Early Hollywood was both a wild spectacle and a place governed by strict rules, with the studio system—in which five studios dominated the film industry—replacing independent moviemaking and wielding unprecedented control over actors’ lives. Following the construction of gaudy movie palaces like the Grauman’s Egyptian Theater in 1922 and Grauman’s Chinese Theater in 1927, the neighborhood became an arena for celebrity and flashy publicity.
Industry growth created real estate opportunities, too. In the early 1920s, railroad tycoons Eli P. Clark and Moses Sherman partnered with Los Angeles Times publisher Harry Chandler and real estate developers Tracy E. Shoults and Sidney H. Woodruff to build an exclusive hillside community called Hollywoodland. As Braudy writes, the addition of the suffix “land” was likely part of a slick marketing scheme, perhaps in tribute to Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland or “Neverland” in J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan.
To promote the development, the syndicate erected a billboard bearing its name. The exact timing of the project—and who came up with the idea for the sign—is disputed, but the Hollywood Sign Trust notes that construction was completed by December 1923.
The bold, sans serif letters that spelled out “Hollywoodland” each stood 30 feet wide and nearly 45 feet tall. Workers spent 60 days anchoring the panels to the ground at a total cost of $21,000 (around $370,000 today). By the end of the year, some 4,000 lights adorned the display, which the Los Angeles Evening Express described as a “gigantic electric sign, the largest in the world, [which] vies with the stars in the luminous beauty.” Originally slated to stay up for just 18 months, the sign remained standing long beyond that.
In the years following the sign’s debut, Chandler’s Los Angeles Times ran regular advertisements promoting the Hollywoodland development as a refuge from city living. But the Great Depression took its toll on the real estate syndicate (not to mention the film industry), which was dissolved in 1933. The sign’s new owner, the M.H. Sherman Company, found the electricity-powered display too expensive to maintain and soon decided to abandon it.