The news is filled with horror stories about summer travel — canceled flights, missed connections, people putting their bare feet on airplane armrests — but that hasn’t stopped tourists from heading to Los Angeles to get a look at Hollywood, up close.
It’s a familiar sight in Southern California. Tourists from all over the world are here walking around in the hot and dusty sunshine with disappointed looks on their faces. They expected glamour and glitz, and instead discovered that Hollywood is, mostly, a working town of drab, beige stucco buildings.
Like everything else, LA looks better on TV.
On the main part of Hollywood Boulevard, in front of the old Chinese Theater and the shopping mall called Hollywood and Highland, the street is filled with out-of-work actors dressed up as everyone’s favorite movie characters.
The costumes range from the highly elaborate to the threadbare homemade, but on any given weekday, there are Batmans and Supermans and Luke Skywalkers galore. They’ll pose for pictures, act out famous movie moments — pretty much anything you like, within reason — all for a few dollars.
A friend told me that he once spotted a Darth Vader and an Ariel from Disney’s The Little Mermaid taking a break together by the side of a building, sharing a diet drink and a cheap lunch. There is something deeply unsettling about seeing a relaxed and casual Darth Vader folding a slice of pizza and sliding it through the mouthpiece of his helmet while Ariel vapes.
Apparently, a few years ago, a costumed Donald Duck and a costumed Mickey Mouse, both of whom, apparently, were chasing the same family of tourists and offering to pose for photographs, became embroiled in a brutal fistfight.
Police were called and arrests were made, but not before traumatizing dozens of children, who had never imagined that Mickey and Donald were capable of that kind of violence or, according to witnesses, such foul language.
To be fair, it was a very hot day, and the young actors inside those heavy costumes must have been nearly unconscious with heatstroke.
The big studios spend a lot of time and money trying to keep all of this from happening. These characters are a major part of their revenue expectations, and they guard their likenesses and characteristics with paranoid intensity. They claim, with total legal justification, that these characters are the “intellectual property” of their respective corporations — in the case of Mickey, the very symbol of the enterprise — and so, all of this unauthorized pantomime is a violation of their copyrights.
This being America circa 2022, you won’t be shocked to learn that the performers have sometimes responded by claiming that their “right to free expression” includes dressing up as Minnie Mouse for spare change. They’re not infringing on copyright. They’re “identifying” as Princess Leia.
Still, to fend off the law, some of the performers have also resorted to making subtle but key alterations in their costumes. Spider-Man becomes, with a bit of careful cutting and sewing, “Spider-King” or “Arachnid Boy” — same color scheme, same web-like pattern, but just different enough to outwit the sheriff.
The studios hate this. But to be fair, they’re the ones who invented this kind of barely legal copyright theft.
For years, when a television show or film depicted a character using an instantly recognizable product — a cola brand, for instance, or a certain kind of smartphone — the prop would be disfigured or painted to obscure the specific brand name while keeping the basic idea. “Coca-Cola” becomes “Cola-Time” and “McDonald’s” becomes “Arch Burger.”
Now, of course, they just use whichever brand offers to pay them.
Luckily for the costumed street performers, the tourists who come to Hollywood don’t want to see perfectly airbrushed and massaged versions of their favorite characters. They can see these anytime. What visitors to Hollywood want to see is juicy backstage stuff, the insider’s view, the world behind the camera.
Romantic entanglements, fist fights, lawsuits, physical collapse. These are all, when you get right down to it, perfectly emblematic of the entertainment industry. This is what goes on all the time, behind studio gates and in dressing rooms all over town.
Maybe seeing a bunch of short-tempered actors hop around in costumes, begging for money, willing to do whatever, is the perfect way to see Hollywood.
Rob Long is a television writer and producer and the co-founder of Ricochet.com.
