From the Blvd: Pacquiao and Presley

Welcome to Stories from the Boulevard. I’m currently working across the street from the Chinese Theatre and stumble upon Hollywood events and personalities rather frequently. Here is my accidental record of what’s happening on Hollywood Boulevard…

Chinese Theatre

This week is the Premiere of Manny, which stars Manny Pacquiao and his wife Jinkee, Jimmy Kimmel, Liam Neeson, and Mark Wahlberg. Across the street from Jimmy Kimmel’s studio, Jinkee Pacquiao met fans and signed posters distributed from a large stack to those people willing to stand in line for hours.

Pacquiao was patient enough to stick around for over an hour to have her photo rapidly taken with scores of fans. One of my co-workers remarked that it must be extremely exhausting and require a lot of patience to live this kind of life.

Star of the Week

It was Elvis’ birthday on January 8, and as a much loved and certainly not forgotten celebrity, his star on the walk was a shrine packed with flowers and mementos. Every day someone would remove the mementos and clean the star… but by the middle of the next day it was covered again. This went on for weeks (the photo I took below was taken 10 days after his birthday).

The current location of the Elvis star is located off the walk at the junction of La Brea and Hollywood (beside the Hollywood La Brea Gateway). This was only supposed to be a temporary location in 1998. The original star was located at Highland and Hollywood but had to be removed because after 38-years because it started to repeatedly crack for no apparent reason.

In the old location, now rests the only black star on Hollywood Boulevard, which also seems to have a problem with cracks.