I lived right behind Hollywood & Highland for four years - I stared at the gate and elephants each morning as I brushed my teeth - but I didn’t quite make the connection until I saw a tweet by the architect Daveed Kapoor during a Black Lives Matter protest at the mall. The reproduction at Hollywood & Highland went up in 2001. The abandoned set sat in an increasingly derelict state for four years until the city eventually made Griffith take it down (the Vista Theatre was built on the site in 1923). The Babylon Court gates - which logged less than a quarter of the film’s screen time - became a tourist attraction, even after the film flopped. The final film would run three and half hours, jumping among segments about Catherine de Medici and the Huguenots, Christ in Judea, a contemporary California crime-and-love story, and the fall of Babylon in 539 B.C. It was filmed on location on a vacant lot in Los Feliz where Griffith erected exquisitely detailed sets and hired thousands of extras. The Birth of a Nation had been an unqualified hit, and the production design of Intolerance became intertwined with Griffith’s attempt to flaunt his commercial success with a film that would be even more over-the-top. It’s this grandiose ode to intolerance across the eons that is part personal grudge and part commentary on social ills.” “It was born out of Griffith’s resentment about having been criticized so heavily. “While The Birth of a Nation has this incredible, straightforward ugliness to its messaging, Intolerance is more complicated,” she explains. He was so bothered by the widespread accusations of racism, says Vulture film critic Alison Willmore, that he made intolerance the theme of his next film out of spite, and gave it that very name. Griffith took the criticism personally and petulantly, publishing a pamphlet the following year titled “ The Rise and Fall of Free Speech in America.” It excoriated his critics by accusing them of censorship in a manner startlingly similar to the open-letter debate on “cancel culture” that’s playing out right now. The NAACP picketed and protested screenings for decades, and a campaign to ban the film led by a Black newspaper editor, William Monroe Trotter, created momentum for the modern civil rights movement. Klansmen actually used the film as a recruiting tool. Cross burnings, which weren’t common before the film, became more frequent. The number of lynchings increased the year after the film was released. The impact of the film on a country just decades out from Reconstruction is well-established. It portrays the Ku Klux Klan as American heroes and glorifies the killing of Black people, who are portrayed by white actors in blackface. It’s inarguably one of the major milestones in the development of ambitious cinema, and it’s also an unapologetic love letter to white supremacy. In 1915, Griffith - born in Kentucky to a Confederate general - made the sweeping epic The Birth of a Nation. This well-intentioned architectural folly is literally the elephant in the room, and it won’t be there much longer. And that’s a problem, because Griffith directed one of the most notoriously racist films ever made. It is, as it turns out, a full-scale replica of a portion of the set from D.W. Most of those visitors don’t know why their Hollywood–sign photos are framed by ersatz Mesopotamian architecture, and it’s difficult to locate the plaque that explains what this thing is doing here. Ascending a staircase into a nondescript beige stucco mall, visitors eager to spot a celebrity are greeted by an imposing four-story Babylonian gate rising in the distance, and, to its right, perched atop similarly styled pedestals, two gargantuan white elephants. For the 26 million tourists who find their way each year to the place in Los Angeles where the Oscars are broadcast, the view from Hollywood Boulevard and Highland Avenue is likely not what they expected.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |