Hollywood Signs: The Golden Age of Glittering Graphics and Glowing Neon
By Kathy Kikkert
Santa Monica: Angel City Press, 2023
Hardcover, 176 pages, $40
Reviewed by Paul Sherman
Movie stars aren’t the only names up in lights in Hollywood. Kathy Kikkert’s delightful Hollywood Signs: The Golden Age of Glittering Graphics and Glowing Neon stylishly salutes the ballyhoo afforded to such customer-craving attractions as greasy spoons, cocktail lounges, coffee shops, motels, bowling alleys, and, yes, movie palaces.
The structure is simple. After an overview of sign making and neon as both industry and art—specifically in southern California—Kikkert focuses on a succession of signs/businesses at a particular location (think Hollywood & Vine) or a specific business type. Each sign gets a portion of a page or a whole page with a photo and a paragraph about the sign and the business. Neither solely historical nor merely a current accounting, Hollywood Signs mingles the long gone with the still active.
Neon is the focus here, but it is hardly the only type of sign included. We start with the famed Hollywoodland (later, and still, just Hollywood) sign hyping a real estate development. We are all familiar with it, but I can’t be the only one unaware that the Hollywood sign was just one of several similar hillside displays for 1920s and ’30s subdivisions. Kikkert also includes signs for the Whitley Heights, Outpost Estates, and Bryn Mawr developments— each, like the Hollywood sign, made of letters big and conspicuous enough to be seen during the day and lit in the night (the Outpost sign was even green neon).
Providing context like that linking the Hollywood sign to other contemporary signs is critical to Hollywood Signs’ success. The signs here were not created in a vacuum (pardon the pun, neon fans)—one coffee shop’s neon could influence a cocktail lounge’s subsequent sign, and a theater’s vertical blade sign might lead to another theater getting a similar sign. The same artisans crafted many of those signs, taking advantage of the same technological advances. So, in addition to the blurbs Kikkert writes about business, locations, and actual signs, she adds sporadic sidebars about significant people, businesses, and innovations to L.A. sign history. The sidebars on neon innovators the Neale Brothers, theater-sign specialists Metlox, developments in interchangeable letters that brought versatility to moviehouse marquees, and the Gruen clocks included on so many signs, among others, add flavor to the story the book tells.
Taken as a whole, Hollywood Signs is more than the sum of its signs. But some of those signs bring form and function together with such panache that they bear mentioning. There’s The Hitching Post, a westerns-only movie theater(!) featuring lettering of both neon and a font made of logs (accentuated with a flag replete with proud saguaro); the successful neon excess of Cinema Sports Center, a bowling alley that included a barber shop, café and cocktail lounge, all (and more) mentioned in the marquee-style sign; and Stan’s Drive-In, where neon shot out vertically and horizontally in service to the hungry denizens of 1950s and ’60s car culture. Favorites are not hard to find here.
Numerous cultural threads weave their way through Kikkert’s signs and businesses. If you like midcentury ethnic exotica, there are Chinese, Egyptian, Saharan, Mandarin, and Hawaiian themes. The days when radio was king, meaning not just sign-adorned network studios but also microphone-themed signs on nearby eateries, provide an unexpected tangent. And there’s enough Googie and Tiki here to satisfy fans of either.
A graphic designer by trade who often designs books and their covers, Kikkert multi-tasks here with cleverness and authority. Hollywood Signs will bring a smile to those familiar with Abbeville Press’ 1990s books devoted to pop-culture design (The Hawaiian Shirt, Snowdomes, Coast to Coast: The Best of Travel Decal Art, among others). It has that much pizzazz and that much affection for and knowledge of its subject.
Hollywood Signs does not come without a few quibbles. It’s dependent on existing photos for its older signs, and poor definition plagues several images; dates are lacking in some of the descriptive blurbs, which is frustrating; and a surprising omission in the introductory section that charts the ups and downs of neon is 1965’s Highway Beautification Act and the accompanying Beautify America movement that led to “Scrap Old Signs” campaigns targeting neon in many communities.
One of the ironies revealed by Hollywood Signs is that several Hollywood signs owe recent restorations to the production of Quentin Tarantino’s 1969-set Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, despite the movie’s period not being very friendly to neon.
Paul Sherman is the author of the 2008 book Big Screen Boston: From Mystery Street to The Departed and Beyond.
This book review originally appeared in the SCA Journal, Spring 2024, Vol. 42, No. 1. The SCA Journal is a semi-annual publication and a member benefit of the Society for Commercial Archeology.
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