What happened to the last four letters of the ‘Hollywoodland’ sign?
In Mulholland Drive, David Lynch’s cautionary deconstruction of the ‘American Dream’, Hollywood is a spectral presence, a symbol of a place where you can become a star as easily as you can lose everything.
The dichotomy of the shadows of a brutal and competitive world, full of jealousy and deception behind the bright lights of a city filled with studios and venues, where lavish buildings are home to those who grace our screens, is captured perfectly by Mulholland Drive, which itself is inspired by another classic tale of industry corruption named after an iconic street, Sunset Boulevard.
Across the range of films made about the industry, and in both these films especially, you can feel the aura of the domineering Hollywood sign, first landing on those rocky cliffs in 1923. The row of great white capital letters made of hard metal, akin to a god to be worshipped, was actually initially put there to advertise a real estate development project harnessed by Harry Chandler.
Over the years, it has become the ultimate reflection of Hollywood’s innate drive for business and capitalistic success, and what was meant to be a temporary billboard advertising expensive housing has since been rendered a landmark, a magnet for people seeking money, fame and excess.
What happened to the last four letters of ‘Hollywoodland’?
There was a time when the sign actually read a bit of a mouthful, ‘Hollywoodland’; the ‘land’ was added to advertise Chandler’s Hollywood housing development, but due to the sheer size, cinema’s increasing popularity, and Hollywood’s dominance over the entertainment industry, the sign soon became iconic and unlike billboards, wasn’t going to be taken down anytime soon.
It gained notoriety in 1932 when a young, ambitious actor, Peg Entwistle, leapt from the letter H after spending the summer failing to achieve success as a star, dying as she crashed down onto the hills below, immortalising the cutthroat nature of the industry in her very act. She got to build a legacy she always dreamed of, but by very different means and entirely tragic reasons.
Still, the sign remained, and for a while it even lit up at night. Eventually, during a desperate need for maintenance undertaken by the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce, the head honchos made the decision to remove ‘Land’ in 1949 since it no longer resonated with what the sign had come to represent, which was just the area of Hollywood, not the housing development intended for it.
The Hollywood sign is its own symbol of freedom, and even though what stands today is not even the same one that was first erected, with a new, sturdier structure replacing the old one in 1978, people will surely never stop loving it and wanting pictures with what is certainly a sight to behold in a proud city.
