Palm Springs, un peu d´histoire
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by: Guest
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Word Count: 380
“Hollywood has always been a cage... a cage to catch our dreams.”
- John Huston
With the sharpest and most instant wit, with never a hair out of place and dressed from head to foot in the latest luxuries, our stars have strode and smouldered across both our screens and the collective consciousness for as long as we can remember.
Forty foot high, at once as big as houses and as fragile as the screen on which they are held captive, these gods of the twentieth century have both lived in and beyond our wildest dreams - their own lives often more outlandishly glamorous than those of the characters they play.
The reality of Hollywood, a machine to frame our fantasies, is one from which even its anointed sons need respite - but to where do the glittering vessels of fantasy, those dedicated to its fabrication, go to escape their own reality.
Intriguingly, during the golden age of the eternally inward-looking home of the movies, the answer seems perhaps to have come from the movies themselves - the Western. The vast emptiness and limitless possibility of the desert plains and the eagle circled mountain passes of the great American West had been a staple of America’s great gilded myth-machine since the silent pictures of the 1920s. The telling and retelling of the conquering of the west’s savage wilderness is indeed a cornerstone of American identity.
Seeking to get away from the rigours of tinsel town, its biggest stars ventured into this symbolically fertile and climatically arid terrain. The first residents of the awe-inspiring Coachella Valley were the Cahuilla Indians some 2,000 years ago, but by 1884, the first permanent non-Indian settler had arrived in what was now known as Palm Springs. Judge John Guthrie McCallum of San Francisco brought both his family and water to the valley, building a sophisticated aqueduct.
Having initially gained fashionable Twentieth Century notoriety as a health resort for wealthy sufferers of conditions alleviated by its dry heat, by the 1920s, it had become a haven for Hollywood stars seeking the same winter sun. The seclusion and the privacy afforded by the small, still unknown, desert town and the sense of unbridled space fuelled its growth, and by 1938 it had been made into an incorporated municipality...
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