Hollywood Apocalypse: Exodus of the Rich and Famous (Daily Mail, UK)

[root]

© REUTERS, Damian Dovarganes
Liberal politics and the coronavirus have turned the City of Dreams into a cesspool of drug addicts and violent criminals. Los Angeles has always attracted beautiful and talented people from all over the world who came here in search of fame and money. Its streets now look like Haiti after the earthquake. It's dirty, dangerous here, but there is no work. The virus made the situation worse. Homeless camps have sprung up in some of the most attractive and famous tourist destinations.

Hollywood Apocalypse: Exodus of the Rich and Famous (Daily Mail, UK)
Caroline Graham

The Gold's Gym fitness center has become synonymous with the Hollywood dream.
Standing just a few hundred meters from the ocean on the sun-kissed Venice Beach, Gold's became the filming location of the 1977 documentary Pumping Iron, which captured the training of young unknown Austrian bodybuilder Arnold Schwarzenegger for competition "Mr. Universe" (Mr Universe).
The film turned him into a sensation in an instant. After him, he will become a world superstar, marry a woman from the Kennedy clan and become governor of California.

And yet today Gold's is one of the post-apocalyptic scenes unfolding in many parts of Los Angeles and turning the City of Dreams into an urban nightmare from which people flee in droves.
On all sides, the gym was surrounded by a spontaneously sprung tent city made of tarps and cardboard boxes fluttering in the wind.

Drug addicts and homeless people, many of whom are clearly mentally ill, walk like zombies through the palm-lined streets just three blocks from millions of dollars of homes overlooking the Pacific Ocean.
Stolen bicycles are piled into a tall pyramid on the sidewalks littered with broken syringes.

TV news reports are filled with nightmares throughout the city of attacks on women on their morning jogs, or of how residents return home to find defecating strangers on their lawns.
Today Los Angeles has become a city on the edge. For Sale signs seem to dot every suburban street, and middle-class people, especially family people, are fleeing in search of safer suburbs, with many choosing to leave Los Angeles altogether.

Born Briton Danny O'Brien runs Watford Moving & Storage. “There is a massive exodus from Hollywood,” he says. "And a lot of it has to do with politics." His business is booming. “August has already become a record month, and only half of it has passed,” he told me.
“People are getting out of here in droves. Last week, I transported a famous person in the music industry from a $ 6.5 million residence above Sunset Boulevard in Nashville. "

O'Brien, 58, who moved to Los Angeles from London 34 years ago, is also planning to move to Tennessee.
“Liberal politics destroyed this city,” he says. “Homeless tent camps are legal and the police can't do anything about them. The wealthy white population, the middle class began to leave here. People stopped feeling safe. "

While movie studios are still closed due to the coronavirus pandemic, and businesses are just starting to remove wooden planks from windows boarded up in the general demonstrations following the assassination of George Floyd when he was arrested by three white police officers in Minneapolis, Los Angeles, there is a massive exodus of whites.

Lou Ferrigno befriended Schwarzenegger while practicing at the Gold's Hall. Ferrigno, even if his name is not on everyone's lips, like the name of Arnie, starred in the television series "The Incredible Hulk" (The Incredible Hulk), becoming one of the richest bodybuilders in the world with a fortune of $ 12 million.

In 2018, President Donald Trump named him to his Council on Fitness, Sports and Nutrition.
However, for all his impeccable connections, Ferrigno is fed up with what he calls Los Angeles's "slump." He and his wife Carla recently sold their $ 4 million home in Santa Monica, moving into a 664-square-meter residence two hours north of Los Angeles.

Carla says: “One morning at about seven, I parted the curtains in our beautiful house in Santa Monica and saw three hooligans with tattooed faces looking right at me, sitting on the fence of the road leading to our house. They made greasy remarks about me, behaved indecently. I said I would call the police, and they just laughed, stuck out their tongues and showed their pistols. "

Her husband added: “We put the house up for sale after 40 beautiful years and moved north. Looks like we were lucky to get out of there. Now we live in a wonderful place and are very happy. "
Renee Taylor, an Academy Award-nominated screenwriter and actress who played a role in the television sitcom The Nanny, recently sold her Beverly Hills home after 50 years, and moved to East coast.

“I am so worried about the friends who stayed in Beverly Hills who had to endure looting and riots,” she says. "I left just in time."

The virus only made the situation worse. Homeless camps have sprung up in some of the most attractive and famous tourist destinations.

The alleys of Hollywood Boulevard - dotted with glittering stars in honor of the people who made their dreams of fame and fortune come true - now resemble a third-world slum settlement, not the heart of America's second largest city.

At the Chinese Theater, where the memory of Marilyn Monroe and other screen stars are immortalized in their handprints in concrete, beggars are now begging to replace Michael Jackson's look-alikes and the Superman who usually pose with tourists.

Meanwhile, visitors take pictures of a large Black Lives Matter logo painted in the middle of the street.

The beach car parks in Santa Monica, a popular British tourist destination, are lined with wrecked mobile homes with multiple occupants.

Authorities have even installed mobile dry closets on the streets in an attempt to stop sending needs to the homeless on private property.

The Westwood area of Los Angeles, home to some of the city's most expensive residential developments, has become known as West Hood by locals. West Hood - lit. western ghetto ), horrified by the rise in crime.

Renowned publicist Ed Lozzi says:

“The city was changing even before the coronavirus brought us to our knees. The problem of the homeless has been growing for years, and poor decisions by weak politicians have only made it worse. Hollywood has always reacted most sharply to any social injustice, and politicians did nothing to stop people sleeping on the streets. It's not illegal, the weather is nice, so they keep appearing. There are not enough places to accommodate them, psychiatric care does not meet the requirements. Add Covid to this and you have the perfect storm. When I first arrived in Los Angeles 40 years ago, the city smelled of orange blossom. And now the streets stink of urine. There is a beautiful park in Westwood, but you can't go there because people are lying on the ground and you have to step on the carpet of needles. The flight of whites is a reality. Elites and middle class are leaving the city. People are selling houses, losing money just to get out of here. "

Never before has the divide between rich and poor been more pronounced. Just a few meters from Gold's Fitness Center is the huge Los Angeles headquarters of the Internet giant Google.

The parking is located in a building designed by architect Frank Gehry in the form of huge binoculars. Private security guards walk around the area, and employees returning from quarantine enter the complex in their Teslas, Porsches and Range Rovers.

Charity worker Robert (who declined to give his last name) is in charge of two mobile dry closets across from Google's headquarters. After his release from prison, he could not get any other job other than this. Over the past two weeks, two people have overdosed in the toilet, he said.

“I have a syringe of naloxone to bring them back to life after an opioid overdose. I have had to use this syringe twice since the beginning of August. This is a terrible situation. I don't blame those who can afford to leave the city for running away. "

Now, about 66,000 people sleep every night on the streets of Los Angeles - a 12.5% increase over last year.

“There is no more hope,” he continues. - The rich are only getting richer, and the inhabitants of the poor areas have nothing left. Trump has done nothing to help the poor. He only cares that his rich friends make more money. If I had money, I would have gone too. "

The pandemic has pushed many in Hollywood to realize that they don't need to live in Los Angeles - or the area around it - to keep working.

Creative agent Craig Dorfman has moved to upstate New York. “A lot of people in our industry re-evaluate their life and say, 'You know, I never really liked Los Angeles. Where would I like to live? Because I can do whatever I want from anywhere, ”says Dorfman.

Fashion stylist Leah Forester and her husband, film producer Bill Johnson, have rented out their home with their two children in the Mexican coastal town of Careyes.

“We wanted to be in a healthier, more life-affirming and peaceful environment, so that we felt like we were somehow in control of our immediate environment and our destiny,” says Forester.

Comedian Joe Rogan, who makes $ 30 million a year from his own podcast of the same name, left Los Angeles for Texas and says: “When you see traffic on the streets, economic despair, the problem of the homeless, rapidly gaining irreversible momentum ... I think there are too many people. I think it's out of control. I don’t think it can be dealt with. ”

© AFP 2020, Apu GOMES Homeless tents on the street in Los Angeles

Ironically, the Malibu celebrity enclave, home to such leading figures in the Voukerati movement ( from the word "woke", woke, meaning fighters against social, racial and gender injustice - approx. perev .), as Leonardo DiCaprio (Leonardo DiCaprio) - after the introduction of local laws prohibiting people from parking their mobile homes at night by the beach.

“They have pushed homelessness to other areas of the city, such as Westwood and Venice,” says publicist Ed Lozzi. "This is a classic example of 'not in my backyard' position."

Meanwhile, some of Hollywood's biggest stars are making plans in the event of a deterioration. Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson recently received Greek citizenship and told friends that they plan to spend more time in Europe.

Producer Dana Brunetti, business partner of disgraced actor Kevin Spacey and producer of Fifty Shades Of Gray films, received Italian citizenship “because Italy is a member of the European Union - and he gives I have a lot of options if it comes to a complete ass. "

Nicole Kidman and her husband Keith Urban have homes in Los Angeles, Nashville and her native Australia.

The source says: “They spend a lot of time in Nashville. There they can raise their children in a more normal environment. They talked about getting rid of their home in Los Angeles. "

When news broke last week that Prince Harry and Meghan had decided to settle two hours north of Los Angeles in the upmarket Montecito neighborhood, the news was not a sensation.

One Academy Award-nominated screenwriter told me, “They had seen enough of LA when they left Tyler Perry's house that they had no desire to raise Archie in a place like this. Los Angeles has always attracted beautiful and talented people from all over the world who came here in search of fame or money, or both. Now its streets look like Haiti after the earthquake. It's dirty, dangerous here, but there is no work. Even when studios start opening, people will prefer to work from elsewhere. "

Among the famous people who have left Hollywood recently is Tesla's billionaire Elon Musk, the audience's favorite in the show business world. Actor Robert Downey Jr said that Musk was the inspiration for his portrayal of Tony Stark, the eccentric billionaire inventor from the Iron Man films.

Musk recently sold his four-home complex in Bel Air for $ 62 million and is reportedly considering moving to Texas, where he is building a new $ 1 billion Tesla plant.

"When the real Iron Man leaves Hollywood, it becomes clear that it's over," says a source in one of the largest film studios.

InoSMI materials contain assessments exclusively of foreign media and do not reflect the position of the Inosmi editorial board

Source