Russkies Torpedoed the Cinnabon!

Submarines Under Hollywood!

Well, it’s shaping up as a pretty crappy end to an ambitiously crappy week, so in the spirit of counter-programming, here’s another movie-adjacent bonus post. As a longtime resident of Hollywood, the Neighborhood, and sometime toiler in Hollywood, the Industry, I take special delight when both meanings merge. Especially when I’m mall-walking.

A few years ago I literally stumbled into the most impressively elaborate and delightfully shameless bit of ballyhoo I’ve ever seen for a television series. And it made me ponder the following bizarre and totally impossible hypothetical question:

Say you're a consortium of real estate developers, and you want to cash in on the "Hollywood Renaissance." Well, you could erect a shopping mall next to a major landmark—say, Grauman’s Chinese Theater—and build it around a huge courtyard to take advantage of all that foot traffic on the Boulevard. Then you could give a nod—or at least a head fake—toward the town's history by decorating it with massive reproductions of the elephant statues and the Great Gate of Babylon from Griffith's Intolerance (because your Peachtree development in Atlanta has already snatched up that plum Birth of a Nation theme). Finally, you could fancy it up with mosaics that vaguely recall the Yellow Brick Road from The Wizard of Oz, and add one of those "dancing water" features that ejaculate from the pavement in perfect unison, kind of like a bukkake fetish video starring the USMC Silent Drill Team.

Well, you’d get Hollywood & Highland.

Just to give you an idea, this is what the place looked like at Christmas:

It contains exclusive nightclubs, fine dining, a Broadway-style theater designed to host the Academy Awards, and in daylight you can even see the Hollywood Sign neatly framed by the Babylon Gate like a lunar eclipse viewed through the trilithons of Stonehenge. Couldn't be more picture perfect, right? So after all that time and money and attention to detail, what happens? You turn your back for one minute, and a Russian submarine breaks through the flagstones and breaches in the middle of the courtyard like it's Ice Station Zebra.

For those who may have missed it, The Americans was a TV series on FX about Soviet sleeper agents in the Reagan Era, and you could tell the producers were very excited about it, but you know what? Even if I were a tourist thrilled to be in Tinsel Town, I think I'd rather watch a network promo after How I Met Your Mother, or read about it in TV Guide than be bent over, squinting at the mall directory and suddenly take Red October up the ass.

The flag at the rear of the conning tower was two-faced—U.S. on one side, Soviet on the reverse—and occasionally one of the crew would use it to communicate in semaphore with Sephora.

The uniforms looked amazingly authentic, the sailors standing guard would periodically march around the sub while the Soviet national anthem blared and the officers on deck shouted orders in Russian; and I must admit, I was kind of impressed they went to all that trouble. Then I remembered that it's Hollywood, and you can find people shouting in Russian pretty much anywhere, including at the parking ticket machine in the garage when I was waiting to validate.

So anyway, we can call off the Hunt for Red October. Turns out it was next to Lane Bryant the whole time.

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