You are surrounded by 45-foot-tall white letters, so close you cannot discern what they say.

Fourteen hundred feet above the city of dreams, you can see the sweep of the metropolis, from the hills to the sea, and within it the cauldron of struggle and strife that is Los Angeles. But the eyes down below are staring at you, for you are atop the town’s most famous monument, the ultimate symbol of fame, fortune, and the fantasy of moviemaking worldwide.

You are standing atop the Hollywood sign.

You are not supposed to be here.

Normally, you would be chased away, fined, and possibly even arrested. For the sign may be the only monument in the world that keeps visitors out instead of welcoming them in. Getting to the sign is almost as tough as breaking into Hollywood, and almost as treacherous: a vertical climb that requires nerves, tenacity, and, like everything in this town, connections.

But to understand its significance and its story, you have to start, like everyone who has gazed upon it and dreamed of stardom, not at the top, but at the bottom.

Those who know how to get to the sign don’t tell; and those who tell don’t know.

“We don’t particularly promote this,” Diana Wright says of the drive she’s about to take you on. Wright is on the team that handles PR for the Hollywood Sign Trust, an organization of nine men and women, some appointed by the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce. The trust’s mission, she says, is “to preserve and promote the Hollywood sign as a symbol of hopes and dreams and international filmmaking.”

Early one summer morning, she picks you up in her dusty Nissan at the gateway to the sign: Beachwood Canyon, a quaint hamlet whose café was made famous by Harry Styles in his 2019 song “Falling.” She asks you not to reveal her secret route, which would be next to impossible for a neophyte to navigate.

The warning signs begin almost immediately, erected over the years by the city and residents fed up with the pilgrims traipsing across their lawns and disturbing their peace.

“No Access to the Hollywood Sign,” reads the favorite, which seems to adorn every street corner.

“Park Closed.”

“Caution! Rattlesnakes in Area.”

There are coyotes, gray foxes, bobcats, and until recently a mountain lion—the famous “P-22,” which prowled the area around the sign until his death last year.

Some say the rabid tourists are the most dangerous creatures of all. “For the tourists it’s not about viewing the Hollywood sign, it’s about viewing themselves with the Hollywood sign in their photos,” says Anne-Marie Johnson, an actor whose extensive screen credits range from In Living Color to Grey’s Anatomy. A second-generation Angeleno, Johnson understands the sign’s appeal all too well. She remembers an old episode of I Love Lucy where Lucille Ball stands on a hotel room balcony and gazes directly at it. “It stuck in my brain: how important it was for Lucy to be near the Hollywood sign, which represented her constant desire to be in the business. Just like everyone else.”

Over time, the sign evolved from the dream factory’s weather-beaten emblem into an ultra-commercialized global tourist destination that’s a nightmare for the neighbors. “It’s being used as a billboard for things like the Los Angeles Rams football team. The Hollywood Chamber of Commerce transformed the sign with panels to say ‘RAMS HOUSE.’ I believe it’s a slippery slope. Can anyone advertise if they have the money?” says Johnson. “If you speak to the residents who live below it, you’ll get an earful of how their lives have been disrupted.”

But you aren’t here to police, patrol, criticize, or debate. You’re here to celebrate this icon, which turns 100 this year. It first blinked to life, illuminated by thousands of light bulbs, in 1923. To kick off the sign’s centennial year, the Hollywood Sign Trust recently announced that a visitor center will at long last be built to offer a “close-up experience” of the monument, though when it will open and where it will be have yet to be determined.

Your guide, Wright, grew up in LA and long ago internalized the sign’s cardinal rule: Admire from a respectable distance. She is so devoted to burnishing its image that she carries a can of white paint and a brush in her trunk for small patch jobs.

Today she is going to take you all the way up, onto the ridge where the sign stands on Mount Lee, named for the pioneering LA entrepreneur Don Lee, who sold Cadillacs and owned a radio station whose tower stood on the peak. Once at the summit, she’ll hand you a rope and show you how to access the magical letters on the hill.

But first, the drive.

“I think of going to the sign as the ultimate VIP experience because it’s closed off. Not even celebrities can come up here,” she says. “It’s really the people that want to support and protect Hollywood and believe in the sign and the park and the mission.”

Along the way, you see a woman gazing up at the letters, her eyes closed and her arms outstretched, as if praying toward Mecca.

And you meet Azhanti Williams, a TV production coordinator who says she has a secret route to get behind the sign, where she regularly hikes to celebrate the realization of her lifelong dream of moving to Hollywood and launching a life here. “It’s like, Wow, I’ve finally made it. I’m working in the industry. I’m living in Hollywood!”

Far below, on Hollywood Boulevard, tourists are lining up to pay $199 to ride to Lake Hollywood Park, one of the favorite (but distant) public viewing points, in a Ferrari or Lamborghini. The proprietor of this thriving tour business is John Gabin, a crêpe maker from France who moved to LA in 2001 to open restaurants. Soon he began hiking up to view the sign and dreaming up ways to build a business around it: “People want to see glamour,” he says. “They want to see movie stars. They want to see the Hollywood sign, and I only saw people doing it in a big ugly bus. So I was like, Let’s do it in a glamour way, in Ferraris and Lamborghinis.” His company, I Ride Like a Star, was born.

“It’s just, uh, the symbol that highlights the Hollywood industry,” a young woman stammers, attempting to explain why she and a friend are climbing into a Ferrari for a 30-minute ride to the sign. “Like when I think of Hollywood, the sign pops up in my mind. So that’s why I want to do it!”

But when their brief time in those $250,000 Italian luxury cars is up, the windblown tourists are back on foot on Hollywood Boulevard, under the sign’s unblinking gaze. For some, it must surely seem to be laughing.

For something so huge, the sign is impressively elusive. The intrepid souls who brave the elements and rattlesnakes to clamber directly up the hillside trails toward the sign itself are turned away by gruff voices from the sky: the two cops at the top.

“There are police stationed up at the top of Mount Lee 24 hours a day to kick people off,” says Wright. “Do you want to see a security cage?”

She stops her Nissan at a cage filled with security devices. “This is where we have the cameras, infrared motion sensors, and a two-way radio system to deter people from climbing to the sign. The majority of people are just curious tourists who might have gotten lost. But every once in a while we get someone who likes to go rogue.”

Several rogues are scurrying across the hillsides now, evading the security cameras and even the police. But not the eagle eyes of Diana Wright.

“Excuse me!” she shouts from her car window. “You are trespassing! You, in the white shirt! Turn around! You’re in a closed area!”

The trespasser turns around and descends obediently, but others are even higher, racing up the hillsides, determined to somehow get to the sign.

“I’m going to call the cops on her,” Wright says of one brazen interloper.

A siren followed by a loud voice from on high suddenly fills the hillsides. “You are trespassing!” a cop’s amplified voice declares. “There is no hiking on the trail! Walk back down the same road! You’re in a fire district area. Thank you.”

They turn around and retreat, but they’ll be back, in ever greater numbers and with even fiercer determination to touch the untouchable, all believing they can somehow make it theirs.

Say you’re an aspiring actor. Or a tourist, a businessperson, or just a traveler passing through. Whatever your objective, you long for a touchstone, something that announces and celebrates your arrival. In New York, it’s the Statue of Liberty; in San Francisco, the Golden Gate Bridge; in Paris, the Eiffel Tower: all accessible, embraceable, inclusive public monuments. In Los Angeles, it’s just a word, the name of the nebulous neighborhood it looks down upon. Nine white letters splayed out in a slightly crooked but somehow majestic formation on a hill.

Its birth is a happy accident, a testament to serendipity in the city where, to borrow the title of Sandra Tsing Loh’s 1996 collection of essays, Depth Takes a Holiday. Built out of a conglomeration of telephone poles and sheet metal, the sign isn’t meant to last two years but somehow endures for a century. “The only monument in the world that started out as a billboard,” as Hope Anderson, director of the documentary Under the Hollywood Sign, once put it.

To understand its beginnings you have to go back to the early 1920s, to a Los Angeles then, as now, swarming with dreamers and schemers from all corners of the earth.

“Don’t Try to Break Into the Movies in Hollywood” a Chamber of Commerce newspaper advertisement warns at the beginning of the Roaring Twenties, under a photograph of a mob stampeding an employment agency, all seeking work as movie extras. “Out of the 100,000 Persons Who Started at the Bottom of the Screen’s Ladder of Fame, ONLY FIVE REACHED THE TOP.”

Around the desperate fame-seekers, the city roars, real-life dramas competing with the pyrotechnics onscreen. In 1921, the comic star Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle is accused of killing a young actress at a boozy party during Prohibition. (He’ll eventually be acquitted, but not before his career is ruined.) In 1922, the silent-film director William Desmond Taylor is found shot in the back. Hollywood’s reputation for decadent depravity only grows as the years pass. “In 1923, the Edgar Rice Burroughs novel The Girl From Hollywood was published, about the horrible things that happen to women there,” says Leo Braudy, author of the book The Hollywood Sign: Fantasy and Reality of an American Icon. “Also in 1923, Paramount released a movie called Hollywood, with a poster of the head of this huge evil man, who ironically looks a bit like Harvey Weinstein, with the word Hollywood embossed upon his head. His mouth is open and all these women who are about to get chewed up are heading into this open mouth.”

Around this time, five city power brokers dream up an exclusive new housing development high above the hullabaloo, free from the crowds, criminals, and bloodsuckers down below. “Where will you live when the second million has come?” asks an early advertisement, referring to LA’s then booming population. “Will your family enjoy a delightful home in the clean, pure mountain air…with its wonderful climate, broad open spaces and plenty of ‘elbow’ room—or—will you live in a ‘dwelling’ in the flat, uninteresting houses-in-a-row sections of the City, your family’s freedom hampered by this maelstrom of human existence?”

“It was also a place for whites to get away from Black and brown people in the inner city,” says Braudy. “They didn’t say it explicitly, but that was the imagery of the advertisements. There was one ad of a young white couple in a roadster, driving up out of the city, filled with trolley cars and smog, and up to a shining city on the hill.”

Up there, the sun is bright. The streets are clean. And the houses are built right into the hill.

The name of this suburban paradise: Hollywoodland.

Naturally, the grand opening requires an ad campaign. But the man who conceives it—a 26-year-old Angeleno named John D. Roche—never intends to create an icon. According to a 1977 Los Angeles Times article, all he wants is a mock-up for a brochure. He sketches the hillsides, the home sites and equestrian trails, the broad streets and rolling avenues. Then, as an “afterthought,” he pencils in the development’s name, Hollywoodland, across the mountainside above.

He takes his sketch to one of the developers, Harry Chandler, the all-powerful publisher of the Los Angeles Times. Chandler sees pay dirt in the name in pencil on the hillside. It isn’t merely a word to Harry Chandler; it’s a sign. He wants it big and blazing, so that motorists can see it all the way from Wilshire Boulevard two miles away.

John Roche goes to work to create the sign: 13 big, bold, no-nonsense white letters, each 45 feet high. No permits, deliberations with planning boards, or environmental reviews are required. “I don’t think the word ‘environmentalist’ was in the dictionary in 1923,” Roche will later say. Almost a hundred Mexican laborers with mules march up the hillside and dig holes in the rocky terrain. Into the holes go telephone poles, upon which are fastened the sheet-metal letters, painted white. The cost: $21,000.

The sign is lit for the first time on December 8, 1923. It basks in the glow of 3,700 20-watt light bulbs. The Hollywoodland sign is “believed to be the largest in the world,” The Los Angeles Evening Express reports. The denizens of the city below revel in the light show on the hill, the massive letters spelling out first “HOLLY,” then “WOOD,” then “LAND,” and finally, after a pause, “HOLLYWOODLAND”—a phantasmagoria so extravagant that a full-time employee, Albert Kothe, is hired to change the bulbs that constantly burn out. He works out of a hut behind the first L.

The sign, along with the development it advertises, is a smash hit. The lots, costing between $150 and $400 apiece, sell quickly. The grand houses rise. And the residents move in, soon to include actors Humphrey Bogart and Bela Lugosi, the mobster Bugsy Siegel, and business leaders and titans of all stripes.

Nine years later, on the night of September 16, 1932, an out-of-work actor will shatter the peace and quiet so dear to Hollywoodland.

Her name is Millicent Lillian Entwistle, but she goes by Peg. She is 24, with a flapper’s hairdo and a solid stage résumé, having appeared opposite the young Bogart. An 18-year-old Bette Davis is said to have told her mother, “I want to be exactly like Peg Entwistle.” Now, though, Entwistle is divorced and depressed, either over her lying cad of an ex-husband—who deceived her by not revealing his previous marriage and child—or her struggle to replicate her success on the New York stage in the movie business.

Her few months in town have been rocky. Acting jobs lost or abandoned. Movie scenes cut by the National Board of Review. Housing troubles. And, compounding the indignities, financial woes so deep that she is forced to move in with her Uncle Charles and Aunt Jane at 2434 North Beachwood Drive in Hollywoodland.

She tells them she is going to buy a book at the village drugstore.

Instead, she may well have walked up Beachwood Drive on the route you are traversing now, past the cute little gingerbread Hollywoodland Real Estate office, near the house Clark Gable once shared with Carole Lombard, and onto the now forbidden trails leading to the sign.

No one will remember seeing her. Not hikers or pedestrians. Nor residents. Not even Kothe, the light bulb changer. She borrows his ladder to climb up to the H, then takes her final bow before the City of Angels, leaping from the letter and rolling down the hillside to her death.

Two days later, a woman calls the LAPD. She says she’s found a jacket, a purse, and shoes beneath the Hollywood sign. Then she hangs up—but not before saying she’s left the items on the steps outside the Hollywood station.

Inside the purse is a note: “I’m afraid I am a coward. I am sorry for everything. If I had done this a long time ago it would have saved a lot of pain.”

Headlines blaze. “Actress Ends Life by Jumping Off...Sign After Failure in Movies” read The New York Times. “Suicide Laid to Film Jinx” adds an LA newspaper.

It’s difficult to separate truth from myth. Did she leap or fall? What was her motivation, considering her prospects for film roles were improving? (Legend has it that “the very next day a letter arrived in her uncle’s mailbox, offering her a role in a play about a woman driven to suicide,” says Wright.)

However her life ended, Entwistle is elevated in death from tortured actor to legend—the “cautionary tale,” as Ryan Murphy, who will make a pilgrimage to the Hollywood sign shortly after moving to LA in the late ’80s, tells Oprahmag.com. “There were tours where they would show you which letter she jumped off and how she did it,” he’ll recall. The second episode of the Netflix series Hollywood, cocreated by Murphy, will show Darren Criss, Jeremy Pope, Laura Harrier, David Corenswet, and Samara Weaving climbing the sign—the ultimate metaphor for acting’s ladder of success.

Entwistle becomes known as the Hollywood Sign Girl, a ghostly symbol of all Hollywood’s failures. Her favorite scent, gardenia, is said to waft on the evening breeze.

Maybe she even cursed the sign. By 1939, seven years after her death, the sign is a ragged wreck. Most of Hollywoodland’s lots have sold, and maintenance of the sign has stopped. A torrential rainstorm demolishes the H from which Entwistle leapt.

“It’s supposed to be temporary, a billboard, just sheet metal, and so it gets ripped up,” says Braudy. “The Recreation and Parks Department considers it a public nuisance and wants to tear the whole thing down.”

In April 1949, the sign’s first savior—the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce—steps up as caretaker. The word “LAND” is excised and restoration begins. The sign will now become a billboard not merely for homes but for dreams.

It reads simply “HOLLYWOOD.”

As the years pass, the sign moves from supporting to starring roles in movies, television, and, eventually, social media. Maybe you saw it in the opening credits of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, hovering over the young Will Smith as he whistles for a taxi to take him to his new home in Southern California. Or in season four of Seinfeld, mocking Kramer’s dreams of fame and fortune after he travels to LA and ends up being wrongfully arrested for murder. Or in Quentin Tarantino’s comic noir Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood, taunting a washed-up television actor (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his stunt double (Brad Pitt) as they try to make sense of the late ’60s.

The sign beckons as a backdrop for love and lust. In Friends With Benefits, Mila Kunis and Justin Timberlake traverse the sacred ground behind the sign, then sit together on the first O until a cop in a helicopter orders them to “Get down!” In the teen romance The Kissing Booth, late bloomer Elle (Joey King) and bad boy Noah (Jacob Elordi) lie naked on the hillside near the sign as the camera sweeps across the magical letters.

Directors love to destroy the sign, perhaps in subconscious revenge for their early struggles here. In the disaster movie San Andreas, a monster earthquake levels the Los Angeles landscape, bringing the sign tumbling down.

Such a downfall seems unlikely, though. For the sign is eternal, indestructible, forever in the sky and the minds of those inspired by it.

“ ‘Just find the hills,’ we were told, ‘and you’ll know where you are,’ ” says Stephen Gyllenhaal, the filmmaker and author who drove out to Los Angeles in the summer of 1978 at age 29. “No money. No prospects, except hope—which was echoed by the sign.” He and his first wife, the screenwriter Naomi Foner, pull into town with their eight-month-old baby, the future actor-director Maggie Gyllenhaal, in the back seat. (Their son, the actor Jake Gyllenhaal, will arrive two years later.) They move into a small house just south of Melrose, “almost directly below the sign,” he says.

After all these years, Gyllenhaal is still transfixed by the sign’s contradictions. “Sure, there’s the Eiffel Tower, the Pyramids, Mount Kilimanjaro, the Great Wall of China, but we have our Hollywood sign perched precariously on top of hills that too often catch fire, marketing the magic of storytelling,” he says. “Nine letters. Silly, romantic, tenacious. Hopeful and almost dignified—but not quite. The perfect monument for the place that I proudly call home.”

“For me it was always the welcome signpost I returned to when I wrapped a film. Home,” says two-time Academy Award winner Jodie Foster, who attended an elementary school directly beneath the sign. “The movie business has been my family since I was three years old. I’ve never known anything else. When I park my car off Beachwood and take the palm-lined hike up to the fire trail behind the sign, I’m back in the ’70s. Back to the Polaroid color of my childhood nostalgia. Familiar and bittersweet, just like the sign.”

Bobbie Chance is 18 years old the first time she sees the sign. It’s the mid-’60s, and she has just arrived from Miami with a seven-year studio contract that will lead to roles in Pajama Party, Beach Blanket Bingo, and other swinging beach flicks. She falls in love with the letters at first sight, and the sign becomes her lucky North Star, spurring her not only to make it in Hollywood but to inspire others.

She becomes a Hollywood acting coach, goading and guiding a multitude of wannabes in hopes of unleashing their potential. “That sign stands for dreams,” she sighs in her Valley Village home office, whose walls are filled with pictures of celebrities who she says passed through or visited her Hollywood Actors Showcase: Brad Pitt, Jennifer Aniston, Martin Lawrence, Kardashians, and dozens more. “You gotta come here with a dream. You can’t touch the sign and you can’t touch the dream. But it’s always there.”

She looks skyward as if staring up at those nine letters on the hill. “It’s not at eye level. It’s always looking down at you and saying, ‘Get your shit together or go home to mama.’ That sign is in your face all the time.”

And yes, she acknowledges, “the whole thing is a sham. What is Hollywood? It’s a bunch of motels, hotels, and tourist shops. People from all over the world come to Hollywood thinking they are going to see Scarlett Johansson walking down the street. The whole thing is bullshit. Hollywood is a storefront window with no store. There is no Hollywood. Hollywood only happens when you succeed. But that sign is real. That sign is a global magnetic force for dreamers from all over the world. It’s as universal as the Apple logo or the Nike Swoosh, the ultimate global symbol of everything these young kids want: fame, fortune, and the keys to a Malibu beach house.”

Elegance Bratton, the filmmaker, writer, and producer making his narrative fiction debut this year with the semiautobiographical film The Inspection, first sees the sign in 2009. Then a Marine corporal visiting a friend at Camp Pendleton in San Diego, he feels the sign calling to him from afar. “We can’t be this close to Los Angeles without seeing the Hollywood sign!” he tells his friend. So they jump into her car and drive three hours to Beachwood Canyon. Staring up at the letters, Bratton imagines “Marilyn Monroe, Sidney Poitier, Madonna, and so many other icons” looking at this “concrete, tangible, touchable symbol of Hollywood.”

He has to get closer.

A combat filmmaker accustomed to rocky terrain, he begins the long climb, evading everything to reach the summit. And here, he reaches out and actually makes contact with the letters, feeling their power. “I was just blown away. All I could think about is, How many people who aspired to be in the industry made the same trek that I did?”

Eight years “after actually touching the sign and realizing what’s possible,” he releases his first short film, Walk for Me. Today, he lives in Beachwood Canyon, right beneath the landmark where it all began. “It’s like when people go to Mecca, or the Vatican to look at the Virgin Mary, or the Louvre to see the Mona Lisa. Being able to climb up there was an influential experience for me.”

For some, getting too close to the sign is like getting too close to the sun. “When we were in our backyard, we looked up at this behemoth,” says the director and artist Aaron Rose, who lived for five tortured years in a midcentury-modern house hanging off a cliff directly beneath the sign. “It was challenging. One of the largest tourist destinations on the West Coast. But no infrastructure. Strangers walking onto the property to get a photo. Once, our security camera caught three girls in a convertible yellow Mustang who pulled into our driveway, took their tops off, and posed in front of the sign.”

Sometimes, he would stare up at it and ask, Are you my friend or are you my adversary?

As a director, he was in and out of work. When things were going well, the sign seemed to be smiling down on him. “Like fate had placed me in that house at the foot of that monument of Hollywood success, and I loved it,” he says. But when he was between jobs, the sign bore down upon him with an unrelenting glare. “It took on a human, almost like a godlike personality. I’d wake up in the middle of the night and sit at the outdoor table in my underwear and stare at it. I would say, You fucking bitch! It was like what Dennis Hopper said in Blue Velvet: Don’t look at me! Don’t you fucking look at me!”

He often felt the presence of Peg Entwistle. “Maybe they’re not jumping off the sign anymore, but that sign still represents all the darkness and sadness that this town has imparted on young, impressionable people. I would look at the sign at two in the morning and think about all of the broken dreams.”

Now you are almost there, riding up the circuitous route, the sign peeking at you around every turn. You think about all of the greats who have gazed upon it, an unfathomable array of talent and tenaciousness, producing and performing in the sign’s looming shadow. You remember the icons, as humbled by the sign as the newcomers. In the Baz Luhrmann biopic Elvis, Austin Butler, playing The King, lounges, lip curled and determined for a comeback, in the rusty tattered O of the 1970s sign, telling his crew, “When I first came to Hollywood, I’d come up here and sit for hours…. The sign was beautiful then. And now, feels as though lots of things are like that these days. Broke down. Beat up. Rotten.”

In 1978, with the sign once again on the brink of destruction, another savior rose up: Hugh Hefner, the priapic founder of Playboy magazine. An authority on the power of symbols, having turned a drawing of a bow-tied bunny into a globally recognized logo, Hefner spearheaded a $250,000 campaign to save the sign. The amount was “oddly equivalent in terms of inflation to the $21,000 the sign originally cost,” says Leo Braudy, but it’s enough for a renovation so thorough and successful that an engineer will say, “That’ll be there when the mountain leaves. It’s there for good.”

And now you are there too, ready at last to see the sign up close. You pass through the fabled “gate,” whose name you are forbidden to reveal. Once opened, it allows you to access a private road at the top of Mount Lee where you and Diana Wright will traverse the rocky terrain straight down to the sign.

She hands you a rope.

“We’re going to rappel down to the letters together,” she says, holding out the rope for you to grasp as you go slipping and sliding down the steep hillside.

At last you are there, standing amid the letters, reaching out to actually touch them. But from this vantage point they are too big, too close: mammoth walls of blinding, indecipherable white. Like a movie screen, the sign is best seen from a distance. “Prettier from far away, fairly ordinary up close,” says Jodie Foster.

You cast a nervous glance at the terrain below: It’s a very long way down. But you have made it to the summit and, like every other fresh-off-the-highway interloper with the audacity to believe you belong here, you want that photo.

“Sunglasses or no?” you ask the keeper of the sign.

“It’s Hollywood,” she replies. “Sunglasses.”

So you put on your sunglasses and you smile. Will the sign smile back at you, miraculously replacing your vagabond clothes with Oscar gowns and acceptance-speech tuxedos? Or will it curse you, standing in smug but silent witness as you are cast to the hinterlands?

Whatever your fate, the sign will still be there, blessing the town’s winners, mocking its failures, and beckoning a never-ending parade of aspirants with the power of a single word.

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story misidentified the chamber of commerce that was involved in transforming the Hollywood sign to read “RAMS HOUSE,” in honor of the Los Angeles Rams’ Super Bowl victory. It was the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce, not the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce.