Lumiere Cinema in the Bellvitge neighborhood of Hospitalet de Llobregat in Barcelona, in 1975. Jordi Socías
Five neighborhoods in search of a city or vast outskirts of nothing, that is how Los Angeles de California was defined when I passed by in 1964.
During the drive from San Diego and La Jolla along the Camino Real highway, which ran along the coast, at dawn boys and girls of heavenly bodies were seen surfing against the sunrise.
Everything seemed fascinating, full of glamor then, between yachts and palm trees, but those splendid bodies that caused admiration to those of us who came from Iberian hunger, have been degraded by sugary drinks and junk food and today in the US you see only successive waves of fat people in the street displaying infamous slices as if it were an endless fat contest.
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A neighborhood cinema to feel like Cecilia
Photos: A Hollywood Madrid
The man who invented Hollywood Olympus
At that time, North America still had Europe seduced by the triumph in the world war and by the economic aid of the Marshall Plan. In Spain, the posters of American movies filled all the facades of the cinemas, including the neighborhood ones, and were the most fabulous and cheapest way to escape poverty. I was then a movie fan sick of mythology. But when I arrived as a lost tourist in Hollywood, one of those five neighborhoods north of Los Angeles, all my dreams so long nurtured since I was a child in the town's cinema suffered a setback, since that Hollywood Boulevard did not outnumber the Bravo Murillo street in Madrid. It was a ramshackle avenue, dirty, without any interest.The Chinese theater seemed vulgar to me and the footprints of the artists stamped on the sidewalk were no more than an anodyne curiosity. Fuck mythology, I thought, I've been ripped off.
From a cafeteria with red plastic seats next to a window on the famous Sunset Boulevard, he could see ordinary people pulling carts, workers digging ditches, supermarket customers, girls handing out hamburger advertisements. No, no, Gloria Swanson, William Holden, Kirk Douglas, Liz Taylor, and Lana Turner didn't pass the Sunset Boulevard sidewalk, who, oddly enough, would probably be in Madrid. In fact, I was coming from Madrid where around 1960 you could meet most of the Hollywood artists on the street, Audrey Hepburn leaving a buttery shop, Cary Grant cycling through El Retiro, Gary Cooper crossing a zebra crossing, Rita Hayworth at the door of the Ritz, to Tyrone Power dressed as King Solomon died of heart attack, hugging Gina Lollobrigida.And of course Ava Gardner, the more drunk the more beautiful.
Bored with my fist to my jaw in that cafeteria on Sunset Boulevard, I began to remember the cinema in my town, which began to be built in the fall of 1944, as flocks of thrushes crossed south. In the middle of the morning, the school teacher took us to the suburbs for recess in a row of two and I was holding the hand of the boy who was my best friend. On a street where the school rope passed, some bricklayers perched on a scaffold sported a facade of what people said was going to be a movie theater. A few weeks later some painters were seen giving him a cream-colored hand and began to draw very large letters, C, I, N, E, in blue. The children followed the construction process day by day in the same way that a dream is built, the attic where the projector would go,the gently sloping stalls, the stage under the screen, everything was becoming reality out of the imagination, and although the priest said that the cinema was an invention of the devil, that only excited me even more. By Christmas, the name of the cinema in large Roman letters within a border was completed. It would be called Cinema Rialto and on its screen, very soon, the heroes that he saw in the lampoons and hand-outs would begin to ride, shoot, dance, and kiss each other. There I saw for the first time the illuminated screen where Mickey Rooney moved inthe name of the cinema in large Roman letters within a border has just been completed. It would be called Cinema Rialto and on its screen, very soon, the heroes that he saw in the lampoons and hand-outs would begin to ride, shoot, dance, and kiss each other. There I saw for the first time the illuminated screen where Mickey Rooney moved inthe name of the cinema in large Roman letters within a border has just been completed. It would be called Cinema Rialto and on its screen, very soon, the heroes that he saw in the lampoons and hand-outs would begin to ride, shoot, dance, and kiss each other. There I saw for the first time the illuminated screen where Mickey Rooney moved in
The young Edison
and Bela Lugosi in
The gorilla
and
The nail
with Rafael Durán and Amparito Rivelles.
Down Sunset Boulevard, which once seemed so crusty to me, I don't know if there will be star-studded limousines in search of the red carpet this year.
The bonfire of the vanities, although decimated by the pandemic, will continue to burn at the Oscars.
For a long time now, its ashes have fallen on that dead world of neighborhood cinemas, village cinemas, which have closed and are full of rats and cobwebs, but keep the laughter, tears, first dark kisses and that beam of light that crossed paradise in whose crisp armchairs all dreams were realized.
Platforms, series, home cinema, have taken it ahead.
