Rathbuns Go west

After our our trip to Laguna Beach on Tuesday, we thought we would take in Hollywood.
Our first stop of the day was The Warner Brothers Studio... what a great tour! It was over two hours of behind the scenes fun. We were amazed how they used the same sets with small variations to film hundreds of movies and TV shows. The first picture above is where they filmed the famous upside down kiss between Spiderman and Mary Jane in the first Spiderman. It doesn't look like it in the day time, but they transform it for the movie.
The next picture you see is the "high school" currently being used for the Gilmore Girls TV shows, but the same building was used in the 70's as the town hall for Boss Hogg in Dukes of Hazzard. The same town setting around this building has been used as Latham, Massachusetts for the last Seinfeld show and for the the small Colorado town for the movie "Jack Frost" with Michael Keaton.
The next picture is, of course, the General Lee from Dukes of Hazzard TV series, which I watched as a kid. They informed us that they had to use 300 different Dodge Chargers because they wrecked so many of them in the show's run. We also had to take a picture of our kids in front of Bugs Bunny.
The next stop after the Warner Brothers Studio was not so great. We wanted to see the Kodak Theater where they host the Academy Awards, but unfortunately, we arrived just as the sports stars were arriving for the ESPY awards. As you can see by the fences, security was tight. The stars are chauffered up in their big limos and dropped off inside security and walk the red carpet into the theater. After we walked by the Theater, we went next door to Grauman's Chinese Theater. That's obviously Jimmy Stewart's handprint.
All in all, though we had a blast at the Warners Brothers Studio, we were not impressed with Hollywood. For all the talk the stars do about poverty and world problems, I would be more impressed with them if they did some work in their own city. Hollywood is pretty dumpy once you leave the immediate area of Kodak Theater.
The last picture is all the kids jammed in a phone booth in Downtown Disney, a shopping area right next to Disneyland which was 1 mile from our hotel.

(By the way, I wrote this from a Best Western in Kanab, UT in between Zion National Park and the Grand Canyon. It has a population of 3000 if they count the livestock and I have best internet connection I have had on the whole trip. I find that kind of weird.)