MARK EDWARD HARRIS | LITTLE NAKED HOLLYWOOD
Hollywood is more of an idea than a place.
While the dream factory (i.e., the film industry) is for the most part on a hiatus due to the COVID-19 outbreak, tourists for the first few months of the pandemic were stripped from Hollywood’s Walk of Fame where the who’s who of the silver screen, television, radio, and music are immortalized.
Gone were the selfie stick-wielding sightseers comparing their hand and footprints with their favorite stars in front of the Chinese Theatre. As the pandemic took hold in the United States, foot traffic began to slow all along this tourism mecca.
Having no one to pose with for money, the Darth Vader’s, Jokers, and other costumed “performers” began to disappear.
Then the death knell came. On Wednesday, March 4, 2020, California Governor Gavin Newsom declared a state of emergency.
He had a good reason. An elderly man with underlying health conditions had just died from the COVID-19 at a hospital in Roseville that morning after most likely been exposed to the virus on a cruise from San Francisco to Mexico in February.
This first death was a harbinger of what was to come not only in the Golden State but across America.
One week later, on March 11, Tom Hanks’ announced on Twitter from Australia that he and his wife Rita Wilson had contracted the coronavirus, bringing home the reality that anyone was susceptible to this invisible enemy. After all, he is Hollywood’s “common man.” For more than three decades, I have traveled to the most remote parts of the globe to cover both news-breaking and daily life stories. In fact, I had just returned from Australia, where I was doing a photo essay on the impact of the recent bushfires on the koalas of Kangaroo Island.
Now, with most planes grounded and most assignments put on hold or canceled, I refocused my efforts much closer to home.
For us, Angelenos, Hollywood does not hold the magical aura that non-residents often have.
The “boulevard” is lined with too many souvenir stands and vape shops and is home to too many drug addicts and homeless for that vaulted position.
For those like me fortunate enough to have a roof over their heads and access to a computer, Smartphone, or television, one of the forced isolation’s greatest companions are Hollywood productions, transporting us to another time when the concept of a worldwide pandemic was only the stuff of movies.
But the thin curtain of fantasy has risen, revealing the ugly underbelly that is also Hollywood. Many homeless are mentally ill, or drug addicts or a combination of the two – that call the streets and underpasses of Hollywood home have become the majority along the Walk of Fame and its environs. They simply have no place to go. And the third and final act has yet to be played out.
While Hollywood Boulevard became home to politically “left” leaning protests, the political “right” found a home across town in a park running parallel to Santa Monica Boulevard in Beverly Hills. As the 2020 United States presidential election drew nearer, the gathering of Trump supporters there grew larger.
On occasion, protesters on opposite sides move into each other’s “territory,” and confrontations become inevitable. Fortunately, most of these are verbal, but on occasion, they turn violent.
Without the police there to intervene – an unenviable position, to say the least – they would likely turn deadly.
