When people who know me find out I’ve never been to California, most of them are surprised. “It seems like your kind of place,” they say, and they’re partially right. I love movies and music and the entire entertainment industry and I love reading about and seeing “behind the scenes” of how those things operate. When I was a kid I used to tell people the reason I hadn’t been to California is because I was afraid I would never come back. As a young man that might have been true, but I’m afraid at this point the crowds, traffic and high cost of living would be too much for me to adapt to. “It’s a nice place to visit,” as they say.

The Hollywood sign and Walk of Fame was not the first place we visited chronologically, but thematically it seems like a good place to start.

I grew up seeing the Hollywood sign plastered in entertainment, from the original Muppet Movie…

…to video games, like Epyx’s California Games.

If you really want to see it, here is the sign as it appears in 80 different movies.

In reality, there are more than a few ways to get a good view of the Hollywood sign. By simply driving around Hollywood you can see the sign from lots of places. There are also hiking tours and other ways to get closer to the sign, although I found the iPhone’s zoom good enough to get a decent shot of the sign from almost anywhere. Our favorite viewpoint came from the Hollywood & Highland Mall.

As you can see, the mall was specifically designed to include a viewing area from which one can easily see the sign. Here’s a phone shot from the walkway itself.

As most people know, the sign was originally an advertisement for a housing addition and read “HOLLYWOODLAND”. The original sign cost $21k to erect in the 1920s, although many more millions have been spent maintaining it throughout the years. In 1932, aspiring film actress Peg Entwistle lept to her death from the “H”. After the war and during the depression, the Hollywood real estate business went bust, and the sign became the property of the city in 1944. In 1949, “LAND” was removed, leaving the sign to appear as it does today: “HOLLYWOOD”. The sign was completely renovated in the late 1970s at a cost of a quarter million dollars — in fact, for three months in 1978, the sign was completely removed while the letters were being restored. Today the sign is surrounded by a “state of the art security system” preventing people from getting anywhere near it without police helicopters quickly swooping in.

After viewing the sign we returned to the mall, walked out one of the exits, and found ourselves looking at this:

Grauman’s Chinese Theater (or simply Mann’s) is an iconic movie theater in downtown Hollywood which has been the home of several huge movie premiers, including this one you might have seen:

Later that summer, R2-D2, C-3P0, and Darth Vader had their footprints placed not in carbonite, but concrete.

On the sidewalk outside the theater is where we first saw stars from the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Two of the first ones we saw belonged to Slash and Godzilla, so the stars are not limited to real people. I had hoped to take pictures of some of the stars but there were literally thousands of people walking on them and getting much more than a quick phone snap of any particular star proved difficult. There are more than 2,500 stars on the Walk of Fame so without a map, finding a specific one would be pretty difficult.

We spent a few more minutes driving around Hollywood, stopping briefly at Hollywood and Vine and again at Sunset and Vine. It was weird to see so many locations and names that I’ve heard about in songs and seen in movies for so long.

We spent less than half a day in downtown Hollywood. I would love to go back and spend a week seeing everything.