Some bright spark in MGM’s publicity department decided that a great way to garner attention for the movie “Hollywood Revue of 1929” (the studio’s second feature-length musical, and one of their earliest sound films) was to create a huge billboard and get 16 chorines to climb up and pose on it. What could go wrong? So they built the billboard pictured here in a parking lot on the northeast corner of Wilshire Blvd and Shatto Place. As a feat of engineering, it’s actually quite impressive, but I wouldn’t want to be one of those girls risking life and limb to promote a movie. (A version of this event takes place in the first book in my Hollywood’s Garden of Allah series, “The Garden on Sunset,” when one of my characters, Gwendolyn, gets a job standing on this human billboard.)

This was the New York version at the Astor Theatre at 1537 Broadway:

That corner is still a parking lot. That tower in the background is the old Bullocks Wilshire department store (now a law library.) This image is from November 2020: