Star-dust in Hollywood (1930)

Los lAngeles-cutn-Hollywood during three months of the year, but for the rest baked a dull, tawny, eye-tiring brown. In these hills sprouted the palaces of the great Movie Great, the houses of the middle Movie Great (clustered into real estate communities and colonies), or blocks of flats for the small Movie Great. Below, across the bungalow plains, stretched the courts, the rooming-houses, and the square-blocked suburbia of the Movie Small merging into Los Angeles itself, homeland of the Iowan emigrant. The great plain stretched out as far as the eye could penetrate the thin Californian mist, covered with two-storeyed houses, ranked two thousand deep to the main street and then spreading their numberless thousands still farther beyond. Four hundred square miles of them. Hollywood is but a tenth part of this four hundred square miles of household monotony. Yet, except for the central business blocks of Los Angeles itself, clustered about the tall white tower of the City Hall, few promontories of building stand out. The few that do are usually apartmenthouses or hotels, each towers of speculative building, towers that scrape no skies, for the land gamblers, seeing their profits from an extension of land sales rather than from upward aspirations that would profit none but the builders, forced an edict through the town council limiting the height to twelve storeys. In spite of the crouching appearance of this extensive city, and in spite of the fact that the movies are claimed to be America's fourth largest industry, a casual visitor might drive in and round about the place and hardly suspect that the movies exist, unless he came upon the big, truncated liner of the Lasky lot rearing its decks above the surrounding bungalow roofs. It is a strange, unreal town, this Los Angeles -cumHollywood, a chimera, a kind of human-house disease breaking out on the desert's face. It is a wilful town, grown there