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The Faces of Hollywood Ever had the feeling you're being watched? by Paul Haddad ABOVE: Roman soldier stands watch at 6423 Hollywood Blvd. RIGHT: Pantages Theatre art deco image (6233 Hol- lywood Blvd.) features sun rays (or searchlights) antagonistic. Others aren't so jovial, casting a stony gaze upon passersby in silent yearning. A wizened few seem resigned to their purgatory, eyes glazed over with indifference. ey are the sculpted faces of Hollywood's historic F laughing at generations of Angelenos and unsuspect- ing tourists. Some are playfully defiant, almost or decades, they've been hiding out in plain sight — With the advent of feature-length motion pictures, Hol- lywood Boulevard was the epicenter of glamour. Down- town Los Angeles was where the studios first premiered movies, but Hollywood was where the moviemakers worked, ate, shopped, and lived. Businessmen and movie moguls commissioned the finest architects of the day to build monuments of opulence designed to appeal to their outsized sense of self. Banks, nightclubs, office buildings, theaters – the majority of these buildings lie on a 1.8 mile stretch of Hollywood Boulevard, from Western Av- enue to the east, to La Brea Avenue to the west. No one style defines these structures. Like Los Angeles itself, ar- chitects of the day borrowed from a dizzying array of 34 DISCOVER HOLLYWOOD / FALL 2012 buildings, and they are amongst the most stunning, yet overlooked, flourishes of architecture in Los Angeles. The 1920s launched the Golden Age of Hollywood. ages. This motley menagerie of jesters, actors, plutocrats, dragons, lions, and angels must have seemed like apropos motifs to help celebrate the West Coast's first movie the- ater wired for sound. Taken as a whole, the faces of Hol- lywod's historic buildings form a living outdoor museum. But it's the effect they have on our field of vision that's even more profound. The majority of pedestrians along Hollywood Boulevard fix their gaze on the sidewalk and architects adorned the facades of their buildings with sculpted faces from the human, animal and other- worldly worlds. Sometimes it might just be one face in repetition, like the cherubic angel that appears at least fifty times at 5981 Hollywood Boulevard, or the lonely- looking maiden affixed above the portal at the historic Fontenoy apartment building on Whitley Avenue. On the other end of the spectrum are the faces at two of the boulevard's oldest movie theaters. El Capitans faces are a divided bunch – an explosion of colorful funhouse revelry surrounding the outdoor vestibule, while its exterior is lined by sepia-toned royalty types, taking their roles as the the- atre's guardians very seriously, thank you very much, quite lit- erally above all the frivolity on the side- walk below. And don't even get me started on the old Warner Hollywood Theatre, home to over one hundred vis- movements – Art Deco, Gothic, Spanish Colonial Re- vival, Classic, Baroque, Rococo, Churriguera, Stream- line Moderne, Moorish, faux Egyptian – sometimes combining several into one. Architectural purists might faint in horror at this mongrel mix of styles, but in Los Angeles, they found a place where Old World rules happily come to die. As if to play up this "anything goes" outlook, many