Hollywood-Land on fire

Two teenagers from Illinois set fire on Hollywood hills, next to the iconic Hollywood sign. No information about their concrete motivations, which could conclude to an important iconography, nevertheless five helicopters and 200 firemen extinguished the fire before it affected the sign. I have edited some info from wiki and elsewhere about the Holly****Land sign…


Originally installed in 1923, the sign read HOLLYWOODLAND and was part of a housing development advertisement. Its expected life was not more than a year and a half.


Still there, the sign became a logo of what we love and hate. In 1949, after an offer from the Hollywood chamber of Commerce the last four letters were removed and the rest repaired. The wooden metal sign continued though to deteriorate in the open air of the Hollywood Hills until 1978 when the Chamber decided to replace the sign with a more permanent structure. Nine donors gave $27,700, each of them replacing a letter (H - Terrence Donnelly, Publisher Hollywood Independent Newspaper O - Giovanni Mazza, Italian movie producer L - Les Kelley - Originator of the Kelley Blue Book L - Gene Autrey - With his pioneer television station KTLA Y - Hugh Hefner - Creator of Playboy Enterprises W - Andy Williams - Singer O - Warner Brothers Records O - Alice Cooper - In memory of Groucho Marx D - Dennis Lidtke). The new restored sign was unveiled in 1978 live broadcasted on TV. The artist Bill Mac bought the original sign in 1925 after it was put up for sale on eBay.


The sign is connected to a lot of stories and dramas, one of the most famous being the suicide of actress Peg Entwistle in 1932, when she jumped form the letter H. Her broken body was discovered in the bush and in her purse a note that read: “I am afraid, I am a coward, I am sorry for everything. If I had done that a long time ago it would have saved me a lot of pain. P.E”. Two days later her uncle opened a letter addressed to her from the Beverly Hills Playhouse. It was mailed the day before she jumped. In it was an offer for her to play the lead role in a stage production, in which her character would commit suicide in the final act. It is believed that the hills are haunted ever since by Peg Entwistle…