Back in Hollywood

Image: ConstructionOwl.com: Backyard Buzz: How to Attract Hummingbirds

I have not been in Los Angeles in 19 years. My first impression: it is still the same, only more so.

My friends tell me the traffic is still getting heavier all the time, and Los Angeles keeps spreading out. But now we have GPS navigators. They are amazingly helpful. I plan my way with a combination of an internet route map and a GPS navigator, and they do make life simpler.

At breakfast I buy the morning papers, The New York Times, and The Los Angeles Times, still classical quality papers, but now slimmer, thinner, and narrower. I remember how startled I was when I saw for the first time a Sunday edition of an American quality newspaper, the size of a telephone directory. That is long gone.

Everything they say about Hollywood is true. But the glamour is but the surface, never to be trusted.

What I'm interested in is in line with John Ford's concept when he planned a film about Hollywood, never realized. He wanted to make a movie about the Hollywood professional. Here are many of the finest professionals and craftsmen of the cinema and the media world.

In the garden of a little old quiet restaurant bungalow in the heart of Hollywood, not far from the thunder of the freeways, I look at the tree top and see hummingbirds.