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Hollywood Highland

Fun Activity

2004 NASA SHARP Program

California State University, Los Angeles

Reported by: Thomas Pearson

On Saturday June 26, the NASA SHARP students were fresh off of our first week of work in the aerospace industry. For a week they’d been driven about LA but only having seen a small percentage of it. In fact, if the trip were to have ended that week, the 2004 NASA SHARP students would remember little more than the crowded and congested highways that lengthened their commute time. That Saturday the students were treated to their first real taste of LA. They were taken to a place most people only dream of going, a place paved with stars. The Kodak theatre to their left, and Ripley’s Believe It or Not Museum to their right my fellow students and I were overwhelmed.

We spent the day in groups just walking around taking it all in. As it happens the Kodak is much more than a theatre, it is an entire complex, including a mall and the studio that houses the hit show “On air with Ryan Seacrest”. While walking about this complex we found individual sales carts and vendors as in any other mall, along with shops, such as Gap, and Express. On the second floor among the restaurants was one of famous chef Wolfgang Puck’s restaurants. Proceeding about the second floor past Wolfgang’s place, we found a balcony view of the Hollywood sign; a perfect photo opportunity was it not for the smog. We could not go past the second floor however. The third floor was reserved for LA’s elite, those precious few who could afford to dine on white tablecloths that swayed in the humidity free breeze on a higher balcony overlooking the Hollywood sign. Leaving the complex and some of its more posh shops behind we traveled down the walk past the Olsen Twins, Fred Astaire, and Britney Spears, we encountered the next wonder of the walk.

Grumman’s Chinese theatre is famous for being the location for the premier of some of Hollywood’s biggest films. Along the way to this theatre we saw impersonators of famous movie characters such as Spider Man, Super Man, The Mask, a Storm Trooper, and even what many considered to be the Devil himself. The Devil took pleasure in scaring small children and tourists (including us) who happened by. At the Chinese theatre we were bombarded with vendors of everything from Star Maps to, well… more Star Maps. A tour guide shouting tour times for the Theatre all the while. Before crossing the street, we reveled in snapping photos of our favorite stars on the walk, including The Simpsons, Bugs Bunny, and Kermit The Frog.

Small shops lined the other side of the street, selling cheap cameras, post cards, and photos of stars that you could say you took for only one dollar. Far down this side of the street one could find three museums dedicated to the rarely seen. One being Ripley’s Believe it or not, another The Guinness World Records Museum, and the last being the famous wax museum (back on the other side of the street), housing the immortalizations of such celebrities as the “Governator” Arnold Schwarzenegger and Marilyn Monroe. Most of us were too budget-conscious to venture inside, so we merely settled for stolen snatches of those rarities within.

All in all it was quite a day, snapping pictures of the “stars” we’ve always wanted to see and rounded off by a movie containing, yet more, stars.

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