This January, we’ve commissioned a series of short essays considering film restorations from the past year. This is the second.
Hollywood 90028 (Christina Hornisher, 1973).
As the Palisades and Eaton Fires raged this month, photos and videos of the Hollywood sign in flames went viral. Before these images were identified as AI-generated misinformation, many took them as an appropriately bombastic symbol of a beleaguered industry. It’s true that the milk-and-honey capital of American cinema has curdled in recent years, accelerated in part by fallout from the pandemic, back-to-back labor strikes, the burst streaming bubble, and now the yet-to-be-tallied damage from the ongoing wildfires. It’s not the first time seismic changes have forced a reconfiguration of Hollywood, but there’s undoubtedly a sense of despair that’s unique to this moment.
We look to history to parse where we are and where we’re going, which makes this past year’s restoration of Christina Hornisher’s forgotten masterpiece Hollywood 90028 (1973) particularly well-timed. The profoundly ugly film follows Mark (Christopher Augustine), a despondent Midwestern transplant struggling to piece together a meaningful filmmaking career in the City of Angels. Loneliness haunts him as he wanders through town, skulks in adult bookstores, and picks up similarly isolated women on his listless drives through the urban grid. Never far behind are mournful childhood memories and feelings of guilt for the accidental death of his baby brother years before. Hornisher captures Los Angeles as a city of deep spiritual alienation, its denizens buzzing around the cultural rot by which the ’60s became the ’70s.
Painted in brown hues of decay, the LA of Hollywood 90028 is also a center of industry at the cusp of extreme transition. Mark makes his meager living shooting softcore loops for Jobal (Dick Glass), a crass, morbidly obese taskmaster and producer of pornography. It’s soul-sucking, creatively stagnant work churned out in a studio space a stone’s throw from what was then Downtown LA's peep-show district, where strip shows, burlesque attractions, and grindhouses installed themselves in the former first-run theaters lining Main Street. Although hoping to make it out of the skin-flick biz, Mark is unable to find the commercial film or photography work he desires. His creative frustrations are also revealed to be rooted in a mysterious sadism. He experiences emotional intimacy with a series of women, soothing their shared sense of big-city loneliness in rendezvous that are at once tender and sad. It’s within these moments of vulnerability that a violent impulse within Mark awakens, its origins and exact cause unknown but its results always the same: at the height of affection, Mark suddenly strangles his lovers before once again hitting Tinseltown’s grimy streets in search of purpose, connection, and his next victim.
Hollywood 90028 (Christina Hornisher, 1973).
In the background of Hornisher’s callous vision lies a snapshot of the city’s adult-film world, still at the margins in a moment when the X-rated Deep Throat and Behind the Green Door (both 1972) were beginning to garner mainstream notoriety (and test the legal boundaries of obscenity) with wide theatrical releases. This period came just before the production boom that would reshape the nearby San Fernando Valley into the new center of pornographic filmmaking, eclipsing the pioneering hubs of New York and San Francisco. On the more reputable side of the industry, a different metamorphosis was underway as the old studio system was shed to make way for the New Hollywood era. A window of opportunity for the talent of Mark’s generation to establish themselves as the new vanguard was coming to a close, a shift that was soon solidified with the critical and commercial sweep of The Godfather in 1972. Incidentally, Hornisher’s film crystallizes an overlooked period of film labor history, in which many hopefuls arrived either too early or too late to strike gold.
A malaise hangs over everything in Hollywood, but underneath it, Hornisher depicts the City of Angels as an ouroboros of decay, destruction, and rebirth. Mark's orbit of its gravity is best illustrated in his date with Michele (Jeannette Dilger), a model he meets on one of his shoots. They cruise through the soon-to-be-razed Victorian neighborhood of Bunker Hill, an area later cleared for high-rises and the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion (the longtime home of the Oscars ceremony), and ponder the ever-increasing difficulty of finding a place to live in the city. They make their way up to the dilapidated Hollywood sign, two years before it would be restored. Among its wreckage, they recount how the city pulled them in, animating their creative ambitions only to mire them in a spiritual emptiness. Mark encapsulates the city’s sense of promise and hope for renewal best when he states: “I live in Los Angeles, in an ugly apartment surrounded by smog, and I make money by making marginal movies. But y’know what? I have the feeling that I’m waiting for something.”
It feels like a turning point, like maybe things will finally change for Mark, a feeling that lasts until Michele tells him that she no longer wishes to see him. He visits her in the hopes of changing her mind, but wakes up the next morning to find her strangled body next to him in bed. In the film’s shocking final shot, Mark follows in the footsteps of Peg Entwistle, the struggling actress who jumped to her death from atop the H of the Hollywood sign in 1932 (when it still read “Hollywoodland,” advertising a luxury real-estate scheme). As the shot pulls back from the noose around Mark’s neck, we see that his final act has been captured by his camera on a tripod nearby, the scene of his suicide becoming increasingly obscured by the city of Los Angeles, its hills, and the iconic smog that smothers it all.
Hollywood 90028 (Christina Hornisher, 1973).
Although completed in 1973, Hornisher’s film was plagued by postproduction issues and would not see an initial release until three years later. Its genre shifts between drama, erotic, and horror defied easy categorization, and it was later recut and re-released under titles such as The Hollywood Hillside Strangler, Insanity, and Twisted Throats. Had the stars aligned, Hornisher might have been recognized as an inheritor of the New Hollywood, instead of drifting into obscurity. At long last, her film has been restored and is available for the first time ever on home video thanks to the efforts of Grindhouse Releasing’s Bob Murawski.
Hollywood 90028 is both by and about those swept to the margins of an industry and a city, victims of circumstances beyond their control. Despite the film’s grim ending, perhaps its rediscovery brings a glimmer of hope into our own time, a promise of rejuvenation just around the corner after an era of gloom. One need only to look to the hills to the north to see the Hollywood sign, standing sentinel some 102 years on, taking on new meaning with each cycle of disrepair and revival, though it may be obscured by the smoke and embers still hanging in the air.