A weekly feature in which my four-year-old son is let loose on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, one of the most popular tourist attractions in Los Angeles, and chooses a star from among the more than 2,500 honorees. His “random” picks sometimes reveal unexplained connections such as the summer day in 2012 when he sat down on the star of actress Celeste Holm and refused to budge. We later learned that the Oscar-winning actress had died only hours earlier.
Not everyone on the Hollywood Walk of Fame is a classic movie star. New people are added all the time — that is, if they are approved by the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce and can cough up the $30,000 “sponsorship fee.” In the old days, such fees were picked up by the studios, but nowadays it’s up to the honoree or their people to raise the money. Half of that money goes to the Hollywood Historic Trust, the group that maintains the more than 2,500 stars on the Walk of Fame, and the other half goes towards creating and installing the star itself. Sometimes it’s a celebrity’s fan club that petitions for the star and raises the funds. Liza Minnelli’s fans did it through bake sales! Recent inductees include Helen Mirren, James Franco, Ron Howard, Ellen DeGeneres, Matthew Perry and Jane Lynch.
Charlie’s pick this week is the brilliant Julia Louis-Dreyfus. Known primarily for her work on television — Seinfeld, The New Adventures of Old Christine, and currently Veep — Louis-Dreyfus has amassed a whopping 16 Emmy nominations and has taken home four of the statues. She received her star in 2010 and, in a rare but not unheard of development, the geniuses at the Chamber of Commerce spelled her name wrong. Oops! They left out the “o” in Louis and forgot the hyphen. Luckily they were able to chisel out the mistake in time for her ceremony and patch in a correction. Since then, the star was replaced by one with the proper spelling!
Julia Louis-Dreyfus was a classmate of mine in college. We weren’t friends but we had several classes together, and when I interviewed her last year for the Disney movie Planes she was nice enough to pretend that she remembered me! Back in college, she was one of the funniest people I’d ever seen and has remained so all these years.
While Julia’s star is understandably for her amazing accomplishments on television, she gave a beautiful, poignant and very funny lead performance last year in Nicole Holofcener’s wonderful film Enough Said, which was also the late James Gandolfini’s final project. Before that, she had smaller roles in films such as Woody Allen’s Deconstructing Harry and Hannah and Her Sisters, as well as lending her distinctive voice to animated films such as A Bug’s Life and Planes. I have no doubt that Julia Louis-Dreyfus will be a multi-starred member of the Walk of Fame before she’s through.