Hollywood and Vine will now boast something worth seeing:
- A group of businessmen announced Tuesday the establishment of a $25 million Motion Picture Hall of Fame, scheduled to open in 2004 at the corner of Hollywood and Vine — or Hollywood Boulevard and Vine Street.
Heck, why not? Baseball players have their hall of fame, football players have their hall, even inventors have invented their own hall of fame.
The new hall will be housed in a converted office building and will not be a museum, insisted civic leader Johnny Grant, the self-styled "Honorary Mayor of Hollywood."
"It will be a multi-million-dollar, multimedia experience," he said.
The hall will include interactive exhibits, such as a "giant camera walk-through," with magnified moving parts, and the "Pillars of Fame," with monumental displays of inductees. There will also be halls of horror, comedy and science fiction, with interactive exhibits showing how to make genre movies.
Zachary Taylor, senior vice president for the founding organization, said six individuals will be inducted into the Hall of Fame every year, including an actor, an actress, a director, a scriptwriter, a producer and a composer.
Critics and entertainment journalists will nominate potential inductees, and the public will be invited to vote on-line on the finalists, Taylor said.
The organization has created a statuette, the Max — a golden figure that differs from the Oscar in that it has separate legs and elbows — which will be presented to inductees at an annual, nationally televised awards ceremony.
....Hollywood and Vine, which early in Hollywood history became associated with the glamour of the movie industry, has long been a drab disappointment for starstruck tourists.
Landau recalled his own first view of the famous corner. "Ever since I was a kid, I had heard about Hollywood and Vine," Landau said. "When I got here in the 1950s, I took a walk along the street here. I was quite disappointed. There was nothing of note."
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