We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
Star-dust in Hollywood
for no reason except that of climate ; a tourist town that draws a hundred and sixty million dollars' worth of tourists to it a year. Yet there is nothing for them to look at when they arrive. The oil that brings in a hundred and seventy millions of its yearly income was not discovered till after the foundation, and the movies that contribute a hundred and thirty millions are themselves but a few years old. It is a town of a million Middle Western farmers, children of Middle Western farmers, and parasites on Middle Western farmers ; it is a refuge where such people, worn out and spiritually overwhelmed by the immensities of the great echoless wheatplains, can huddle happily in a four-hundred-square-mile labyrinth of the flimsiest and craziest city buildings that history has ever seen. The domestic architecture is of every imaginable variety, from old English cottages to Mexican Rococo, from Arabian or Assyrian to Maya, from Irish inns carted over lock, stock, and barrel and embedded in a movie star's beach house to Greek shrines numbered like a jig-saw puzzle and shipped across in cases. Architecture pure, pastiched, or mixed pickles ; architecture of lath and plaster, flimsy as the reputation of those whom it houses, making one believe that the movie lots are a contagious disease.
The town has spread over the desert soil, sprouting here, withering there ; here dense clusters of pocket-living citizens with their noses in each other's back-yards and their ears afflicted by each other's radios ; there large stretches of fallow ground on which no respectable citizen would deign to build. These two aspects are intermingled without apparent rhyme or reason, except maybe the whim of the land speculators. Here a fortune has been realized by the lucky buyers ; there the happiness of a hundred Iowan farms is still embedded in the desert dust. If one may talk of a town being repulsively clean this one is so. It seemed to us like a prim little girl at a party afraid to spoil her frock, or like
[134]