Back in March 2023 I took a trip to Hollywood, California. I’d visited previously in 2017. My friend, the great writer Ben Loory, lives out there (if you haven’t read his work, you absolutely should.)
No other city on earth has grabbed my imagination as much. And not just because of the movie industry. The history of the city itself … the rise from sleepy backwater in the 1890s to the idiosyncratic sprawl it is today.
There are prettier cities, more spectacular cities, cleaner cities, cities with more personality, Los Angeles has been described as a city without a centre, just a collection of suburbs stretching into the yonder north, south, east and to the ocean. And that’s partly true. Its downtown is tiny compared to other great cities of the world. But Los Angeles (even its very name) has a vibe, an allure, a mood, an atmosphere all of its own and is a place of ceaseless fascination and endless strangeness. It’s also a Marmite kind of town. You’ll either fall madly in love with it or hate its guts and steer well clear at all costs.
When I arrived in the *film noir detective voice* “City of Angels”, it was pissing down. And I mean *pissing down*. Torrential fucking rain blowing in off the usually glinting blue Pacific. I’d left Phoenix in sunlight, I arrived at LAX and it might as well have been the dead of night and a creepy carriage awaiting to take me to the Borgo Pass (instead, it was the bus to Union Station).
I’m glad I didn’t go out there wearing shorts, t-shirt and flip-flops in imitation of the Venice Beach layabout. Because it was cold, too. The palm trees you see in picture postcards looked shrivelled up like a nut-sack submerged in ice water. The famous hills and looming snow-capped mountains were so shrouded in cloud and mist, they might well not exist. You wouldn’t know they existed. And the highways and roads and streets wooshed and swooshed with run-off spray as raindrops snaked down windows on buildings and cars and bus shelters and dripped off all surfaces and in the midst of car engines and the wooshing and swooshing of road spray, the world was alive with the sound of windscreen wipers (that’s from The Sound of Music, right?).
Also, the place was dead. Post-apocalyptic dead. Almost. Not really. You know what I mean. I felt like Charlton Heston in The Omega Man (1971), when I got off the bus at Union Station. It was eerie.
Union Station is one of my favourite buildings in the world. The transportation hub as cathedral-like edifice and interior. It’s so beautiful. There’s a terrific video on Union Station, by Los Angeles news reporter and historian Alison Martino, link provided here.
It’s a 2-minute walk to get to Olvera Street from Union Station and it is heavily signposted. Stevie Wonder could walk there blindfolded. Olvera Street is featured as a key location in Charles Chaplin’s ground-breaking comedy-drama, The Kid (1921), a film about destitute people and their struggles in life. It’s ground-breaking because how successfully Chaplin merged comedy and drama; establishing a new form of screen entertainment … one that makes you laugh *and* cry. To quote Lon Chaney in Tod Browning’s The Unholy Three (1925): “That's all there is to life, friends—a little laughter … a little tear …”.
Like I said, finding Olvera Street is easy as pie. I’d been there before. Not Olvera Street exactly, but the Plaza area, which also contains Olvera. I’d walked across it with my friend Ben, back in 2017, when we made a beeline to the Bradbury Building (used in 1982’s Blade Runner and other movies). This section of Los Angeles is the oldest part of the entire city and it’s been preserved due to its historical importance and it has therefore retained its Spanish mission/hacienda flavour. All the buildings hark back mostly to the days when Los Angeles (never call it L.A.) was a one-horse pueblo.
Olvera Street runs north to south and is filled with — when it isn’t raining cats, dogs and frogs — people running food stalls and selling knick-knacks. Everywhere was shut when I traipsed down it in the bleak downpour. (Not surprising.)
Anyway, the climatic scene of The Kid, where the social services come to take away the titular character and the Tramp chases after him and they’re reunited, it was filmed about halfway down Olvera Street. And guess what? The location still exists! You can literally stand close to where Chaplin filmed a profoundly moving scene.
Next stop: Hollywood!
I took the metro to Hollywood and Vine station (genuinely, dear reader, the most terrifying 15 minutes of my life), the carriages filled with equally terrified locals with no money enduring the trip because it’s cheap and relatively easy, and homeless people with mental health problems who spend their days riding the subway, ranting away or doing drugs in open sight … one guy plonked himself down next to me … and the stink I’ll never forget. To quote Robert Pattinson in The Lighthouse (2019): “You smell like hot onions fucked a barnyard shithouse.” As soon as I’d stepped foot into the station, bought my ticket and went through the barrier and down the escalator to the platform, the air damp, I heard the sound of wailing and an old lady in a wheelchair mouthing off to a couple of coppers who stood on the platform not impressed with this lady’s F-bombs and other insults. There were people sleeping on benches and everybody bar me, the two LAPD officers and a couple of cleaners, looked shady or destitute.
The homeless situation in Los Angeles was bad when I visited in 2017, but now downtown Los Angeles and Hollywood Boulevard and environs, with their tent cities, the filthy sidewalks, the broken people loitering and festering … forget all about the glitz and glamour of movies, it is categorical social failure sitting side by side with obscene wealth in the hills. The mega-rich can literally look down on the unfortunate. Los Angeles, at least parts of it, are in threat of becoming an open air asylum.
Hollywood Boulevard was deserted. Hollywood, a ghost town. The sky miserable and grey without end. The thin drizzle of rain felt a world away from the bright and beautiful images you seen on television, in the movies. Every doorway outside every shop, there sat grubby and dishevelled men — it was mostly men — talking to each other or sleeping. I even figured, given the opioid pandemic, some of them might be dead. Who’s to say? Would anybody even give a shit?
Just a few feet south of Hollywood Boulevard, there’s a little alleyway running between Cahuenga Boulevard and Cosmo Street. Here, Chaplin filmed the scene in The Kid, where the Tramp finds the abandoned baby he will adopt.
Now, this nondescript alleyway is important to film history. Not only did Charles Chaplin film a scene from The Kid here, Buster Keaton staged one of his most famous stunts outside the alleyway, in Cops (1922). Being chased by LAPD bozos, he runs down the alley from Cosmo Street and emerges on Cahuenga Boulevard, grabs the back of a passing car and flies off.
Harold Lloyd also filmed here for his 1923 classic, Safety Last!, though Lloyd has no appeal for me … a bit like Clark Gable of classic Hollywood years. I just don’t get it. But the alleyway has since been commemorated as the Chaplin, Keaton, Lloyd Alley and there’s a little bronze plaque. To visit this site … it was mind-blowing. To think Chaplin and Keaton, those titans of silent comedy, were once here with their film crews making scenes for pictures that would live on for generations to discover and re-discover. For a kid from a small-town in the northwest of England, who’d never in a million years would have ever guessed one day they’d get the chance to visit Los Angeles, not once, but twice … it was a “pinch me” moment.
If you walk westwards down Hollywood Boulevard, passing vape shops and other tacky tourist stores, and hooking a left, you will find yourself on North La Brea Avenue. Walking southwards and across Sunset Boulevard, you’ll find Charles Chaplin’s old studio. It still stands and is currently the home of the Jim Henson Company. Yes, the Muppets live here. There’s a big model of Kermit the Frog dressed as Chaplin above the main gate.
When it was built in 1919, Chaplin had it designed in the style of an English mock Tudor structure. Previously it had been an orange grove and a nice big house. This place at Sunset and North La Brea was thousands of miles away — literally and figuratively — from the cobbled and filthy streets poverty-stricken Chaplin was born into and raised in. Of course South London and the Dickensian slums Chaplin hailed from, looked nothing like his quaint English village studio, Chaplin now a member of the Hollywood nouveau riche, richer than his wildest dreams, could begin to construct his dreams into reality. The structure was in keeping with the random and higgledy-piggledy nature of Hollywood’s silent era, where the newly filthy stinking rich built homes in everything from medieval castles to Spanish villas to cutesy bungalows. The OG Hollywood community deplored the movie folk, whom they derisively dubbed “the movies”, but in the end, as the true god of America is money, they grumbled for a bit and then money talks as money always does.
Chaplin shot The Kid here and every other Chaplin film until he was booted out of America in the late 1940s, accused of being a commie sonofabitch. He sold the property in 1953.
As I stood on North Brea Avenue, staring at the studio, daydreaming about the classic movies made there by one of the true geniuses of the cinema, I felt very lucky. It’s a trip I’ll never forget. To stand in the vicinity of culturally important history.
But The Kid is about extreme poverty and the lives of those on the fringes and Los Angeles still has those very same problems 102 years on. It always will in the savage land of America, where poverty is a personal failure, not a system designed to keep those down. Chaplin knew it. The Kid shows it. Los Angeles lives it.