The stars have lost their glitter...

Living in this sun-spangled town, you don’t often feel a sense of history. The glut of cars, modern buildings, and sea of neon create a feeling of modernity in a place which is constantly pushing forward at some pace. Whether it’s technology, movies, or TV shows, Los Angeles has its eye on the future and its finger on the proverbial pulse. Even its people are constantly on their phones thinking about what they’re doing next week, next month, next year. But a few weeks ago, I got a rare taste of Hollywood history.

Turner Classic Movies, a popular movie channel in the U.S., held a weekend-long festival showcasing classic films on big screens in Hollywood. Interjection: If you think you’ve seen Some Like It Hot or Top Hat on TV and feel you don’t need to see it with an audience - think again. Watching a film on the big screen gives a movie an added dimension. You notice things you’ve not seen before. You laugh in different places. You appreciate the acting, the drama, and the film’s direction. Movies are made for this and believe me, it is not the same in your living room.

Anyway - TCM held a red carpet premiere for the restored version of the Judy Garland/James Mason classic 1954 musical film A Star Is Born. Sadly, many of the stars of the movie are long gone, but some of the remaining actors whose films were showing at the festival attended in a salute to Hollywood’s past.

There were many. Tippi Hedren, who was famously attacked by Hitchcock’s Birds; Tony Curtis, who once compared kissing Marilyn Monroe to ‘kissing Hitler,’ and Lorna and Joey Luft, Garland’s children by her third husband Sid. Eva Marie Saint won an Oscar for the Eliza Kazan masterpiece On The Waterfront, where she worked opposite the late, great Marlon Brando. She was also directed by Hitchcock and starred alongside Cary Grant in the iconic North by Northwest. Yet here she was, smiling, cheerful, complementing me on my eye colour, confiding memories, jokes. Ann Rutherford was there – she acted with Vivien Leigh as Scarlett O’Hara’s younger sister in Gone with The Wind. Martin Landau worked with Hitchcock, Woody Allen, Elizabeth Taylor. They had no movies to plug. Yet, here they all were, happy to talk. Pleasant, charming and interesting. Long forgotten relics of a happier era.

Some of them must have remembered those Hollywood days where crowds jostled to catch a glimpse of them, photographers rushed to take their pictures and people recognised them wherever they went. But the movie industry is transient much like L.A. itself. However successful you are and however much botox you have, eventually you have to let time win and fade into the mists of time and history.

And history in Los Angeles has always meant movies. It may be whimsical or sentimental, but to me it was thrilling to see stars who had touched these icons. Whose beauty and stature had been captured on celluloid forever. Stars who I wouldn’t otherwise speak to or see in the flesh. People who had starred alongside legends, spoken the lines of movie history. It was special to walk into Grauman’s, a legendary theatre built in 1922, and sit in an audience filled with long forgotten Oscar winners watching a lauded classic film. And that, to me, is what Hollywood is all about.