Dateline>City of Angels

Hollywood is known for countless oddball pairings: Laurel and Hardy. Spanky and Alfalfa. Sonny and Cher.

But in my mind one of the oddest has to be Rudy Valentino and DeLongpre Park. There is no historical connection between the two. Yet here in the pocket park commemorating the famous floral artist Paul DeLongpre, you’ll find not one but two statues of the silent screen icon who died 82 years ago today.

Stranger still, the fleshly rendition of Valentino at the center of the park was originally sculpted by Roger Noble Burnham for a planned tomb for the actor. When that tomb failed to materialize, the memorial was instead placed here on Valentino’s birthday in 1930 — against protests of residents who found it a bizarre addition to a park honoring DeLongpre. (A second bust, below, was added in 1979.)

Ghost of the Town…

Not surprisingly, over the years there have been persistent rumors of paranormal activity around the graven monument, along with several mysterious incidents of vandalism. In fact, Valentino, who is buried in a borrowed crypt at Hollywood Forever Cemetery, remains one of the Southland’s most ubiquitous ghosts. Ever restless, his spirit has allegedly been sighted hundreds of times at numerous “lifetime haunts,” including:

• His former Falcon Lair mansion in Beverly Hills.
• Downtown L.A.’s Alexandria Hotel.
• Hollywood’s Musso and Frank Grill.
• The Paramount Studios wardrobe department.
• An apartment court at Hollywood’s Valentino Place.
• Mission San Fernando, where he once shot a film.
• An Oxnard beach house and an inn at Santa Maria.
• Riding an Arabian horse in Glendora and driving a roadster through Hollywood’s Whitley Heights.
• And of course, hanging about his final Hollywood Forever resting place.

As if that’s not enough, the spirit of Valentino’s faithful dog Kabar is also said to invisibly nip and lick at visitors to his L.A. pet cemetery grave.

As usual, many of these hauntings are highly suspect. For instance, historical research shows that, local legends notwithstanding, the actor had no actual link to Valentino Place.

Neither did the Latin Lover ever work on the present-day Paramount lot. He made his films at the Lasky Studios near Sunset and Vine before they relocated and became Paramount in 1926.

Still, even in death, Rudy continues to bask in the immortal limelight. To learn more about his career, legacy and supposed afterlife exploits, visit the following links/entries:

• Wikipedia on Rudolph Valentino
  
• Rudy’s IMBD Filmography
• You Tube Tributes and Film Footage
• Troy Taylor’s Haunted Hollywood

They say turnabout is fair play…

Having argued for years that their company has legally appropriated characters in the public domain for its cartoons (i.e., Bambi and Peter Pan), Disney officials may soon be in the uncomfortable position of fending off challenges to their own copyright on none other than The Mouse himself.

According to an extensive article in today’s L.A. Times Business Section, legal technicalities surrounding the earliest “Steamboat Willie” renditions of Mickey (pictured above) may have inadvertently left the trademark rodent in the public domain.

But first, a legal disclaimer of my own: Before anyone accuses this blog of copyright infringement, please note that low-res images reproduced for the purpose of non-commercial commentary on a work are commonly considered fair use under U.S. law. Moreover, for now at least, Steamboat Mickey remains the property of Disney and may not be reproduced from this site for any other purpose. (There. You are warned.)

Even so, if legal experts are correct, Dateline>City of Angels and other would-be copyright violators may have nothing to worry about.

“That ‘Steamboat Willie’ is in the public domain is easy. That’s a foregone conclusion,” says copyright scholar Peter Jaszi in the Times piece, which adds:

The issue has been chewed over by law students as class projects and debated by professors. It produced one little-noticed law review article: a 23-page essay in a 2003 University of Virginia legal journal that argued “there are no grounds in copyright law for protecting” the Mickey of those early films.

The essay apparently sent Disney suits into a tizzy, and their blustery reaction makes for comical reading in the full article.

Birthplace of the Controversy?

Meanwhile, while the lawyers and scholars duke it out, your humble blogger went in search of a “neighborhood angle” to the story — and found it in L.A.’s nearby Franklin Hills district.

Call it the House the Mouse Built. In fact, the home pictured at left could very well be the birthplace of the newly contentious cartoon character.

About 1925, as Uncle Walt was preparing to open his first studio along Hyperion Ave., he purchased two lots at the corner of Lyric and St. George, within walking distance of his new enterprise. The following year, he completed the construction of two $8,000 houses, one for him and wife Lillian, and the second for brother Roy. Although Mickey made his celebrated debut in 1928, film historians say the Disney brothers had been at work on the character as early as 1925, with Walt possibly tinkering on preliminary sketches in his garage studio.

Back then, he called his would-be star Mortimer, but when he shared his creation with Lillian, she suggested the name Mickey instead. Disney made the change and released two animated shorts starring the mouse in 1928, neither of which was picked up by distributors. Undeterred, Walt took another stab that year with “Steamboat Willie,” the first animated cartoon to synchronize sound and action, performing the voices of Mickey and Minnie himself. This time the magic clicked, propelling Mickey and his creator to fame and fortune.

Four years later, Walt and Lillian moved out of their Lyric Ave. home, presumably for a fancier private domain.

The Film: Sunset Blvd., the 1950 film noir classic co-written/directed by Billy Wilder and starring Gloria Swanson, William Holden, Erich von Stroheim and Nancy Olson.

The Scene: After leading two repo men on a high-speed car chase along a winding stretch of Sunset Blvd., down-on-his-luck screenwriter Joe Gillis (Holden) ditches them with a quick turn into an old, rundown estate. Mistaken for a “pet mortician” by the mansion’s bizarre owner (Swanson), Gillis tries to explain his intrusion into her reclusive world as her identity begins to dawn on him…

“You’re Norma Desmond… You used to be in silent pictures… You used to be big.”

“I am big! It’s the pictures that got small!”

The Question: What was the address for this legendary exchange, (a) in the film, and (b) in real life? (Again, no fair Googling up hints.) Click the Read More link to see the answer… Read more