Two Designers Walk Into A Bar

Episode 08 1/2: The Origin Story of the Hollywood Sign

Released December 30, 2020
© 2020 Two Designers Media, LLC

As we discussed, there was so much good material we shared for our movie logos that we just ran out of time.

Yeah. Right. About the time listeners were running out of patience. So it worked out, but hey we’re back. You, the listeners are back. So let’s tie up our movie logos with the bow and move on to just a little more of some Hollywood stories when two designers walk back into a bar.

We talked movie logos. We talked Ghostbusters. We talked Rocketeer. In fact, we talked so much that we ran out of time last time, and we had to do this little extra. You know, probably good for us, probably good for the listener because it gives us a little more room to pontificate or it gives our listeners one more chance to fast forward through this stuff.

You’re not going to want to fast forward through this stuff.

Hopefully not.

Um, so I thought a great place to start is picking up where we last left off. Let’s talk Ghostbusters. Let’s talk the logo and let’s talk about the ways that it worked and the reasons that it worked and then we can chat Rocketeer and then we’ll jump into your juicy Hollywood story.

How does that sound?

Rock and roll, man.

All right. Cool. So three things I think about the Ghostbusters logo that made it great. Just to summarize. First it was based on an international symbol – the no sign, right? The circle with the slash through it, that’s something everybody understands the world over. So there wasn’t any kind of language barrier there. It was just a great instantly recognizable icon.

The second thing that I feel makes it great – as we discussed – it was used appropriately in the movie. It was used on clothing, on vehicles and signage and so forth. And that really adds to the believability of it. It was the logo for the movie, but it was also the logo for the business in the movie. And that’s just wonderful to me.

And the third thing is the luck of timing. When we talk about pop culture, I think so many of these things always boils down to creativity, but another reason is good timing, right?

Time, right place. This movie came out in the mid-eighties when people were very logo conscious.

Think about Coca Cola clothing. You remember that in the mid-eighties, All these sorts of things, right?

Right. So logo consciousness, designer label. Nike was really starting to take off and become big in a very brand conscious sort of way. So it easily plugged into the logo culture during that time. And there’s sort of a nod to this.

If you go back and watch the Ghostbusters movie as they start to become popular and as they start to become famous, do you remember the media montage in the movie where they’re on Larry King? They’re on the front page of USA Today and all these different sorts of things. They’re plugging products and all this stuff.

So there was a total send-up of pop culture, even within the movie that made it great.  I love it. Love, love Ghostbusters, as we’ve talked about and you of course loved The Rocketeer. So just top-line for us. What are the three things you feel make The Rocketeer logo?

Sure. Well, there’s a couple. There’s actually some similarities as I’m thinking about it.

The one thing is, it is sort of about Hollywood. It’s a Hollywood movie about Hollywood. Which you know, we’re going to talk about that in a little bit. The first thing that I think we have to mention is – as you and I said this movie, The Rocketeer, which came out in the early nineties – has developed a huge cult following, but it really performed poorly at the box office. But it’s a beautiful movie.

It is definitely of the time. They went to great lengths to make it look like it was the 1930s in Hollywood. So that’s two things.

And the last thing is something that I think ties both of these movies together is they sort of are scenes within scenes. With the Ghostbusters as you said, it’s obviously a business they’re wearing the logo.

And things are happening. As you just said with the media montage, that puts it sort of like, “Is this real? Is this not real?” And with The Rocketeer, that same thought is kind of tied up in these deep Hollywood tropes. Definitely of the 1930s. Disney did a great job with this, making it look and feel and sound like the 1930s.

There is this dashing leading man, as you would expect. Who is the hero. He is the Rocketeer or Cliff Secord. Then there is the cad played by Timothy Dalton. Who as you mentioned, was also playing James Bond at the time. There were Nazis because you’ve got to have universal bad guys in any kind of Hollywood story. And then it ties into some Hollywood lore.

You had mentioned Howard Hughes is in this. Not the real Howard Hughes, as we said. And then there are some cool things that happen involving, Hollywood itself. And that's what we’re going to talk about a little bit more now.

That’s awesome. Let’s jump in.

I’m curious Elliot, I’ve got a tiny trivia question for you because I know you love the trivia.

I do.

All right. Do you remember Harold Ramis? His character in Ghostbusters.

Yeah, Egon Spengler.

Okay. Do you know where the name comes from?

I forget.

Okay. Interestingly enough, remember when his character Egon meets the assistant? The lady Janine?

Yes, he’s under the desk and hooking up something and she’s like, “Oh, I play racket ball. And you know, I read a lot.” And then he comes up and he says, “Print is dead.” So here is a little bit of meta info for you.

Egon Spengler. The name Egon was an exchange student, best friend of his in high school. A Hungarian exchange student. Spangler comes from Oswald Spengler who was a futurist at the turn of last century in early 1900s and he predicted…he did a lot of media predictions. And he said that this media…blank media…would be the cause of Western decline. So what media do you think he was talking about?

Social media. No, I'm kidding. I was going to say you'd be a damn good futurist to figure that out.

I mean, geez. I would say, you know probably something like movies.

Well, Telegraph actually.

Oh yeah.

We’re talking like 1910 here. The Telegraph was going to be the downfall of Western civilization.

So anyway, if he were alive now. Boy. Um, he would realize that Western civilization still chugging along and really, I would argue Western civilization contributed to the downfall of the Telegraph.

That would actually be a twist on the meta. Isn’t it?

Okay. Speaking of meta…back to The Rocketeer for a second. At the end of the movie…again, not giving a whole lot away…but one person flies into the Hollywoodland Sign.

Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, what do you mean “Hollywoodland.”

Okay. So everybody in the whole world is familiar with the Hollywood Sign that sits on Mount Lee in the Hollywood Hills? It was first created in 1923 as a very temporary sign to advertise some bougie housing development called Hollywoodland. So just like the Hollywood sign, but L-A-N-D on the back end of it.

So here’s the funny thing I started researching because that sounded like a classic trope, right? The Hollywood Sign and even the destruction of it.

I started – there are sites dedicated to the Hollywood Sign, so this is what’s funny. They fall into three kinds of basic categories.

By far 75% of the movies that you see the Hollywood Sign in, It’s an early part of the movie, or it’s scene setting in some way. So that idea of setting the scene with the Hollywood Sign was actually first used in 1935 in Hollywood Boulevard because the protagonist character was this woman who was sort of a washed up Hollywood, Norma Desmond. (ed note: Todd confuses Hollywood Boulevard and Sunset Boulevard from 1950)

Okay. So that’s by far how the world knows of the U.S. through the Hollywood Sign to set scenes. And it’s been used in about a bazillion movies the second way, which is a little bit more esoteric. Is it kills people.

Okay. It begs further explanation.

Yeah. Okay. Or, or, you know, it’s some kind of secret portal to another layer, like an Austin Powers Goldmember place and it’s all right. But a third way, which is also used quite a lot. Like it was in Rocketeer is, uh, the Hollywood Sign gets destroyed in some way. This first started in the movie Earthquake in 1974.

I’m sure as a one-year-old it was probably one of your favorites.

I loved it. I would watch it every day.

Yeah. Yeah. So, you talked about John Belushi. See, we’re going to tie so many things together with this trope here. And, his movie 1941, he crashes into the Hollywoodland Sign and blows up the “Land.”

And, and for those of you keeping score, that was one of Steven Spielberg’s biggest bomb movies.

Yes. Yes, it was. And again, great.

So used in tons of movies, Independence Day, The Day After Tomorrow. A movie called 10.5 excuse me, that’s a TV movie about a 10.5 earthquake and all of these kind of references.

Civilization folly, right? It’s the classic Hollywood movie sign, which was really only supposed to be up for 18 months to sell some housing plots has been up for almost a hundred years. So that trope of seeing things kind of crumble, seeing the Hollywood Sign fall apart is something that has been used over and over and over again.

And one of the most recent examples? Well, it’s kind of been a franchise, but it was first used in the movie Sharknado in 2013. This tornado blows the letters away.

Right.

And here’s what’s so. One of the letters that gets blown away, crushes an aspiring actor in Hollywood, just after he says, “My mom always told me Hollywood would kill me.”

I love that. I love that man.

And, and you know what? That did not win an Oscar.

Wait, hold on.

Yeah, it was then. Right then that I knew the Oscars were rigged.

You know what? You know what? For me, I freely admit it was when Snakes On A Plane didn’t win anything. Oh man. The fix was in after that.

Oh yeah. You know, it’s rigged.

Anyway, that trope goes on and on and on and on. But those are sort of three uses of the Hollywood Sign and let me wrap up talking about The Rocketeer for a half a second and tell you that there’s been talk of a sequel out in the giant web-o-sphere forever and ever. And as a matter of fact, in February of 2020, which was really almost a year ago, when it was reported.

It was confirmed by Disney. There’s a script in the works. There’s a draft in the works that would probably be going to the streaming service and it’s directed by a guy named J. D. Dillard, and it will be called The Rocketeers with plural there.

Interesting. So is any of the original cast slated to come back?

Well, it’s a little kludgy on that. The talk around the web is that the main character, the rocketeer character. Cliff Secord will come back, but the plot is that he’s gone missing while fighting the Nazis. So this movie takes place six years after the initial movie. So yeah, I think it’s going to be a little bit of like Skywalker magic there where he’ll probably show up at the end, but it’ll be the MacGuffin that pushes the movie forward.

Look for Cliff, the original rocketeer. But here’s the cool thing. It will star a young African-American woman as the lead.

So she becomes the new rocketeer? Which is really cool.

When you think about it’s taking place in 1944, then is Alan Arkin going to take her under his wing?

I cannot confirm or deny that from the web-o-sphere.

I see. I see. Well, that’s exciting. So Todd, you talked about the Hollywood Sign and really how. L.A. and Southern California is kind of a major character in The Rocketeer. I feel that New York is really a character in Ghostbusters. I really think that I’m sure for Dan Aykroyd, after living there working on Saturday Night Live and all these other things, I’m sure he fell in love with the city. And I think he, at that point of course, had already done The Blues Brothers and I consider The Blues Brothers a love letter to Chicago. So in that sense, I think it is only is fitting that he would also make a love letter to New York. And to me. When you think about the locations…the fire station at Tribeca Fire Station, you think about the New York Public Library of course.

And the opening set up and you think about the apartment building it’s Central Park, West and Tavern On The Green, across the street where Louis Tully is banging on the windows to no avail. While the swells watch him get eaten by a demonic hound.

Columbia – the mystery college that they got kicked out of – was turns out it was Columbia University. And from what I remember, Columbia basically said, “We’ll let you film here, but we don’t want you to say in any way, shape or form it’s us.” And I think it was in case the movie was a bomb.

So as a result of that, my son and I – I have a son in his early teens and he grew up watching Ghostbusters. I introduced him to some of my favorite movies when he was pretty young. When we were up in New York, we’ve taken some guy’s trips to New York together and things like that. He and I have been to Dana Barrett’s apartment building near Columbus Circle.

We’ve been to Columbia’s campus. We’ve been to the reading room at the New York Public Library. We haven’t made it to the fire station yet, but it was really fun when we got up to Columbia, we were walking around and I said, “You know, this is a pretty nice college campus isn’t it?” And he’s like, “Yeah, yeah, it is.”

And I said, “Look around. What movie was shot here?” And he looks around and two seconds later, he’s like, “Oh! Ghostbusters.”

So tactfully as Columbia tried to collect some Hollywood money and not make their campus known. I think everyone basically figured it out pretty quickly. And of course the scene you had brought up, our friend Stay Puft and the church right next to the apartment building, which is a real church, which is still there today when Stay Puft steps on it.

And, Pete Venkman says, “No one steps on a church in my town!” You know, I just love that. The same principle, it’s like it’s an iconic city representing sort of things going wrong. And you know the church, the real church is getting stepped on. Other buildings are getting crushed that people are familiar with in the city.

One of my other favorites in that same scene, one of my favorite lines in the movie that also mentioned the city is, when they’re sort of hunkered under that stone bench on the roof and Stay Puft is climbing up, coming after them. And they’re trying to figure out what to do. And, Pete says, “Hey this Mr. Stay Puft. He’s not such a bad guy. He’s a sailor. He’s in New York. We get this guy. We wouldn’t have anything to worry about.”

I just love that line.

Oh man. Classic. So I’ve got to go back and watch Ghostbusters. It’s been a while since I’ve seen it.

Yeah. This talk of The Rocketeer has made me want to go back and watch that again and see how it has held up.

I think both would be great for a movie night one night.

I do, it may be Todd. We have to join our bar bubbles together, and then you and I can just hang out in quarantine for two weeks and just watch our favorite movies. Todd, thanks for this trip down memory lane. I enjoyed revisiting fun movies, quotes, logos, posters.

Yeah…signs. I mean, we really covered it all. I think destruction of major cities.

Yes. Things were stepped on. Things were knocked down. Things were blown up. I mean you really can’t ask for a more action-packed episode.

That’s right. That’s right. Yeah. Wow. Hey, is this like us buying a free round for everyone in the bar?

Ha. How would you know what that’s like? You’ve never bought me a beer.

In that case, I’m returning all those vintage Pez dispensers I haven’t bought for you yet.

Damn. All right, let’s talk again soon. All right. Back to the bar, man.

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