The Best of Connie Willis

Afterword for “At the Rialto”

I wrote “At the Rialto” after an SFWA Nebula Awards Banquet weekend which actually featured many of the elements depicted in the story. It was held at the Roosevelt Hotel, which was right across the street from Grauman’s Chinese Theatre; we did go to the Bra Museum at Frederick’s of Hollywood, which has Madonna’s gold cone-shaped bra and Ethel Merman’s girdle; the desk clerk was a model/actress; and there were definitely signs of quantum effects occurring at a macrocosmic level. We did not, however, see Benji IX at the theater. We saw Willow. And we didn’t make it out to Forest Lawn.

But we had a great time. And what else can you expect from Hollywood? I adore the place. It’s so deliciously nutty. I mean, not only is every hotel clerk and waitress and valet car-parker an actor/something-or-other, but the trademark Hollywood sign up on the hill was actually an advertisement for a housing development called Hollywoodland till the last four letters fell over, and the shopping mall has rearing concrete elephants and a massive replica of the Babylon set for D. W. Griffith’s 1916 silent film Intolerance.

They named one of their cemeteries Hollywood Forever, and during the summer they project movies on the side of the mausoleum (I am not making this up), and the locals bring picnic baskets and sit on the grass among the graves of Douglas Fairbanks and Cecil B. DeMille and Jayne Mansfield.

And all those stories about crazy directors and clueless producers and pitch meetings are true. When they turned the Broadway play The Madness of King George III into a movie, they really did insist on changing the title to The Madness of King George because they were convinced the audience would otherwise think it was a sequel. You know, like Spider-Man 3.

How can you not love a place like that?