The curse haunts the Hollywood Sign, the mythical sign that crowns Mount Lee in Los Angeles and is now being harassed by fire. One of the latest outbreaks has occurred in the Hollywood Hills area, known as Sunset, just above the Hollywood Boulevard Walk of Fame and just a highway away from the Griffith Observatory and the legendary sign.
Although it seems that, for the moment, it is out of danger, it is not the first time that a sign has been threatened, which, by the way, is not even the original, the one that was installed with mules and at the time for 21,000 dollars at the time as a publicity stunt to promote sales of the Hollywoodland development.
Beyond fiction, whether the iconic white letters of the Hollywood Sign were knocked down by an earthquake caused by Gene Hackman’s Lex Luthor or shot by John Belushi in Steven Spierlberg’s ‘1941’, the sign has suffered the ravages of time in the same way. that the young British actress Peg Entwistle, 24, succumbed to alcoholism and depression for not succeeding in the mecca of cinema and threw herself at the letter ‘H’, fifteen meters above the ground, in 1932, nine years after it opened in the golden age of Hollywood.
Already in the following decade, the guard guarding the famous Hollywood Hills sign crashed his vehicle after driving drunk through the top of Beachwood Canyon, further deteriorating some letters that already appeared rusty and semi-destroyed, eroded by wind and vandalism.
Several times he threatened to retreat, but he was still there, guarding the city from above like Monument Valley did in John Ford’s westerns. The Chamber of Commerce was responsible for its restoration in 1949 and took the opportunity to strip it of the ‘Land’. In the seventies he experienced bad times again, so much so that, for the first time, his retirement was considered. It didn’t get to that point but almost. Los Angeles was orphaned from the Hollywood Sign for three months, until the new sign, financed by the founder of ‘Playboy’ magazine and other big names in Hollywood, invested their fortune to replace the diminished emblem of the cinema mecca with a more resistant one. composed of steel beams and iron plates and fixed to the ground with reinforced concrete and surrounded by a fence that prevents unauthorized access.
Measures that, with luck, will allow you to continue holding on if the fire finally arrives.
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