

Just how gray depends on where you live. At LAX, June usually yields no more than nine perfectly clear days. In coastal cities from Malibu to Seal Beach, the gloom can linger all day, putting off the start of their summer until after the Fourth of July.

The gray season is made in the Pacific Ocean. Cold currents rise close to shore; a persistent high-pressure zone farther out channels warmer air eastward, and the springtime vortex called the Catalina Eddy fabricates fog from the interaction of cool water and warm air, pushing it on shore when the air of inland valleys rises in the heat of midday. Television weathercasters call the visible result "the marine layer," although what they're really taking about is fog.

It ambles over the beaches after midnight, flows in wide streams up the former bed of the Los Angeles River through the western half of the city and takes general possession of the basin under the same inversion layer that brews smog. On good days, the sun eventually burns down through half a mile of gray clouds and illuminates, at last, a city that seems to have been forgotten by sunlight and color.

It could be worse. Tourists before the mid-20th century often complained that a dull haze shrouded the charms of what had been advertised as a perpetually sunlit Mediterranean city. William Faulkner called the lighting effect a "treacherous unbrightness."

The JPL-NASA folks say this -

While the Catalina Eddy, an atmospheric vortex or eddy with a counter-clockwise rotation pattern, can occur in the California Bight (the open ocean bay formed by the bend in the coast between Point Conception to the north and San Diego to the south) at any time of the year, it is most often seen during May and June. It can develop when the winds from the northwest along the Southern California coast are stronger than normal and interact with the local coastal and land topography, turning inland and creating a vortex.

Only about 200 kilometers (120 miles) in diameter, the Catalina Eddy has not been well measured by scientists. The eddy is actually too small to appear in current weather forecast models and is sometimes too shallow to have a strong influence on the cloud structure viewed by weather satellites.

Tuesday, June 6, 2006, Catalina Eddy, wasn't being nice to Hollywood - the sun never burned through all the "treacherous unbrightness." Here, on Laurel Avenue, at the base of Laurel Canyon, a raven in a palm at the end of the day.

By the way, when William Faulkner was out here to work on the screenplay for The Big Sleep, based on the Raymond Chandler novel, he didn't much like it here. He cut out early and worked from home, in Mississippi. But the scene at the gambling joint at the top of Laurel Canyon, on a foggy night, makes noir sense. It must have been June. And Catalina Eddy sounds like a character in one of those Raymond Chandler novels.

June gloom, Laurel Avenue, Hollywood, a raven in a palm in early evening -

But the diffused light makes for nice light for taking pictures - Johnny's Coffee Shop, Fairfax at Wilshire, closed, but kept up for location shooting, when you need classic Google Architecture, as they call it.

Johnny's Coffee Shop, Fairfax at Wilshire -

Posted by Alan at 7:42 PM PDT | Post Comment | Permalink
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Monday, 5 June 2006

New Eye on Hollywood
Topic: Technical Exercises

New Eye on Hollywood

At the edge of the driveway, the Storer House, Frank Lloyd Wright, 1923 - 8161 Hollywood Boulevard, Los Angeles

Testing the new lens - AF-S DX Zoom-Nikkor, 55-200 mm f/4-5.6G ED. It just came today. Don't like it much, but getting the most from it will take some time.

Here are some test shots, using the polarizing filter that came with the thing.

The Storer House
Frank Lloyd Wright, 1923

One of the homes in Los Angeles designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, a textile block thing, the blocks cast on site with Wright supervising that himself - on Hollywood Boulevard, but not the part you know. This house is on the right at 8161 – in the trees high above the Sunset Strip, a half a mile west of here. The home is now owned the movie producer Joel Silver, responsible for such things as the Lethal Weapon and the Die Hard series of shoot-'em-ups. But Silver seems to be committed to restoring the home to its original condition - and, in fact, he is working in conjunction with Eric Lloyd Wright on that. The edge of the driveway, six in the evening, Monday, June 5, 2006.

Below, two pigeons keeping an eye on Hollywood Boulevard -

Two pigeons keeping an eye on Hollywood Boulevard

The abandoned Fredrick's of Hollywood flagship store on the boulevard -

The abandoned Fredrick's of Hollywood flagship store on Hollywood Boulevard, Los Angeles

It's across the street from Musso and Frank, where, when they were writing screenplays back in the late thirties and early forties, Faulkner, Fitzgerald and the rest used to hang out - John O'Hara, Dorothy Parker, Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler - even Ernest Hemingway. Raymond Chandler wrote "The Big Sleep" here. Long ago, silent-movie star Tom Mix used to sit next to a window here, so his fans could see him. Charlie Chaplin liked their martinis - he and Paulette Goddard were regulars. Humphrey Bogart, the Warner brothers, Jack Webb and Peter Lawford also could be found here. In the 2001 version of "Oceans 11" there's a scene where George Clooney and Brad Pitt first discuss the Vegas heist in one of the booths. Now? Tom Selleck likes table 24, while Al Pacino prefers table 28. Whatever. This is just a test of the new lens.

Musso and Frank on Hollywood Boulevard, Los Angeles

Posted by Alan at 7:53 PM PDT | Post Comment | Permalink
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Updated: Monday, 5 June 2006 7:56 PM PDT

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