Manor Hotel ~ Scientology Celebrity Centre |
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Chateau Elysée now Scientology Celebrity Centre |
Reference:
LAist Neighborhood Project
Franklin Village net
History: At less than .5 square miles, Franklin Village is one of the smallest of the L.A. neighborhoods. The geographical epicenter of Franklin Village is the 5900 block of Franklin Avenue, where today is located the Church of Scientology’s Celebrity Centre International. But the prominent seven-story building – now called “The Manor Hotel”, which is run as an actual working hotel for out-of-town Scientologists – standing on that block, was originally built as the “Chateau Elysée”, a luxury hotel and apartment house intended to replicate a 17th century French-Norman castle.According to “A Short History of the Manor Hotel”, prepared by the Church, the Chateau Elysée was built…
“…in 1929 by Eleanor Ince, widow of Thomas H. Ince, the highly successful pioneer silent film producer. . . . When construction started in 1927, a new era for Hollywood was dawning. The first talking picture, The Jazz Singer, with Al Jolsen, was released that year. In a spirit echoing her husband’s contributions in the formative period of the film industry, Mrs. Ince provided a home for many of the artists that were now being drawn to Hollywood.
“Residents of the Manor included some of the most famous names of the 1930s and 40s. The list includes: Bette Davis, Errol Flynn (room 211), Edward G. Robinson (room 216), Carol Lombard (room 305), Edgar Rice Burroughs (room 408), Humphrey Bogart (room 603), Clark Gable (room 604), Ginger Rogers (room 705), Ed Sullivan (room 501), Gracie Allen and George Burns (room 609), Katherine Hepburn, George Gershwin and Cary Grant.
“As the center of the film world’s ‘chateau life’ in the 1930s, the Manor was often the scene of glamorous parties and saw frequent visits by Hollywood nobility dwelling in nearby estates"
The building then became a retirement home for actors and actresses in the 1950’s and was slated for demolition in 1972 when it was bought by the Church of Scientology. The Church renovated the building in the early 90’s, even restoring much of the original furniture. The building is now a historical landmark.
TRIVIA:
- The Church of Scientology’s Celebrity Centre International and Manor Hotel serves as a film location for many movies and TV shows, with Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery and episodes of Felicity and Entourage among past projects filmed there.
- One block to the east of Celebrity Centre on Franklin stands the apartment building where scenes from the movie Swingers was shot.
- And the next street to the east, Canyon Drive, was where Jason Priestley got his misdemeanor DUI charge after crashing his silver sportster here in 1999.
- "New York West": Franklin Village is often described as the closest thing Los Angeles has to New York, which in large part is due simply to the serendipity of the zoning and architecture of the area, which allows locals to walk rather than drive for most of their errands, and bundles stores together in a cute row, a la Manhattan, rather than having each store located in a mall surrounded by a parking lot the size of a small county. And of course the buildings are relatively old for L.A., which adds to the NY feel.
Pulpateer by L. Ron Hubbard L. Ron Hubbard, before he founded the Scientology movement, was a pulp author. In answer to the many critics of pulp fiction Hubbard presented a spirited defence of the genre in what was intended as a "letter to the editor." The Scientology site has reprinted Hubbard's spirited defence of pulp authors:
". . . Primarily, a pulpateer is a very decent writer (he has to be that, you know). He is sincere about his work as any of the top rankers will testify. If you should happen to intimate to a pulpateer that his stories are trash, you are likely to be soundly punched in the nose – and rightly. He tries to write his very best and make his stories exciting and often he gets a lot more than excitement into them. There is no real reason for ignorant people to rip and tear at a man’s livelihood and vocation and avocation when it actually means nothing to said people. Such backhanded slaps hurt not a little. The idea that pulp writing is mechanical is already too prevalent."
Read the entire article at: http://literary.lronhubbard.org/page29.htmSee the Edgar Rice Burroughs / L. Ron Hubbard Connection at:
Part I Part II Part III Part IV Art Legacy
Blog Sightings
Sentence Structure in Edgar Rice Burroughs
Robert GibsonIn pursuit of the ultimate discovery of the secret of story-telling, one could do worse than study the rhythms of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ prose. Because of his stereotypical characters and defects as a plotter, he must derive his power from some other source, and the source has eluded convincing explanation. It is all very well to say that his standard of invention is good and his writing vivid and clear; other authors in the field of Planetary Romance have achieved as much, but lack his special magic. I suspect the answer is to be found in the cadences of his prose.
By this I do not necessarily refer to ‘purple passages’. The way ordinary things are said, the way information is put before the reader, is what matters.
Following the defeat of his little army, Ras Thavas had disappeared and been all but forgotten as are the dead, among which he was numbered by those who had known him; but there were some who could never forget him. — Synthetic Men of Mars (1940)Here we have what I call the typical Burroughs L-shaped transitional sentence, glueing one theme (the disappearance of the master surgeon) with the next (the persistence of speculation about him). The turning point comes after the word ‘dead’.It is ironical that whereas short sentences are a sign of dumbed-down journalese, long sentences are the stock-in-trade of a ‘pulp’ writer like Burroughs who was also a journalist in later life (he witnessed the attack on Pearl Harbour). The L-shaped or double-backed sentence performs a vital role in keeping the reader careeering on through the tale. Here is an example from A Fighting Man of Mars (1930) of two such sentences following on consecutively;
I do not know that John Carter fully realized the loss that I sustained, but I suspect that he did, for he offered me all the resources of Helium in my search for Tavia.I thanked him, but asked only for a fast ship; one in which I might devote the remainder of my life to what I truly believed would prove a futile search for Tavia, for how could I know where in all wide Barsoom Tul Axtar would elect to hide?
The first of these sentences is merely a simple antithesis, but the second actually has a wide transitional middle part, consisting of the clause “what I truly believed would prove a futile search for Tavia”, which stands like a plateau between two slopes.
Sometimes he gives us a whole paragraph consisting of one sentence. An example from earlier in the same novel:
After we had passed beyond the crater of the ancient volcano, which formed the bed of the valley in which lay sombre Ghasta, we saw below us, in the moonlight, a rough volcanic country that presented a weird and impressive appearance of unreality; deep chasms and tumbled piles of basalt seemed to present an insurmountable barrier to man, which may explain why in this remote and desolate corner of Barsoom the valley of Hohr had lain for countless ages undiscovered.Here the ‘deep chasms… barrier to man’ section of the sentence acts as the summit of the plateau of meaning, with slopes up to it and down from it on either side.Limpidly clear, but masking the art of a great storyteller.
Robert Gibson is caretaker of the Ooranye Project, creating a fictional giant planet which can be explored on www.ooranye.com. The project’s aim is to meld the subgenres of Future History and Planetary Romance, resulting in over a million years of civilization with its own societies, customs, conflicts, triumphs and disasters, politics, philosophies, flora and fauna, empires both human and non-human, and adventures that range over an area ten times that of the surface of the Earth. Lovers of planetary adventure are invited to view the history, comment on the progress of the project, access the tales and keep in touch with the developing destiny of Ooranye.
The Tao of Tarzan
by Doctor Zen
STORIES ARE SIGNPOSTS Blog ~ November 13, 2007
"I have to say he is the finest man that I have ever known - trousers or no trousers." - Rawlins (TARZAN ESCAPES)When Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote TARZAN OF THE APES in 1912 he had held a number of jobs. As a night watchman, he read fiction magazines on breaks and decided that he could write better than what he found in those. 25 books later, not to mention movies, radio, comic books and tv, ERB was able to retire to a ranch in Tarzana CA.
Tarzan had many mythic sources. The hero raised by animals is a common theme from Romulus and Remus nursed by a she-wolf, the Greek heroine Atalanta by bears and the Celtic Oisin by a deer. His story reflects the Arthurian legend of the young man who discovers his true noble heritage. Like any good hero he eventually became immortal.
In his adventures Tarzan overthrew a lot of false religions, idols and god-kings, yet his own spirituality was almost never mentioned. I said last week that Tarzan was a Zen hero. Reading through a few of the books I found some amazing parallels.
"To Tarzan ... contentment is the highest ultimate goal of achievement ... He saw the greed, the selfishness, the cowardice, and the cruelty of man; and, in view of man's vaunted mentality, he knew that these characteristics placed man upon a lower spiritual scale than the beasts, while barring him eternally from the goal of contentment." ~TARZAN AND THE CITY OF GOLD (1933).Buddhism teaches that the only thing that bars us from happiness is attachment to things and feelings."Happiness does not come from having much, but from being attached to little." ~Cheng YenSamsara is a term for living in the world, attached to habits and materialism. It is the opposite of Nirvana, freedom and happiness."The initial stage is to reduce attachment towards life. The second stage is the elimination of desire and attachment to this samsara. Then in the third stage, self-cherishing is eliminated." ~The 14th Dalai LamaERB wrote adventure stories, not philosophy. Tarzan was not a Zen master. Tarzan did kill, but hey, he was raised by apes, not monks! Burroughs said, "Necessity required him to kill for food and in defense of his life, but the example of his savage associates never suggested that pleasure might be found in killing ... His viewpoint toward death was seemingly callous, but it was without cruelty."Popular culture analyst Doc Hermes wrote,
"This dual nature is one of the things I love best about the character. Tarzan is not a mere animal in a human form, he is a unique symbiosis of the human and the animal natures ... the balance between Lord Greystoke strolling through Hyde Park with Jane on a Sunday and Tarzan ripping raw meat from a freshly killed gazelle is an essential part of the appeal. Tarzan is yin and yang in a single body."Writing about the traits that separated his hero from the apes ERB said "not the least of these were in a measure spiritual, and one that had doubtless been as strong as another in influencing Tarzan`s love of the jungle had been his appreciaton of the beauties of nature." ~ TARZAN THE TERRIBLE, 1921) Tarzan lives, not in a treehouse with an elephant elevator, but on a sprawling ranch in Africa with his wife Jane. But he "loves to roam remote fastnesses still unspoiled by the devasting hand of civilization." He has a "spiritual enjoyment of beauty that only the man-mind may attain."Zen sayings and poems like Han shan's "A thousand clouds among a myriad streams And in their midst a person at his ease. By day he wanders through the dark green hills, At night goes home to sleep beneath the cliffs" might be talking about Tarzan.
In "The God of Tarzan" (JUNGLE TALES OF TARZAN, 1917), Tarzan reads about God and sets out to find this being who is supposedly more powerful than himself. Investigating what he hears from jungle people, he eliminates false gods like the Moon, idols and tribal shamans. Finally he understands that the still, small voice in his conscience that stops him from killing a helpless enemy is God, and God is stronger than Tarzan.
That story was probably one of the earliest influences on my own spiritual thought.
- In the video game Jurassic Park: Trespasser there is a statue of Edgar Rice Burroughs, possibly as a reference to novels such as Tarzan the Terrible and The Land That Time Forgot.
- In the Mars Trilogy novels of Kim Stanley Robinson the original capitol city on Mars is named Burroughs as a sort of tribute. It is later flooded.
- Season 1, Episode 29 of Disney's The Legend of Tarzan animated series, "Tarzan and the Missing Link," illustrates Burroughs as a struggling writer who travels to Africa in search of inspiration for a new novel.
- The 1980 novel The Number of the Beast, by Robert A. Heinlein featured characters named Zebediah John Carter, Jacob Burroughs, and Dejah Thoris Burroughs in homage to Burroughs' Mars novels. Among other things, these and the other main characters travel to various alternate universes, including Barsoom, Oz and Wonderland.
- Russian dictator Joseph Stalin once said that Edgar Rice Burroughs was his favorite author.
Buster Crabbe. Mention his name, and chances are that there will be a question like “Buster Crabbe: Didn’t he play Tarzan?” Of course, Crabbe did portray that celebrated jungle hero, but he only did so once. This athlete-turned-actor went on to create a lengthy and successful career in several areas of show business. |
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