How Hollywood Turned Into a Ghost Town - Vanity Fair

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“I fully expect them to apply to SVB,” Klein says wryly. “I don’t know if they’ll get in, but I expect them to apply and definitely go be Tower Bar regulars. I think they’ll fit in really well, actually.” Klein notes that “L.A. loves a royal” shaking up the scene, adding, “There are enough movie stars.”

The royal couple are such a singular phenomenon that they’ve managed to overshadow the fact that the Wealthiest Man in the World also bought a place in L.A. Earlier this year, Jeff Bezos expanded his real estate portfolio to include a 1937 Beverly Hills manse originally commissioned by Jack Warner, which is like buying a Roman palazzo built by Caesar Augustus. But the pandemic finds Bezos’s behemoth, Amazon, in a fraught position, with strikes, shutdowns, and boldface critics. In truth, Bezos arrives at a time when the city’s social hierarchy has been entirely upended. When WME is cash-strapped, Disney’s parks are bleeding money, and ever more agents are furloughed, do Bezos, Bob Iger, and Ari Emanuel get the corner booth or the breezy seat by the swinging kitchen door?

“Do you remember when just seven, eight months ago, Mr. Ted Sarandos and Mr. Steven Spielberg, for example, would have this conversation of movie theater versus streaming?” says Dimitrov, the maître d’ at SVB. “When I was young, everything happened around the theater, and now I think it’s threatened, right? I’m even scared that it’s lost forever.”

Caruso, who is part of a White House task force on economic recovery and a voice of leadership to many Angelenos, has managed to find some positivity during quarantine: “There’s actually a bluer sky. There’s more birds, right? There’s more silence. There’s more peace. I was saying this to my son the other night, ‘How do we get back to a regular rhythm of business and our lives but have the sky stay blue?’ I know it sounds corny, but hopefully everybody realizes that Mother Earth bounces back really quickly. I’m hoping that businesses and the city find ways to encourage people to drive less, maybe work a couple days at home now that we all have Zoom, take some traffic off the streets and walk more.”

Once the restaurants, bars, hotel lobbies, and dens do start to reopen, insiders say that crowds will be kept at half capacity and tables will be six feet apart. That’s hard to picture in a town where dining has always been performative: actors greeting each other at tables with a double kiss, rival agents loudly shaking hands, tourists trying to play it cool until their iPhone flash goes off in Brad Pitt’s face.

“Hugging was a norm,” says Dimitrov. “That’s done. I don’t think that Hollywood will be—ever, ever—the way it was.”

Still, Los Angeles has rebounded more than once before. Out of the Great Depression came the talkies, and out of World War II came Technicolor. Whether it’s streaming, theaters, YouTube, or Quibi, this country has always needed Hollywood. Escapism may well be a growth industry. As Reese Witherspoon said to Jennifer Lopez on an Instagram livestream recently, “I just want to make comedies for the next 10 years.”

Or, as Doppelt puts it, “It’s going to be riveting to re-create the dream.”

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How Hollywood Turned Into a Ghost Town - Vanity Fair

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