The Hollywood Of The Late 90's

Forgive me if I've told you my Hollywood tales.
When I came out here for graduate school Hollywood was still a pretty dope place to hang. In 1998 (pre-9/11). The place was a shithole. But it was OUR shithole. I lived about 50 feet from Hollywood Boulevard on the east side near some of the premiere scum. A block away near the onramp for 101 Freeway was a free clinic. Every Sunday there'd be a line running damn near the Tommy's Burger two blocks long. It was an awesome time. There was talk of gentrafication, but I lived in a terrible apartment complex for $600 month WITH a roommate. College wasn't cheap, you know.
Anyway, back then exploring was so much fun. Pre-social media internet, we went out and found really neat small areas to hang at. Yeah, it's trite but I'd hit the Chateau Marmont just to see the grounds. Back then NO ONE was there. The celebs were there, but they LIVED there so it wasn't like what it is today. A corporate face of old Hollywood. It was cool then, now...it's pretending to be cool. Or the place where John Belushi O.D'd (sorry, I never thought he was funny).

There were also a ton of movie theaters back then too. One right on Hollywood and Vine Street was a theater that showed double features (much like the New Beverly does today). It wasn't a reparatory theater, but a second run one. I suspect Quentin Tarantino had gone there a bunch too because for $5 you could see two movies. I remember my roommate and I would hang out there, then go to Shakey's Pizza to get fried chicken. This would last us a week (as well as my stories of collecting cans to get a large pizza, so we could live...food wasn't really a priority back then).

It was really awesome without the internet. God, it really was. And I know I'm a hypocrite for using it to spew how much I dislike it, but it seems to have hobbled people's sense of adventure. Why bother going out when you get detailed photos of it online? Plus, as Instagram becomes the main source of visual stimuli, nothing is that amazing anymore. That is sad. Simplicity is re-defined here.

Yes, old Hollywood of the late 90's (fucking 20 years) was still a magical place. Garbage trash town but still worth exploring. Hollywood today tears too many things down to make things for the new. This is incredibly wrong.
There is an unspoken war between preserving old Hollywood with building new things to survive. There are reminders of a bygone era people are okay with leaving. But there is also a sense of...legacy we're missing out on. The grandeur of showing up to putting handprints in front of Graumann's Chinese Theater is lost. As is the star on the Walk of Fame. These are things the new generation aren't wrapped up in (why? They're the stars in their own world created at home). These are the things most working here can't articulate (most I work with only see it as a job and have zero passion for the craft, hence...latest and greatest).

For mid-old guys like me, I sense the late 90's were the last era of classic cinema. Because we still had wonder. Internet anger didn't spoil everything. Or make cool things seem trite. Sure, we had the internet but no one lived on it.