SPEAKER_09: Every kid learns differently, so it's really important that your children have the educational support that they need to help them keep up and excel. If your child needs homework help, check out iXcel, the online learning platform for kids. iXcel covers math, language arts, science, and social studies through interactive practice problems from pre-K to 12th grade. As kids practice, they get positive feedback and even awards. With the school year ramping up, now is the best time to get iXcel. Our listeners can get an exclusive 20% off iXcel membership when they sign up today at iXcel.com slash invisible. That's the letters iXcel dot com slash invisible. Bombas makes clothing designed for warm weather from soft, breezy layers that you can move in with ease to socks that wick sweat and cushion every step. Socks, underwear and T-shirts are the number one, two and three most requested items in homeless shelters. That's why for every comfy item you purchase, Bombas donates another comfy item to someone in need. Every item is seamless, tagless and effortlessly soft. Bombas are the clothes that you'll want to get dressed and move in every day. I'm telling you, you are excited when you've done the laundry recently and the Bomba socks are at the top of the sock drawer because your feet are about to feel good all day long. Go to B-O-M-B-A-S dot com slash 99 P-I and use code 99 P-I for 20% off your first purchase. That's Bombas. B-O-M-B-A-S dot com slash 99 P-I. Code 99 P-I. This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. On March 21st, 2022, a small crowd gathered in front of the Musso and Frank Grill on Hollywood Boulevard in Los Angeles. They weren't there for the restaurant. Instead, dozens of photographers, reporters and Godfather fans packed in together to catch a glimpse of the ground.
SPEAKER_03: Chamber of Commerce, we now declare today Francis Ford Coppola Day in Hollywood.
SPEAKER_09: It was right there on one of the most famous stretches of sidewalk in the country that acclaimed film director Francis Ford Coppola received the two thousand seven hundred and fifteenth star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
SPEAKER_06: Even if you haven't made the pilgrimage to Southern California, you can probably already picture what the Walk of Fame looks like. It's a one point three mile walkway lined with terrazzo and brass squares. Each slab spotlights a salmon pink star and the name of a different famous celebrity deemed worthy enough to become a permanent part of Hollywood's urban fabric.
SPEAKER_09: Your 99 P-I producer this week is actor, director and Hollywood insider Gillian Jacobs. If her voice doesn't sound familiar, you might recognize her face from shows like Community or HBO's Winning Time. The walk is located on Hollywood Boulevard from Gower to La Brea and continues on Vine Street from Sunset to Yucca.
SPEAKER_06: Back in 1960, the street's main features were grand old movie palaces like Grauman's Chinese Theater and the El Capitan. Those theaters are still there, but these days they're surrounded by crowds of Elvis impersonators, snake wranglers and people in Elmo costumes hoping tourists will pay to take a picture with them. Upwards of 10 million people a year brave the traffic and crowds and fight over L.A.
SPEAKER_09: Scarce's resource parking, all just to snap a photo of a star with the name of their favorite famous person.
SPEAKER_06: Before working on the story, I'd never actually gone to the Hollywood Walk of Fame, despite living in Los Angeles for over a decade. It might be snobbery on my part or a deep ambivalence about my own profession, but I could not understand the appeal of looking at names embedded in the sidewalk. That is, until one day last year when I made the rare journey to the Walgreens on Sunset and Vine to buy the hypoallergenic baby detergent my dermatologist said would help with my rosacea, and I realized I was actually stepping on a portion of the Walk of Fame. There was the expected mixture of movie stars from the golden age of Hollywood, musicians, television stars, you know, your Merv Griffin's, your James Brown's, but one name made me stop in my tracks. Dorothy Arzner.
SPEAKER_09: If you've never heard of Dorothy Arzner before, you are not alone. Most people these days have no idea who she was, but in the history of Hollywood, Dorothy Arzner was a big deal.
SPEAKER_05: You want really intimate details? Intimate details. Gossip. You want gossip? I'm not very good at that. Arzner was the first woman admitted to the Directors Guild. She made films starring Joan Crawford, Clara Bow, and Lucille Ball.
SPEAKER_09: And even though she stopped directing in 1943, she still holds the title for the most American studio films directed by a woman. Which is impressive, but also super depressing, right? I had heard of her because she directed my childhood hero, Katherine Hepburn in the film Christopher Strong.
SPEAKER_06: And as I've discovered more of Arzner's work in recent years, I've also come to love her wry sense of humor and her obvious skill in pulling funny, dynamic, even slyly mocking performances out of her actors. I also admire the hell out of her for being literally the only woman directing Hollywood films for much of her career. I usually announce, you know, if anyone doesn't want to work with a woman director, with me being a woman, you know, speak up now.
SPEAKER_06: I felt giddy seeing that star there and knowing that she's been memorialized forever. But I also felt sad, too. Dorothy's star was in pretty bad shape. She was streaked with cracks and the bottom half of her travertine star legs were missing. As I stood there holding my hypoallergenic baby detergent over Dorothy's star, the thing that surprised me most is that I felt anything at all. Honestly, in my day to day life, I just don't think about the Hollywood Walk of Fame. But when I do, it's just another award in a town obsessed with celebrating itself. So why does this gimmicky, broken little star make me feel things? Why does Dorothy Arzener's name on the ground outside a Walgreens make me feel close to a woman I've never met, who died before I was born? Because gimmicky or not, the Walk of Fame is the story of Hollywood, the film industry and the very origin of stardom itself in 1.3 miles of sidewalk.
SPEAKER_09: Today, we use Hollywood as shorthand for the biz and the biz as shorthand for the entertainment business. But there was a time when Los Angeles and the film industry weren't inextricably linked. In fact, its original home was all the way across the country in the greatest city in the world, Fort Lee, New Jersey.
SPEAKER_06: Like many professional actors in the US, I live in Los Angeles. And the reason I live here and not in Fort Lee is because of famous New Jerseyan Thomas Edison. You do actually. You live in Los Angeles because of Thomas Edison, because he was the asshole of early cinema.
SPEAKER_04: This is Lauren Steimer, associate professor of film and media studies at the University of South Carolina.
SPEAKER_09: Edison held over 1000 patents in the US, including many of the patents for technologies required to make movies. And there was a problem with that. Thomas Edison was the original patent troll. Since the 1890s, Edison sued everyone over patents, cameras, projectors, film stock, and then those companies had to pay him license fees.
SPEAKER_04: So if you wanted to shoot anything or screen anything, money goes to Thomas Edison.
SPEAKER_06: Since New Jersey was where the tech was incubated, it was also where the production offices, studio stages, talent, and by default, the entire motion picture industry was based. But Edison's stranglehold over the technology also made it more difficult, expensive, and frankly annoying for other film studios. And then over time, they realized, well, why don't we actually move far, far, far away from the grasp of Thomas Edison and we'll start our own thing?
SPEAKER_04: It would be harder for Edison to enforce his patents from the other end of the country. And of course, the weather was better.
SPEAKER_09: So fledgling studios and filmmakers escaped to beautiful, distant, Southern California.
SPEAKER_06: In the early 1900s, Hollywood hadn't yet become the physical manifestation of the film industry. It was just another name on a map. Hollywood was its own community, and there were a lot of real estate promoters here trying to build up this community and make it something special.
SPEAKER_12: And so when the motion picture industry settled here, it wasn't quite what they anticipated. This is LaRon Goobler, former president of the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce, which is the entity that oversees the Walk of Fame.
SPEAKER_06: Hollywood was founded in 1887 when Harvey Wilcox and his wife, Daida, registered his 160 acres of land with the Los Angeles County Recorder's Office. These acres, just south of what is now known as the Hollywood Hills, were filled with apricots and fig trees. And for film studios looking for open space to build an industry on, it must have looked like heaven.
SPEAKER_09: But the Wilcox's were the opposite of showbiz people. They were religious teetotalers who envisioned their new community as a Christian utopia where vice would be banned.
SPEAKER_12: Hollywood was a very conservative, straight-laced community. And stars and celebrities at that time were not looked upon favorably. In fact, they had signs in apartment buildings saying, no actors and no animals allowed. So that was the original attitude towards actors back in the early 20th century.
SPEAKER_06: But the Wilcox's couldn't keep actors out for long. By 1910, Hollywood went from being its own municipality to an incorporated district of Los Angeles. And by 1911, the very first of many film studios in the area were built. Hollywood would be the new home of the big, bad movie business. Oh, it was very downmarket. It was very shady stuff, the movies.
SPEAKER_06: Ty Burr is a film critic and the author of Gods Like Us on movie stardom and modern fame. He says that in the nascent years of the movie industry, the very idea of a monument to film actors like the Walk of Fame would have been unfathomable. You know, in the earliest days of movies, they didn't even call it acting.
SPEAKER_08: They used all these different verbs to describe what was going on, shamming, posing, playing, but never acting. It was just sort of being yourself in front of the camera. So whatever it was, it wasn't acting. Movies were viewed as a novelty at the time.
SPEAKER_09: Unlike today's films, early cinema rarely had narrative plots. They were mostly just snippets of life captured on camera. Films were also silent with no dialogue to memorize. So actors were pretty far away from thespians reciting iambic pentameter on stage. And shockingly to this SAG member, performers weren't even credited, mostly because movie studios didn't want people to care about the actors.
SPEAKER_06: Carl Lemley, who founded Universal, they all realized that as soon as you started naming an actor by name and promoting them, you would have to pay them more money.
SPEAKER_08: So for the first 15 years of the film industry, actors were not named. You just got the title, you got the company that made the film and that was it.
SPEAKER_09: But during the first decade of the 20th century, the number of small movie theaters and Nickelodeons skyrocketed across the country. Production companies rushed to produce enough content to meet the growing need for new films. Many studios relied on factory style methods to create more movies and would often cast the same group of actors over and over for the sake of practicality. And because audiences were seeing the same actors over and over again, viewers were becoming attached to the faces they were seeing on screen.
SPEAKER_06: One of the things I found fascinating when I was researching my book was how crazy people went to find out the identity of these people.
SPEAKER_08: So people would write to the film companies, to the Biograph Girl or the Girl with the Curls or whatever they named them. And the letters that come up in the researcher are really kind of touching and sad and indicative of where we were going as a culture. People saying, please tell me your name. I won't tell anybody else, but please tell me your name. And just this yearning that comes across. And it's a new kind of yearning.
SPEAKER_06: Soon, movie studios had no choice but to yield to their audience's demands and start identifying and then promoting their stars. Once you name one star, you got to name them all. And that's right there is where the star system is born.
SPEAKER_06: You might understandably think that with all this new fame and prestige, all this collective yearning, that Hollywood actors would finally come into their power. But it didn't quite work out that way. Instead, executives like Carl Laemmle realized that stardom was a commodity that could be manufactured, controlled and profited from.
SPEAKER_09: Studios tied up actors in exclusive contracts, which meant they could only work for that particular studio. They had nearly complete control over their stars.
SPEAKER_04: So you had not just to go where they wanted you to go, but you had to be photographed and be photographed how they wanted you to be photographed. So they would tell you to go to Musso and Franks and there'll be some photographers outside and you're going to have a dinner inside. And magically, the photographers will find their way inside to a private restaurant.
SPEAKER_09: Movie studios understood how these public spaces could be used to generate even more star power. So they started exerting control not only over which pictures the stars acted in, but where they went at night and with whom.
SPEAKER_04: If you were not romantically involved with anyone at that time, they would actually craft a narrative in which you were dating some other celebrity at the studio or newcomer at the studio that they wanted to promote to help their career.
SPEAKER_06: Back then, an appearance at a restaurant like the Brown Derby guaranteed a write up. Rival gossip columnists Luella Parsons and Hedda Hopper were permanent fixtures inside. It generated publicity for the actors and the restaurants and let fans know where to go if they wanted to see stars in person.
SPEAKER_09: Meanwhile, the neighborhood of Hollywood, which not long before had its no actors, no animals rule, quickly capitalized on the film industry and its celebrity status. If Detroit had its cars, then Hollywood had its stars.
SPEAKER_03: The city below looks like any other sprawling metropolis. Yet this one is different. Its fame has spread to the four corners of the earth. Its name is known to practically every man, woman and child in the universe. For this is fabulous Hollywood. The press actually really pushed both the idea of the star and the idea of Hollywood as this glamorous, identifiable location.
SPEAKER_04: And it helped cement this idea that Hollywood itself was such a glamorous area.
SPEAKER_09: Despite its reputation today, the truth is that not many movies are actually filmed in Hollywood. And this was true even back in the day. Of the five big film studios of the time, MGM, Warner Brothers, Paramount, Fox and RKO, most were located in other parts of Los Angeles, not Hollywood.
SPEAKER_08: Municipally, it is its own thing. And I think it's always existed parallel to the film industry, sometimes almost as a parasite of the film industry. But movie makers understood the power of branding. And so the name Hollywood became synonymous with entertainment.
SPEAKER_09: One of the most interesting aspects of Hollywood is the motion picture industry. This vast empire is also a potent factor in the economic life of Southern California.
SPEAKER_02: Its studios employ thousands of workers, electricians, carpenters, painters, seamstresses, artists, artisans of every conceivable time.
SPEAKER_06: Throughout the 1930s, MGM Studios had actors like Clark Gable and Judy Garland on their roster. Dorothy Arzner, the director whose star I saw on the Walk of Fame, was at the peak of her career. She worked extensively with Paramount Studios, where she directed 11 features in five years. The movie industry was one of the biggest businesses in the world. And as it reached the height of its power, film became the economic lifeblood of Los Angeles. Nothing could stop Hollywood.
SPEAKER_09: Nothing except for the Supreme Court.
SPEAKER_04: So the Paramount decision of 48, it affected all of the major studios. The Paramount decision was a landmark antitrust ruling that went after the big five movie studios who dominated Hollywood.
SPEAKER_04: That's the number one thing that destabilized the industry. And that was kind of the very slow decline of the industry and their power.
SPEAKER_06: Basically, the big five had a powerful monopoly over the entire motion picture industry. They controlled everything from the production of films right down to the theaters that screened them. If a studio owned a movie theater, it could shut out its competition by refusing to play any film from a rival company. The 1948 rule put an end to that, making studios give up control of their movie theaters and sell them to independent companies, which was great for competition, but bad for the system Hollywood had been built on. On top of that, in the late 40s and early 50s, Americans were flocking to newly constructed suburbs far away from the city centers where movie palaces were located.
SPEAKER_09: Ticket sales plummeted. Movie theater attendance dropped by 60 percent in some markets.
SPEAKER_08: It just dropped like a stone. And the studios were panic stricken for good reason.
SPEAKER_09: The Hollywood film industry was suffering and with it, the District of Hollywood. Retail had gone into a state of decline because people weren't coming over the hill to shop like they once did.
SPEAKER_12: Laurent Gubler says that residents who fled over the hill for the San Fernando Valley suburbs weren't just ditching a night out at the picture palace.
SPEAKER_06: They were ditching the entire local economy. It seemed as though the industry and the neighborhood were in crisis.
SPEAKER_09: So in 1953, in response to declining revenue and a distinct lack of good old Hollywood oomph, a man named E.M. Stewart, who was the volunteer president of the Chamber of Commerce, came up with an idea. It was a plan to hearken back to the old, glorious days of Hollywood. He said the tourists come here looking for stars and are disappointed. So let's give them stars.
SPEAKER_09: The chamber announced in a press release that they were proposing an attraction that would maintain the glory of a community whose name means glamour and excitement in the four corners of the world. The Walk of Fame.
SPEAKER_06: The idea would be to take the ethereal stars from the screen and place them into the ground where anyone could visit them. Instead of hoping and then failing to bump into William Holden at the Brown Derby, you can at least know that you'll have a small piece of him along Hollywood and Vine. And then as you're strolling along to take a picture of Humphrey Bogart or Claudette Colbert star, oh, hey, maybe you'll pop into Woolworths to buy a new handbag or duck into Musso and Franks for a steak lunch. Very subtle.
SPEAKER_12: So when they were designing the stars, what they were actually going to look like, there was a lot of discussion.
SPEAKER_06: No one quite knows where the original idea came from, but Laurent believes the inspiration for the design of the walk came from the ceiling of the dining room in the Hollywood Hotel.
SPEAKER_12: A lot of celebrities hung out there and in their dining room on the ceiling, they had stars with the names of celebrities in them. And if you look at those stars, they are very similar to what ended up in the ground.
SPEAKER_09: The Chamber of Commerce created four committees with experts in four separate categories, motion pictures, television, audio recording and radio. The first members of the Motion Picture Committee included industry giants, Cecil B. DeMille, Samuel Goldwyn and Walt Disney. They combed through thousands of names dating back to the earliest days of Hollywood in order to decide who deserved to be honored on the brand new Walk of Fame.
SPEAKER_06: At this time, there was a kind of cosmic shift taking place. By the 1950s and 60s, the actors who had inspired that new kind of yearning were changing. While the town and the film business were still relatively young, the movie stars fueling the industry were not. The classic stars were getting old and stars aren't supposed to get old.
SPEAKER_08: And what happens when a star gets old? That we hadn't, we really hadn't come to grips with that as a culture, but you get into the post where and cable's getting old and Crawford's getting old and all these things are just changing. A permanent ode to the great stars that made Hollywood itself great seemed like a very appropriate tribute.
SPEAKER_09: The Walk debuted with a sort of soft open with the unveiling of eight stars, Joanne Woodward, Olive Borden, Ronald Coleman, Louise Fazenda, Preston Foster, Burt Lancaster, Edward Sedgwick, Ernest Torrance and me, Roman Mars. Sorry, force of habit.
SPEAKER_06: And in 1961, after years of debate over where it would go and who would be honored if the color scheme would clash with the neighborhood and if Charlie Chaplin was indeed a communist, The Walk was finally installed.
SPEAKER_12: They put in 1500 stars all at once to create an instant tourist attraction. The Chamber of Commerce wanted to acknowledge that this would be a living monument so it left about 500 stars blank as placeholders for future recipients.
SPEAKER_06: This was a pragmatic move because, let's be honest, of those first eight names unveiled on the Walk of Fame, chances are you didn't recognize most, if any of them. The Chamber knew that the industry was fickle, that people would eventually forget about their old favorites and move on to the next big star in line, whether that was Farrah Fawcett or Francis Ford Coppola.
SPEAKER_09: It's a permanent memorial dedicated to a fleeting concept, fame.
SPEAKER_06: Although it began as a ploy to generate business, the Walk of Fame ended up tapping into that intimate connection people feel for their favorite performer. The same one that had fans writing to movie studios in the early days of cinema begging to learn the names of the girl with the curls or the biograph girl. The Walk of Fame allows people to feel that they are in the presence of, in the sort of privy to, whatever stardust, whatever magic these people had.
SPEAKER_08: There's that gulf between, you know, us and them, and there are very few places that bridge it with physicality. And that is the story of how the Walk of Fame saved Hollywood.
SPEAKER_04: Oof, so things really start to go downhill in the 1960s and 70s, between the 60s and the 80s. Yeah, it was never going to be that easy.
SPEAKER_06: Despite the Chamber of Commerce's best efforts, the neighborhood kept declining. This was something that was happening to urban areas all over post-war America. But contrasted to its glory days, the decay of Hollywood Boulevard felt extra bleak.
SPEAKER_04: Hollywood Boulevard becomes a place where you find a lot of, like, what can I call them, cheap stores, stores for dollar items, five dollar items, really, really cheaply made souvenirs. And those picture palaces, in the 1960s and 70s, if they're still around, they're showing porn. There was a period in the late 70s and early 80s when it was difficult to find celebrities who would accept stars.
SPEAKER_12: The problem was, Hollywood was going downhill, economically and physically, and it was becoming kind of rough out there on the sidewalks. And a lot of celebrities were reluctant to accept stars at that time. Laurent Gubler says that the Walk of Fame itself was never actually in any danger of disappearing, even as the urban area around it deteriorated, in part because of the ways the Walk has had to evolve over the years.
SPEAKER_06: Since it was first installed, the Chamber of Commerce has made a number of changes to its process.
SPEAKER_09: It added additional categories to honor, expanded the actual area of the Walk, and began hosting unveiling ceremonies for each new star installed. So the celebrity receiving the star actually has to show up in order to get one. And in the 1980s, a radio and television personality named Johnny Grant stepped onto the scene to try and shake things up.
SPEAKER_11: I must tell you, I must tell you one thing, by the way, I'm Johnny Grant and I'll be your host this evening. Nice.
SPEAKER_12: Johnny was the world's greatest promoter. And when he got his star, he got involved in the ceremony. He arranged for a military flyover and a brass band. And the committee that put on the Walk of Fame was so impressed with what he did for his own ceremony that they said, Hey, Johnny, how would you like to chair the Walk of Fame? And he immediately jumped at the opportunity and really is probably the person most responsible for what the Walk of Fame has become today.
SPEAKER_06: But one of the most important changes to the process was instigating a fee in order to receive a star on the Walk of Fame. In 1980, this started at $2,500 to help pay for installation, maintenance and the unveiling ceremony. But by 2022, it's ballooned to $55,000. In most cases, a studio or sponsor will foot the bill because it's great publicity.
SPEAKER_06: There's a whole nomination process involved, so it's not like you can just shell out $55,000 and buy yourself a star. But the price tag, as well as how that money is spent, has been a point of criticism for the Walk over the years.
SPEAKER_01: Well, for me, the significance is that you only get a star on the Hollywood Boulevard if you're willing to pay for it or someone who's trying to get publicity for a film coming out pays for it, which is how most of them get put there.
SPEAKER_06: This is Walk of Fame star recipient Francis Ford Coppola. Wait, you know Francis Ford Coppola? I know a guy who knows a guy. If you weren't aware, Coppola is the director of the Godfather trilogy, Apocalypse Now and a personal favorite of mine, The Conversation.
SPEAKER_06: Even though his career spans decades, he says he didn't receive his star until early 2022 because of the hefty price. Usually my films were produced by myself and we did not spend money in PR in aggrandizing people like myself.
SPEAKER_01: But now with the 50th anniversary of the Godfather, Paramount is willing to treat me to that. And certainly there are many people on that Walk of Fame that I am humbly proud to be in their company. One of them is Miss Arzner. Miss Arzner, as in Dorothy Arzner, the film director whose broken star on the Walk of Fame first got me interested in this story.
SPEAKER_06: After Arzner retired from directing, she taught film at UCLA where one of her students was actually a young Francis Ford Coppola. Well, Miss Arzner was a wonderful teacher.
SPEAKER_01: She really made us feel as if she cared for us. And aside from that, she was a movie pioneer. She was one of the people who created the cinema.
SPEAKER_06: Arzner had a reputation for being a director with an eye for new talent. She was able to help craft on-screen personas for new actors and mold them into stars. She was always coming up with little tidbits like that, little pointers.
SPEAKER_01: And of course the most significant one, that the director should always sit at the same place next to the camera. Not only because that's the best view, but also it was so the actors would see that you're there and because they're doing it for you. And if you're back away in some place where there are television monitors, the actors can't see who they're doing it for. Arzner also had a successful career as a film editor before she began directing.
SPEAKER_06: Coppola says that she showed him some important directorial tips from back when you physically cut and paste film negatives. And you had to use your arm to measure the length of a scene. I remember she told me once that, and demonstrating that one arm length for a kiss was a long, sexy kiss.
SPEAKER_01: But two arm lengths was a really passionate kiss and three arm lengths was a very sexy kiss. And on top of that, Arzner made some pretty amazing technological contributions to filmmaking.
SPEAKER_06: She's credited with inventing the prototype for the very first boom mic. Here she is talking about how she came up with the idea in order to let the actress Clara Bow move around freely on set.
SPEAKER_05: I'd hang the mic and Clara Bow would have to say what she had to say and then be silent until she got over here if she moved. And it wasn't many days until I said to the prop man, do you have a fish pole? And he said yes, and I said bring it tomorrow and a ladder and hang that thing on it and when Clara moves, you move that with her.
SPEAKER_09: It might not be a microphone taped to a fishing pole anymore, but the boom is a piece of equipment that's still essential on film sets today.
SPEAKER_06: In 1943, Dorothy Arzner retired from the film industry. It was probably much earlier in her career than she anticipated.
SPEAKER_05: I got pneumonia on the last picture I made, which it took me some time to get over. And I didn't feel strong. You have to be strong to be a director to stand up to the end.
SPEAKER_09: Health issues aside, she was also a female film director and a lesbian. At this point, sexism and homophobia in Hollywood were squeezing out people like her. Arzner directed her last Hollywood film at age 46.
SPEAKER_06: The fact that someone has a star on the Walk of Fame means that they achieved a level of renown and acclaim so immense that the Chamber of Commerce thought that the mere sight of their name would entice tourists to the area. But the reality is that the industry and the public have a short memory when it comes to people like Dorothy Arzner. And many of the names on the sidewalk that were once a draw have faded into obscurity.
SPEAKER_10: Thank you. You know my god. You ready? Hollywood to an end.
SPEAKER_05: No, thank you. The gentleman Anderson over there.
SPEAKER_10: I'm so excited about it. Last chance to go inside and there's a fascinating history of this building.
SPEAKER_01: Today, Hollywood Boulevard is in better shape. But it wasn't all because of the Walk of Fame.
SPEAKER_09: In the early 2000s, the city invested millions of dollars of public and private money to build up Hollywood and Highland into a commercial district equipped with a shopping center and luxury hotel. Jimmy Kimmel does film there and Hollywood has hosted the Academy Awards since 2001, except for in 2021 because of the pandemic.
SPEAKER_06: But the general area has undergone a sort of time square-ification where it's, you know, fine, I guess.
SPEAKER_04: There's a lot of space, a lot of retail space that's taken up by, what would I call them? They're like, they're designed to appeal to anyone who's there. They're really just tourist traps.
SPEAKER_06: And despite the somewhat renewed glamour, you are very, very, very unlikely to see a celebrity walking down the Walk of Fame. There is a man with two snakes. There is a man with two snakes. I'm very afraid. I am walking away. There are people paying to have the man put snakes on them. I think the unintended irony of the Walk of Fame is that it was a group of business owners, not the film industry itself, that gave those stars a permanent place to be memorialized. And for underappreciated pioneers like Dorothy Arzner, her star on the Walk of Fame remains the greatest public tribute to her life and career, even if it is missing a few pieces.
SPEAKER_01: You remark how the Hollywood Boulevard star with her name on it was rather old and worn. Here's Francis Ford Coppola again.
SPEAKER_06: To me, that is a badge of honor because it shows how long her name was enshrined in that way.
SPEAKER_01: And in terms of Miss Arzner's legacy, of course, the first way that is preserved by the many movies she worked on.
SPEAKER_06: Francis Ford Coppola probably has the healthier perspective on this matter, but I still felt bummed about Dorothy's star. And because the Chamber of Commerce maintains the Walk of Fame, I couldn't help but raise the issue of her missing star legs when I was talking with Laurent Gubler.
SPEAKER_12: You know, if there's a star that needs repairs, if somebody sends an email to the chamber, info at HollywoodChamber.net, we'll pass it on to the historic trust. So if there's one that you think needs to need some attention, just let us know. Miss Arzner is missing her bottom legs, her bottom star legs.
SPEAKER_06: Oh, the trazzle is missing?
SPEAKER_12: Yeah. Okay. Let me make a note.
SPEAKER_06: She's near the Walgreens. Near the Walgreens? She's across the street from the Walgreens. Really? Okay.
SPEAKER_06: A few months ago, I took a stroll over to North Vine to pick up more detergent. And not only was the Walgreens gone, but I was horrified to see that Dorothy's star was somehow in worse shape. The bottom of her cracked terrazzo had been filled in with black asphalt by the city, which was something that Laurent warned could happen if there was a tripping hazard. I don't know if there's any point to the Walk of Fame or fame or Hollywood or any of this business that I've chosen. Some days when I think of Dorothy's star, it just feels like a symbol of how quickly Hollywood forgets. There are more than 2700 names on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, most of them completely unknown to the 10 million people who visit every year. But other days, I take comfort in the fact that despite the pushy tour guides and snake wranglers and sweaty people in Elmo costumes, that the Walk of Fame is a place where anyone can stop, look down, and remember Dorothy Arzner, a director who made movies all the way back when.
SPEAKER_05: There you are. Now that's a long story. And I've briefed it. It has lots of detail in it.
SPEAKER_09: Coming up after the break, what Gillian Jacobs can teach Roman Mars about con law. Hollywood con law. The International Rescue Committee works in more than 40 countries to serve people whose lives have been upended by conflict and disaster. Over 110 million people are displaced around the world. And the IRC urgently needs your help to meet this unprecedented need. The IRC aims to respond within 72 hours after an emergency strikes, and they stay as long as they are needed. Some of the IRC's most important work is addressing the inequalities facing women and girls, ensuring safety from harm, improving health outcomes, increasing access to education, improving economic well-being, and ensuring women and girls have the power to influence decisions that affect their lives. Generous people around the world give to the IRC to help families affected by humanitarian crises with emergency supplies. Your generous donation will give the IRC steady, reliable support, allowing them to continue their ongoing humanitarian efforts, even as they respond to emergencies. Donate today by visiting rescue.org slash rebuild. Donate now and help refugee families in need. If you need to design visuals for your brand, you know how important it is to stay on brand. Brands need to use their logos, colors, and fonts in order to stay consistent. It's what makes them stand out. The online design platform Canva makes it easy for everyone to stay on brand. With Canva, you can keep your brand's fonts, logos, colors, and graphics right where you design presentations, websites, videos, and more. Drag and drop your logo into a website design or click to get your social post colors on brand. Create brand templates to give anyone on your team a design head start. You can save time resizing social posts with Canva magic resize. If your company decides to rebrand, replace your logo and other brand imagery across all your designs in just a few clicks. If you're a designer, Canva will save you time on the repetitive tasks. And if you don't have a design resource at your fingertips, just design it yourself. With Canva, you don't need to be a designer to design visuals that stand out and stay on brand. Start designing today at Canva.com, the home for every brand. This show is sponsored by BetterHelp. Do you ever find that just as you're trying to fall asleep, your brain suddenly won't stop talking? Your thoughts are just racing around? I call this just going to bed. It basically happens every night. It turns out one great way to make those racing thoughts go away is to talk them through. Therapy gives you a place to do that. So you can get out of your negative thought cycles and find some mental and emotional peace. If you're thinking of starting therapy, give BetterHelp a try. It's entirely online designed to be convenient, flexible, and suited to your schedule. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist and switch therapists at any time for no additional charge. Get a break from your thoughts with BetterHelp. Visit BetterHelp.com slash invisible today to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp. H-E-L-P dot com slash invisible. Squarespace is the all-in-one platform for building your brand and growing your business online. Stand out with a beautiful website, engage with your audience, and sell anything. Your products, content you create, and even your time. With member areas, you can unlock a new revenue stream for your business and free up time in your schedule by selling access to gated content like videos, online courses, or newsletters. This summer, why not share your adventures with your followers in a newsletter? Or maybe make some fun video compilations of all your summer escapades. Now you can create pro-level videos effortlessly in the Squarespace Video Studio app. You can easily display posts from your social profiles on your website, or share your new vlogs or videos on social media. Automatically push website content to your favorite channels so your followers can share it too. Plus, use Squarespace's insights to grow your business. Learn where your site visits and sales are coming from and analyze which channels are most effective. Go to Squarespace dot com slash invisible for a free trial and when you're ready to launch, use the offer code invisible to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. So we're back with Hollywood insider Gillian Jacobs. Thank you so much for doing that story for us. This is a true dream come true for me. So thank you for having me.
SPEAKER_09: I'm delighted with the result and I'm delighted to be speaking with you now. So you're here again because of the few things we want to talk about. That's something we touched about in the main piece, but it's actually come up in the news kind of recently. What is that? Yeah, so when I started working on this piece with Vivian, the Paramount Decree felt like a sort of historical anecdote that we needed to explain to help explain the walk of fame, but it's actually become very relevant for current day Hollywood to the point where friends are actually texting me about it.
SPEAKER_06: And now instead of feeling like I'm boring my friends with this information I've learned working the piece, I can actually help illuminate perhaps what we're seeing go on in current day Hollywood. Right. And so that Paramount Decree was a Supreme Court decision from 1948 and it led to these huge changes and shakeups in the movie industry. It like broke up the sort of vertical monopoly that studios had.
SPEAKER_09: Exactly. Yeah. So to recap, Hollywood during its golden age operated on something called the studio system, which meant that a very small number of very large studios dominated essentially every aspect of the American film industry.
SPEAKER_06: And that was that big five studios that I listed out in the piece.
SPEAKER_09: Exactly. So these studios operated under what you just described, vertical integration, which meant that they didn't just make the films, but they had ownership and control over how they were distributed and exhibited.
SPEAKER_06: Right. And so the big studios, they owned the movie theaters that the films were screened in and that meant they could simply refuse to screen movies that were made by their competitors.
SPEAKER_09: Yes, yes, yes. So we didn't mention it in the piece, but another big aspect was that before the Paramount Decree, studios engaged in something called block booking, which meant that if a movie theater was independently owned, in order to show a really popular film from a big studio, it would have to sign a contract saying that would also screen a bundle of other films that were released by that studio.
SPEAKER_06: And a lot of times those would be the not great titles that the studios wanted to unload. So if a theater wanted to show the Wizard of Oz, MGM, who made Wizard of Oz, could force them to exhibit like five other crappier MGM films too. And it was the Paramount Decree that put an end to all that.
SPEAKER_06: It sure did, yes. So the decree initiated a lot of really important and good changes to the entertainment industry. The number of independent and art house movie theaters shot up from the 1950s onwards. Independent filmmaking was finally able to take off. The number of international films being shown went up. Censorship was severely weakened. And it kicked off a really interesting, creative, and freer time for American filmmaking, which is now known as the American new wave or new Hollywood. Yeah. And this is where your friend, your best friend, Francis Ford Coppola, comes into the scene. And of course, Daisy and all these people.
SPEAKER_06: Okay. So let's just smash cut to the present day. And in August of 2020, the Paramount decision was actually overturned, which was pretty stunning. So why now, after 70-ish years, did this reversal happen?
SPEAKER_09: Okay, I'm going to state the obvious, but the film industry is so different than it was in 1948. And the rental market didn't even exist in the 1940s when the decision was made.
SPEAKER_06: And in recent years, there's been a huge move into streaming content and home release. A lot of films don't even see theatrical release anymore. So the argument was that the decree wasn't relevant anymore and that studios have kind of already been in control of their distribution and exhibition with streaming. So in November of 2019, the DOJ moved to terminate the decree. And in 2020, a district court judge agreed. So it is no more. What does this mean for the entertainment industry in 2022?
SPEAKER_06: So even though the decree was terminated in 2020, there was a two-year sunset period to allow for theaters and the business model to adjust. So we actually haven't felt the full effects of the decision yet. Oh, okay. Okay.
SPEAKER_06: But as you can imagine, it's caused a lot of anxiety in Hollywood. And the National Association of Theater Owners, the DGA, and the WGA have all pushed back on this. And so why is that constituency anxious about this?
SPEAKER_09: Okay, so we're in a period of consolidation in Hollywood right now. Warner, Discovery, Disneybot, Fox. So take Disney, for example.
SPEAKER_06: What I think the fear is in terms of something like block booking, which is, you know, something, as I said, that the Paramount Decree banned, is that so much of the box office is motivated by huge budget films like Marvel movies. So these are the films that a majority of theaters will want to screen. If studios return to the practice of block booking, Disney can theoretically tell both large and small movie chains, okay, so if you screen Guardians of the Galaxy volume, you'll also need to screen like four direct-to-video quality Winnie the Pooh movies. Now, I love Winnie the Pooh movies. Also, shout out to Paddington movies. If you've never seen Paddington 2, you're missing out. Okay, back to my main point. So even if you have a larger multiplex theater chain with like 20 screens, if most of those are being taken up by blocks of Disney properties and blocks of Warner Brothers properties, that leaves fewer movie screens left to play, you know, independent and international films. So this could end up hurting independent filmmaking because there's less room for it in movie theaters. And despite the fact that in-person viewing of movies has declined, there really is value in being able to see independent films in a movie theater. Right. And I truly love seeing a movie in the movie theater. I also like seeing them at home, but I really like the movie theater experience.
SPEAKER_09: So if the Paramount Decree is really set aside and all of a sudden, you know, movie studios can own theaters again in large scale, like what is the result of that?
SPEAKER_06: I don't know. I'm Hollywood insider, not Hollywood expert. Okay, so I don't know. And that is, I think, probably why my friends are texting me. There's a lot of feelings of anxiety right now about what is the future of content. But as we know, theater owners were already seeing a decline in movie going even before this regulation was rolled back and even before the pandemic. But I think people are imagining scenarios in which one of the remaining big studios could buy AMC, which is one of the largest movie theater chains. So theoretically, that movie studio could shut out its competition and only show their properties on 11,000 screens across the country. Oh, wow. I mean, it's already pretty close to that now. But like, it would be bad if that were policy for sure.
SPEAKER_09: Yeah, and I truly don't know if that will happen. I don't know what is going to happen. But the end of the Paramount Decree came at a really scary time for movie theaters.
SPEAKER_06: It hit right in the middle of the pandemic, which decimated movie going. And there have been so many changes, even within the last few years in the industry, that it really left independent theater owners on shaky ground. And now studios have the ability to swoop in and buy up these theaters. And, you know, actually, it's been quietly happening for a while. There's this weird loophole from the 1948 ruling that allowed for city specific exceptions. So Disney already owned the El Capitan theater in Los Angeles. And in 2020, Netflix bought the famous Egyptian theater. And for people not from Los Angeles, the Egyptian is an iconic LA landmark. It was actually the site of the very first big Hollywood premiere. So it has a deep history to everything we talked about in this episode. It's right there on Hollywood Boulevard. So the Egyptian is supposed to reopen next year, and half of the title screened will be Netflix. Wow. What's interesting about what you said there is that even in the Netflix theater, only 50% of the films being shown will be from Netflix.
SPEAKER_09: So obviously, they feel a need to assuage people's fear about what a monopoly would mean, especially in a place so historic as the Egyptian theater. Yeah, it's been really fascinating working on this piece and seeing how cyclical this all is. You know, as it says at the National Archive, what is past is prologue.
SPEAKER_06: So, you know, we are living through a historic time for the entertainment industry again. And every week, it feels like there's a huge breaking news story about the continued shakeout of these major mergers and consolidation of power and big, big changes happening. Yeah. But what gets me about this, and this gets me about all sorts of sort of when regulation diminishes, is there's this quote from Ruth Bader Ginsburg when part of the Voting Rights Act was being eroded.
SPEAKER_09: She said that getting rid of these provisions are like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you're no longer getting wet. I mean, the reason why people feel that the landscape is different is because this regulation existed. And now that it doesn't, like, it could immediately snap back to the bad old days that people hate. Like, I think it's really kind of nerve wracking. Well, thank you, Gillian. I really, really appreciate this. This is fun.
SPEAKER_06: Thank you. I'm so glad to have this forum where I can talk about this with people equally interested and not just get a glazed overlook at dinner parties anymore. Not that I go to dinner parties. Well, I will be happy to talk about Dorothy Arzner with you any whole time.
SPEAKER_04: Thank you.
SPEAKER_09: 99% invisible was produced this week by Gillian Jacobs and co-produced and edited by Vivian Lay with additional editing by Kelly Prime. Sound mix by Martine Gonzalez. Fact checking by Graham Hacia. Music by Swan Rial with additional music from APM. Our senior editor is Delaney Hall. Kurt Kohlstedt is our digital director. Our intern is Olivia Green. The rest of the team includes Chris Berube, Christopher Johnson, Emmett Fitzgerald, Jason De Leon, Jacob Maldonado Medina, Joe Rosenberg, Loshma Dawn, Sophia Klesker and me, Roman Mars. Special thanks this week to Roman Coppola, Kelly Wolf and Judith Main. Judith's interview didn't make it into this story, but if you want to learn more about Dorothy Arzner, you should definitely check out her book. It's called Directed by Dorothy Arzner. If you want to read more about the biz, Ty Burr has a sub stack. Subscribe to it at TyBurrsWatchlist.Substack.com. Gillian Jacobs also directed a great documentary called More Than Robots. It follows four teams of high school students as they prepare for the 2020 FIRST Robotics Competition. And I know fans of 99 PI will love this movie. You can watch it on Disney Plus right now. We are part of the Stitcher and Sirius XM podcast family now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora building in beautiful uptown Oakland, California. You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet at me at Roman Mars and the show at 99PI.org. We're on Instagram, Reddit and TikTok too. You can find links to other Stitcher shows I love as well as every past episode of 99 PI at 99PI.org. And the winner is Stitcher.
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SPEAKER_11: Welcome back to our studio where we have a special guest with us today. Toucan Sam from Fruit Loops. Toucan Sam, welcome. It's my pleasure to be here. Oh, and it's Fruit Loops, just so you know.
SPEAKER_10: Fruit? Fruit. Yeah, fruit. No, it's Fruit Loops. The same way you say studio.
SPEAKER_11: That's not how we say it.
SPEAKER_10: Fruit Loops. Find the Loopy side.
