I think I've found some significant real life connections in MD, that I haven't seen discussed. I wrote a longer document on MD that begins with these connections, and if there is any interest in what follows, perhaps I could upload it to an Administrator.

The real actress Ruth Selwyn (described on LoMD) seemed to have a career arc similar to Diane & was involved with the W.R. Hearst/Marion Davies clique. That got me interested in old Holywood & whether Havenhurst was connected to WR Hearst; plus I had spent a few days visiting someone living on Havenhurst Dr. in 2007.

Moving quickly: Havenhurst was named after W.H. Hay, who created Crescent Heights (in W. Hollywood), built a mansion in the early 1920's, sold a 99 year lease to it to rising silent film star Alla Nazimova in 1927, who converted it to a hotel she named "The Garden of Alla." She soon went broke, sold the hotel/lease to a corp. that built 25 bungalows surrounding the main hotel & reopened it as as "The Garden of Allah."

From the late 20's through the 40's the GoA was THE place for the Hollywood elite to stay and party hard.

The MD TV pilot script has an exact location for aunt Ruth's apartment. It is half way between Sunset and Fountain on the east side of Havenhurst. This places Ruth's apartment less than 100 meters from the bungalows of the GoA, before it was torn down in 1959. I don't have an exact street address but 1436 gets you close. Here's a photo and Ruth's courtyard apt. is directly to the right of the orange dot. North is at the left and East is at the top.

Allow me to add two more real life connections; in this case to two writers.

1) The tenants' register for the Sierra Bonita apts. has only one name listed that
has no first name or initials. This is the name "Anaya" in cottage #13. I
believe this refers to Rudolpho Anaya, former English Lit. prof. at UNM and author
of various Hispanic/Chicano themed works. I found two works of interest. The
most obvious is the book "The Legend of La Llorona."

I'm a sucker for the non-obvious, so I originally thought that the most relevant
Anaya work might be a collection of short stories entitled "The Silence of the
Llano." Llano means plains. The stories blend the mystical with reality and the notion that the silence of the New Mexico high plains can steal a person's soul.

Then I discovered some material on La Llorona that the El Camino Real heritage group had put together. They apparently put on a stage play based on the legend, and there is a photo of la llorona, the ghost, after she has been searching the Rio Grande for her children for centuries. (Looks familiar?)


El Camino Real Heritage

2) Member "fornus" noticed how significant the "Ouija Board" scene is, where Betty and Rita are studying a map of Hollywood on Ruth's coffee table. The part we missed, I think, is precisely where Betty's index fingertip ends up. It stops about 1 block south of Sunset, and about 5 blocks east of the freeway.

This is De Longpre Ave. in Little Armenia, and is probably 5124 De Longpre which is on the historic LA building list. It is the apartment of Charles Bukowski, who was once called the "laureate of American lowlife” and died in 1994. The bio on this guy is kinda extreme. I'd guess this connection helps cement the conventional interpretation of MD as the story of Diane downward spiral.
Wikipedia on Bukowski

All very cool and interesting stuff and a good idea generally for a thread. Sorry for the delay in responding and thank you for sharing.

On this:

The MD TV pilot script has an exact location for aunt Ruth's apartment. It is half way between Sunset and Fountain on the east side of Havenhurst. This places Ruth's apartment less than 100 meters from the bungalows of the GoA, before it was torn down in 1959. I don't have an exact street address but 1436 gets you close. Here's a photo and Ruth's courtyard apt. is directly to the right of the orange dot. North is at the left and East is at the top.

I'm not sure whether you're implying that the apt buildings to the right of the orange dot were the actual shooting location or the fictional location of Aunt Ruth's apartment. I can confirm that it's not the actual shooting location which is at 450 North Sycamore. But that's not to say that David couldn't have been leaving the connections that you found. The pilot script says:

EXT. STREETS - LOS ANGELES - DAY

Betty goes from the right side of the cab to the left side of
the cab looking at every building, tree and sign. Each street
sign seems to be magical to her and she says the names to
herself as they pass by. She sees La Tijera, La Cienega,
Venice Boulevard, Pico Boulevard, Olympic Boulevard, Wilshire
Boulevard, etc., etc. until they reach Fountain and turn
right. Betty's heart is pounding when she sees Havenhurst
and the cab turns left. In the middle of the block on the
right the cab pulls over and stops. Betty sees her new
home ... an ancient, gorgeous courtyard apartment building,
built during the golden age of cinema.

A right onto Fountain, a left onto Havenhurst and the apt on the right hand side of the block, I agree with your location.


What I find quite amusing is the route that was taken from LAX to get there (according to the script), which as far as I can tell looks like this:


That's a HUGE detour. Taxi driver taking advantage of the new girl in town, perhaps?

The information generally about GoA is neat stuff and reminds me of another (possibly coincidental) connection I came across a while back. I have the information somewhere and will bring it into this thread. Along the same lines as Hollywood history type stuff that people might be interested in.

I like the fact that Anaya is the only one listed withouta forename, that we can see at least, and the La Llorona connections work for me. Did you find/read the books?

I wrote a longer document on MD that begins with these connections, and if there is any interest in what follows, perhaps I could upload it to an Administrator.

Most certainly. Email it over to Bob on the webmaster account: webmaster@mulholland-drive.net

Oh, and that Ouija Board thread is a doozy. Link here for anyone who never saw it: http://www.rottentomatoes.com/vine/show ... p?t=411725

Correction: The Hay estate was built around 1920, then leased to Alla N. somewhere around 1922 - 1924 and she added the large pool immediately. She declared bankruptcy in Jan. 1927. Shortly later the bungalows were built & reopened as a bungalow hotel. Stars like Valentino had rented rooms from Alla before bankruptcy, but died before the bungalows were added. The best days of the GoA was from 1927 - 1945.

I have the books "The Garden of Allah" by Sheila Graham and "The Silence of the Llano" by Anaya. I'm about 1/3 into the GoA book.

Tidbits from the book: Ginger Rodgers used to hang out at the GoA in her tennis dress, and then play some games at the "Ronda Apts." courts which is the building I've pictured at 1412 Havenhurst. (Yes, I knew MD was not filmed there. There are some cool photos of Ronda on the Web.) One of the costume designers that frequented GoA owned a home at 1428 Havenhurst.

Apparently, the main attraction to the GoA was the bungalows surrounding the large pool and the quaint crooked paths through the vegetation. Some stars did stay at one of the two Beverly Hills hotels but at GoA a bungalow was like your own home within an artist commune. You had your own kitchen and liquor cabinet, and guests coming and going were relatively hidden from view. The level of privacy was high.

The Graham book was written in the late 1960's and its origin from an aging gossip columnist shows. She claims that Hearst built the castle (called a "beach shack") in San Simeon, in part, so that Marion Davies could compete with Alla and her pool. Marion joked that if her career tanked, she could always have Hearst add bungalows around the main castle buildings and rent them.

I didn't try to trace the early path of Betty's cab, 'cause it was a mess. Anyway, I'm pretty sure the Ronda Apt. is significant; it has two courtyards, one called the Sancho Panza, and the other the Don Quixote.

The post my memory was jogged to make. Not much of an MD connection to hang your hat on, so to speak, but fits with the Hollywood history angle of the thread.

Real Life Files: The Ambassador Hotel and Cocoanut Grove

Much of this information is sourced from:

http://www.hollywoodusa.co.uk/ambassador-hotel.htm

and

http://theambassadorhotel.com/

The Ambassador Hotel and its attached nightclub Cocoanut Grove were beacons in the Hollywood social scene throughout the 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s and 60s. There is a great history of Hollywood folklore contained within its walls. In the late 20s/early 30s Cocoanut Grove was known as "The Playground of the Stars". It hosted literally thousands of dance competitions (maybe some Jitterbugs along the way) and it is said that Joan Crawford won over 100 dance competitions following her arrival in Hollywood in 1925 (eat yer heart out Diane).

Judy Garland's comeback was made at The Ambassador after several years of illness with a series of extravagant concerts. Several Academy Award Ceremonies were held in The Ambassador, and it was the place in which the Oscar statuette was introduced. The jury of the Charles Manson trial stayed there for its 9 month duration.

But The Ambassador's most infamous moment came with the assassination of Bobby Kennedy in 1968 when he was shot in the hotel's kitchen after delivering his Californian Primary victory delivery speech.

On the Sunset Boulvard tip, apparently Gloria Swanson was a long term resident in the hotel at one point.

The stories are endless if you dig around a bit...

Over the years it seems the hotel and its nightclub deteriorated into a state of disrepair and was closed in 1989. Since 1989 it has functioned often as a filmset (details below). It is currently owned by the Los Angeles Unified School District, and the city announced plans in September 2004 to raze most of the 500 room hotel to house an elementary school, junior high and high school - some 4,200 students on the 23-acre property. It is proposed that the Cocoanut Grove remains as the proposed school's auditorium. Other options include converting the main body of the hotel into the a school, rather than knocking it down. I guess if they can keep such an apparently culturally rich site in this way rather than destroying it, there'll be something to be happy about.

[Edit: I wrote most of this quite a few years ago on another board, and the hotel was indeed demolished in 2005 and the land used to build the Robert F. Kennedy Community Schools]

By naming Ann Miller's character Coco Lenoix, Lynch weaves a subliminal connection between Miller's own life, that of her character and the Havenhurst location, the history of the Grove and The Ambassador, together with the classic "Golden Age" of Hollywood with all its archeypes, legends and myths.

We have a slightly altered spelling of the word "coconut" here though, with an "a" added to make it "Cocoanut". Possibly Lynch observes the A by calling her Lenoix (emphasis on the Le), as opposed to simply Noix. It's not a strict translation, I know, but it's a neat little connection.

Some pics from the site:

There are a series of bungalows on the site, looking more than a little like Sierra Bonita:



Looking like a dilapidated Park Hotel:



Here's our Cocoanut Grove entrance:



And here's the Cocoanut Grove theatre - a possible influence for Silencio?



There's more if you surf the sites I mentioned above, and the links that are provided on them.

As for the films with scenes shot in and around the hotel over the last few years, here's a list.

From http://www.hollywoodusa.co.uk/ambassador-hotel.htm:

The Ambassador Hotel had been used in many movies before its closure, perhaps the most memorable being The Graduate . In which The Ambassadors Lobby, Reception Desk & Palm Bar are all shown extensively when a young Dustin Hoffman conducts his love affair with Mrs.Robinson (Ann Bancroft) in the hotel, called The Taft in the film. Since its closure The Ambassador has been used exclusively for location shooting in Movies, TV series, commercials & video's. The dark wooden veneer walls, high ceilings & general 30's decor make it a firm favorite with film companies, especially with no public to contend with. Some film shootings which have taken place at the Ambassador include scenes from :-

The Fabulous Baker Boys - True Romance - The Mask - Rocky - The Wedding Singer - A Star is Born - Naked Gun -
Hoffa - The Lawnmower Man - Murder She Wrote - Beverly Hills 902120 -Man on the Moon -Crazy in Alabama.

Pretty Woman - The scene when Vivian (Julia Roberts) is taught the use of place settings was filmed in the ballroom.

L.A. Story - The Ambassador's Entrance & Foyer are used as the L'Idiot Restaurant.

Forest Gump - Used as the strip club in which Forest's girlfriend Jenny performs & sings in the nude.

Apollo 13 - Used as the apartments used by Gary Sinise and Kevin Bacon in the film.

Mafia-The Movie - The Lobby was turned into a Las Vegas casino and the Lido pool was the empty pool that the girl dived into.

Deep Impact - The scene where Morgan Freeman is in a Hotel kitchen area was filmed at the Ambassador.

The Rat Pack (1998) - The outside of the hotel was used when Sammy Davis Jnr. was protested at by whites.

The Cocoanut Grove can also be scene extensively in the 1933 Films 'Lady Killer' staring James Cagney, and the Jean Harlow film 'Bombshell', in which the resident Gus Arnheims orchestra can be clearly seen.

I must admit I was disappointed not to find a Lynch film in there - that would have been nice.

As it is - a few loose connections and some interesting information.

Sorry if this felt a bit like a history lesson, but this whole thing really captured my imagination.

We have a Cocoanut, I guess we have to find an Ambassador in MD now. ;)

Actually, as far as the route, I think it's mostly just a straight trip up La Cienega. If you follow that past I-10, you'll pass Pico, Olympic, Wilshire, and a couple other big roads until you get to Fountain on the right.

http://tinyurl.com/4grullp