2024: A TCM Film Fest Odyssey (or, What I Did Last Week) — Part One

Never does time pass so quickly than it does each spring when I visit Los Angeles for the TCM Film Festival. This year was no different.

The 2024 festival, which took place April 18-21, gave me another delightful experience of moviegoing, stargazing, friend reunions, and popcorn meals (one of which left me with a broken crown, but whaddya gonna do?). I’ll be covering the actual festival in a post coming soon, but today, I wanted to share the activities that occupied my time in the days before the fest began. I did more this year than I ever have before, and it was fantastic!

This was my 12th film festival (including the two virtual fests in 2020 and 2021), and the fourth for my older daughter, Veronica. When we arrived on Monday, we intended to partake in the dining tradition that I started my first year, in 2013, by visiting the Cabo Wabo restaurant in the nearby Ovation Mall, but to my dismay, it was gone! I couldn’t believe my eyes. (We wound up at the mall’s Japanese eatery, Cho-Oishi, but vegetable fried rice and Pinot Grigio – no matter how tasty – doesn’t quite hit the spot when you’ve got a taste for fish tacos and a jumbo margarita. Ah, well. Again – whaddya gonna do?)

No mo’ Cabo Wabo.

Darn, that’s the end.

Our adventures really took off on Tuesday, when we joined several friends – Aurora of Once Upon a Screen, Laura (and her husband, Doug) of Laura’s Miscellaneous Movies, and Toni of Watching Forever – for a tour of Paramount Studios. It was entertaining and informative – we got the chance to hold an Oscar (the first one awarded for Best Special Effects, for the 1953 sci-fi feature War of the Worlds), see the building used as the high school in The Brady Bunch (which, along with The Dick Van Dyke Show and Good Times, is among my favorite classic TV shows), sit on the actual bench that Tom Hanks sat on in Forrest Gump, and take pictures of props used in films like Dreamgirls and Coming to America. And our tour guide was a delight (she reminded Veronica and me of Anne Hathaway’s character in The Princess Diaries).

(L-R) Veronica, Aurora, Laura, Toni, Me, and Doug

This is where William Holden and Nancy Olson met to work on their screenplay in Sunset Boulevard.

Veronica and the Oscar for Best Special Effects for War of the Worlds.

The back of the Forrest Gump bench was at a 90-degree angle to foster Tom Hanks’s rigid posture.

The statue of King Jaffe Joffer from Coming to America.

After the Paramount tour, Veronica and I headed downtown to visit a series of locations that I’d discovered in a TikTok video. First, we ate at the Grand Central Market, which is a huge, warehouse-size structure that houses all kinds of food vendors selling goodies that ranged from pastries and pizza to tacos and sushi. (I wound up at Wexler’s Deli, where I got a tuna sandwich described as “classically austere” in the L.A. Times newspaper.) Later in the afternoon, Veronica and I returned to share a piece of key lime pie. So delish.

The Grand Central Market houses 40 food vendors. Something for everyone!

I sure can pick ’em!

Our next stop was described on the TikTok video as “around the corner,” but it was actually three or four blocks away: The Last Bookstore. According to the store’s website, it’s the largest new and used bookstore in California and it’s the only one that’s “22,000 square feet with a record store, comic bookstore, five art studios, an epic yarn shop, a famous book tunnel, a mammoth head, and unexpected nooks of funkiness.” It was great to explore, and they had so many interesting books.

We followed the bookstore with a stop in the Bradbury Building, where numerous movies have been filmed, including such noirs and neo-noirs as Double Indemnity (1944), The Unfaithful (1947), D.O.A. (1950), M (1951), Chinatown (1974), and Blade Runner (1982). Public access isn’t allowed past a certain point near the building’s entrance, but you can still step inside and see the beautiful skylit atrium and the intricate ironwork.

Our downtown tour wrapped up with a trip to Angels Flight, a 118-year-old cable railway that runs two blocks up and downhill and is billed as the world’s shortest railway. From 1901 to 1969, the railway was located near the Third Street Tunnel and operated between Hill Street and Olive Street. It was dismantled in 1969 and sat in storage for nearly 30 years, until it reopened in 1996, half a block from the original site, ferrying customers between Hill Street and California Plaza. It has two cars, named Olivet and Sinai. I think I first became aware of Angels Flight from the 1949 noir Criss Cross, starring Burt Lancaster. It’s also been seen in other noirs including Hollow Triumph (1948) and Night Has a Thousand Eyes (1955), as well as in two that also used the Bradbury Building: The Unfaithful (1947) and M (1951). I loved riding the railway – even though it’s not in the same spot that it was in the movies, it was a thrill to be aboard this historic vehicle. I could have ridden it all day!

The following day – Wednesday – featured a visit to another spot that we’d learned of via TikTok: Mr. Brainwash Art Museum, billed as “the first contemporary art museum created and run by a living artist.” That artist is Thierry Guetta, who gained prominence in 2010 after the release of the Oscar-nominated British documentary Exit Through the Gift Shop. The three-story structure, located in Beverly Hills, features a wide variety of unique and interactive exhibits, including a dinosaur made out of books, a multi-story mobile of paintbrushes, a psychedelic hall of mirrors, famous paintings modified with pop culture references, and life-size paintings by Edward Hopper and Vincent Van Gogh that visitors can actually climb inside. It was the most fun I’ve ever had at an art museum!

And that was the end of our two-day pre-fest L.A. exploration adventure. Thanks for joining me on my L.A. discoveries – stay tuned for coverage of my TCM film festival experience this year!

~ by shadowsandsatin on April 27, 2024.