Quote:
Originally Posted by ethereal_reality
Here's a slide, dated 1952, showing an elaborate advertisement for the film Macao.
http://www.ebay.com/itm/Original-195...item339a6fcea9
Does anyone have an idea where this was located? (I see there's a Drama School at left) --and quite a bit of litter on the ground and along the curb. |
Quote:
Originally Posted by Handsome Stranger
The following is a transcript from an episode of a 1987 BBC documentary series called The RKO Story: Tales from Hollywood, plus a couple of frame grabs showing BBC's recreation of the scene. The man telling the story is Mario Zamparelli, a painter and graphic artist who worked for Howard Hughes when Hughes was running RKO. Zamparelli relates an incident involving a painting he made to promote the 1951 RKO film His Kind of Woman, starring Robert Mitchum and Jane Russell.
"[Hughes] had the painting made. He liked it very very much. And then one day I was told that a brilliant idea had come up, and I asked what was this about. They said, 'Well, we're going to do something very special.' So at the RKO lot...I didn't see this being constructed, but I saw it being moved at two o'clock in the morning. And this was to a site at the corner of Fairfax and Wilshire Boulevard, directly across from The May Company. There was a large parking lot there and a restaurant which no longer exists. And they put on that corner a huge gilded frame, like a masterpiece if you will. This was all framed, gold-leafed, and the center was going to house my painting, twenty, thirty times the size of the original, if not a hundred times the size. It was enormous! The painting was completed. But while that was going on, people were passing by, cars were going by and they were monitoring how many vehicles would pass the corner. Mr. Hughes had an idea that to emphasize the concept of the hottest combination ever to hit the screen, they would have two or three or four large gas jets throw flames up into the air about twenty or thirty feet high." |
Could this be the back of the picture frame billboard (arrowed) in a 1954 Dick Whittington aerial? It's exactly where
Handsome Stranger's transcript describes. I can't find a drama school on S Orange Grove Avenue in the CDs, but the building to the right of my arrow seems to match the building in
e_r's picture. The shadow of the arrowed structure appears to show what could be the lighting bar from
e_r's picture.
Detail of picture in
USC Digital Library
In 1962 the site became the home of Japanese store SEIBU, which became Ohrbach's in 1964. It's now the Petersen Automotive Museum. You can see more about these in
post #6275 by
GW and
post #6277 by
e_r. I think the first picture in
GW's post (below) may also show the picture frame billboard, but it's quite small.
Quote:
Originally Posted by GaylordWilshire
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