[BDiH]

Originally Posted by sopas ej

I felt they belabored the fact that the Leo DiCaprio character was a washed-up actor; I felt they spent too much time establishing that in the beginning of the film. I'm like 'OK, we get it.' It took me a bit to get into the movie at the beginning for that reason... but once I got into it, I was really into it.

Well put & I agree.

Originally Posted by sopas ej

I also kept looking at little details, too... and of course I understand not being able to totally recreate 1969 Los Angeles, but I was kind of disappointed that they couldn't recreate the "shoe-box"-style streetlights that Hollywood Boulevard would have had back then

I remember when those streetlights were installed. Thank god they are gone!

Originally Posted by sopas ej

Also, the film is helping me look back on that era with a different perspective. When I was younger, I felt that the late 1960s was when things started going "downhill" in terms of the look of things and the way LA looked, but maybe it's because now, 1969 is already 50 years ago, and it's now acquired a patina that makes it look like an era lost?

I recently heard somebody mention 1969 as Hollywood's Golden Era. Please

I was selling the Free Press in front of the Pandora's Box site in 1967 and later on the northeast corner of Hollywood Boulevard and Cherokee Avenue. I was a distributor to the hippies that milled around and sold the paper for fifteen cents. There was a Rexall Drugstore on the corner and I remember the pharmacist came outside one day and took me aside. He asked me to move to another location. He was losing business. I didn't move and he soon closed the drugstore. I still feel guilty about that. 1969 was the beginning of the first downward spiral of Hollywood Boulevard.

That Rexall was once a Sontag drugstore and later a Love's restaurant. That address had many incarnations, but my best memory is sitting at the soda fountain at Rexall and ordering a ten cent Coke in a paper cone with crushed ice in a black plastic hour glass style holder. There were drugstore lunch counters all over Hollywood Boulevard back in the day, as well as ones at Woolworth's and Newberry's.