Wednesday, April 27, 2011

Championship! Hollywood! Trivia!

Only three more days until the start of the 2011 LifeSmarts National Championship! With teams from 33 states headed to LA this weekend, let’s take a look at some Hollywood trivia:

  • In 1923, Harry Chandler, a real estate agent and investor built the famous Hollywood Sign to advertise the area "Hollywoodland." The total expense for this advertisement was $21,000. Initially, it was built to last for only eighteen months. The Hollywood sign is no eighty-eight years old.

  • As the sign wasn’t designed to be permanent, after a time, letters began to fall down. To restore the sign, in 1978, an auction of certain letters was held by Hugh Hefner, founder of "Playboy" magazine. This auction was held for a period of three months. Alice Cooper, American rock singer, sponsored the alphabet "O". Gene Autry and Paul Williams sponsored the alphabets "L" and "W" respectively.

  • In 1995, a trust known as "Hollywood Sign Trust" was setup to maintain the Hollywood sign.

  • The Hollywood Walk of Fame is a series of sidewalks along both sides of a 15-block segment of Hollywood Boulevard and a 3-block segment of Vine Street in Hollywood, Los Angeles, California, USA that serves as a permanent public monument to achievements in the entertainment industry.

  • More than 2,400 5-pointed terrazzo and brass stars are embedded at 6-foot intervals over a combined 1.7 miles .

  • To date, 47% of the stars have been awarded in the motion pictures category, 24% in television, 17% in audio recording, 10% in radio, and less than 2% in the live performance category.

  • Twenty to thirty new stars, on average, are added to the Walk each year.

  • Spago, a West Hollywood restaurant, was the birthplace of the “California Designer Pizza.”

  • The iconic Capitol Records building on Vine St has a blinking light on the top of it’s tower that spells out "Hollywood" in Morse code, and has done so since the building's opening in 1956

Looking forward to greeting all of you on the 30th!

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