I live in Hollywood… and this town is a movie town.  You knew that.  Movies come from Hollywood, so it’s no surprise the whole sprawling megalopolis has movies on the brain.  Given the way that movies have wiggled their way into almost every waking moment in the life of an Angeleno, it’s remarkable there aren’t more traffic accidents.

You can’t turn around to sneeze in Tinseltown without being marketed.  They have you coming and going, unless your thing is to hang out in dour Communist bookstores or to stay home watching the cracks in your walls widen.  If you take public transportation, you’re practically riding inside a mobile movie advertisement; if you eat fast food, flicks are being sold to you on the very supersized cups from which you suck carbonated sustenance.  And if you’re driving, well, then you’ve got something to look at… giant billboards heralding the latest accomplishments of the western mass consciousness.  These veritable Ozymandiuses pound you with their colors, their in-your-face imagery, their tart sloganeering and the sheer awesomeness of their size.  They dwarf you, as Goliath did David; they’re meant to make you feel insignificant next to the celluloid wonderamas they hock.  The use of billboards in America goes back to just after the Civil War.  Those road signs were, of course, more modest than what we’re used to now.  As the speed limit in America was raised through the middle of the last century, billboards were made larger so that they could still be taken in, even if only subconsciously, by the lead-foot hoi polloi.  The standard aspect ratio of a billboard (short for “billing board,” if you didn’t know before) is 14′ (that’s two Shaquille O’Neals) high x 48′ long (the length of the reigning Guiness Book of World Records title holder for “World’s Largest Bratwurst”).

Of course, if you’ve lived here long enough it becomes very easy to tune these things out.  We all have places to be and we’re all running late, so our eyes tend to stay focused straight ahead or down to the cell phone we’re using to text message that we’re 20 minutes behind schedule.  But every now and again a particularly striking billboard grabs our focus… as did this one for THE DARK KNIGHT(2008), which uses the image of the late actor Heath Ledger (in one of his final roles as Batman’s gerny nemesis, The Joker) to disconcertingly grim effect.  It’s a powerful poster, partly for all the reasons the producers intend but partly (and perhaps mostly) because of Ledger’s tragic death.  You tend to give up more of your attention to a billboard like this… just mind you don’t rear-end the city bus idling at the curb ahead of you while your eyes are elsewhere!

What’s really interesting about all of this media blitzing is how temporary it all is.  These images seem so rubbed into your kisser for so long that you even see them, or expect to see them, long after they’re gone.  And the shelf life of a movie billboard, even for something Big Ticket like THE RUINS (2008), HELLBOY 2: THE GOLDEN ARMY (2008) or MAMA MIA (2008) is weeks rather than months.  The billboard at the top of this post, that teaser poster for Frank Miller’s THE SPIRIT (2008), which I photographed at the corner of Vineland and Oxnard Avenues in North Hollywood in April, is long gone.  Over the past months, it was replaced by a number of movie posters, of which only WANTED (2008) comes to mind, and now in its place is an ad for Knottsberry Farm. 

What is it that Patton once said… “All glory is fleeting.”  To which I can only add, “that’s a lot of bratwurst.”