Part Seven: Pilgrimage to L.A.

In the summer of 2003, before my senior year of high school, I had saved up my money and decided that my mom and I should take a trip to Los Angeles to see all the movie-related sights.

The first day of the trip, we somehow got lucky enough to find ourselves in the Blossom Room, a banquet room in the Roosevelt Hotel and home of the first Oscar ceremony. Standing in that room was great, and it was probably my favorite moment of the entire trip. By the end of the week we were there, I had visited every place that had held an Oscar ceremony.

The second day, we packed ourselves a picnic and headed out to the Paramount Ranch - home of breathtaking views and sets used in several films and TV shows (including "Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman"). It was a great place, and I loved walking around the old Western town they had set up. It was literally like you were walking into the past.

In addition to the standard studio and museum visits, my mom, my uncle Tom (who lives in California) and I found ourselves at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery three times. The first time was brief, as we happened to find it by accident and had another place scheduled to go. The second time we went around and explored for a while. We came across a couple of graves that we were curious about, most notably a small tomb with the name "Douras," so when we got back to where we were staying, we looked it up, and discovered that it was actress Marion Davies' real last name, which also led us to discover a lot about her history and her relationship with William Randolph Hearst. So after looking all that up, we made our third and final trip to the cemetery.

The Hollywood History Museum wasn't scheduled to open until 2004, but instead, it opened the week before we got there, and we discovered it on the last day of our trip. It was awesome. The basement of the museum was the entire jail set from The Silence of the Lambs and the elevator housed one of the windmills from the 2001 version of Moulin Rouge (my favorite movie at the time). The museum also had one of Cary Grant's cars, amongst a lot of other very cool things.

That week I spent in L.A. was probably my favorite movie-related experience of the decade.