Spooky doings with set decoration in Santa Monica this year.My college friends in Santa Monica have lived and worked in Southern California for more than twenty years. The home they live in is lovely and I would say modest, except that the neighborhood they are in is on the edge of Brentwood. So their house has zoomed in value ...
... and they are surrounded on all sides by Hollywood money and ethos.
At right the pretty Mediterranean Revival home owned by my friends P and J.
At the house across from them this has translated into an amazing Halloween display. Parenthetically, I should tell you the homeowner is a producer who purchased two adjacent homes on the street, tore them both down, built a new house that comes out to the sidewalk, rises two stories and includes a full basement. He and his wife just recently bought another adjacent two-million-dollar-ish lot to add a pool, or a tennis court, or a polo field, I forget which.
Just the beginning of the decor at this amazing Halloween House.Now, the house also looks like a Hollywood set for a Halloween movie and includes not just the decor, but full lighting as well. Each day I was staying with my friends, Phyllis and John, more display and more lighting were added. On the actual day of Halloween, the homeowner brings in his boat and his cars and pulls them up in front and adds skeletons as the drivers, and lights those with baby spots.
It is in the right-of-way! It's everywhere! And it's lighted!
Arnold Schwarzenegger and his wife, Maria Shriver, came to trick-or-treat at this house twelve years ago, when the first such display went up, and now they make it an annual rite to stop by. Six hundred children also show up and so does a special squad of the Santa Monica Police Department, just to manage crowd control. In addition, the family hires private security to ensure that everyone makes it safely through the trick or treat line. Plus, if the neighbors want to call police, this makes it very easy for them to reach an officer.
It grows and grows, like the Incredible Growing Halloween House!And they don't just give out candy. Another neighbor used to work for a carnival concession company and he always gave out Halloween teddy bears or some other stuffed animal to the trick or treaters, and this family has continued that tradition. So they will be giving out at least 600 little stuffed animals as well on Halloween night.
The kind homeowners gave me a favor from last year's Halloween event on a certain street in Santa Monica. Each year the Halloween bear is different.
It made me tired just to watch them work on the house every day I was there, not to mention what it must be like to live nearby on All Hallows Eve. They were still going at it like beavers when I headed back to left-wing Northern California where people would rather keep chickens in their backyards and dream Obama will make such exhibitions of conspicuous consumption against the law, while there are still greenhouse gases to be curbed, Iranian nuclear aspirations to be placated, and Michael Moore to be hired as a consultant to place an official cap on the right to the pursuit of happiness.
But the day before I departed I read a tiny item in what is left of the Los Angeles Times that put a sort of macabre coda to the story of the Hollywood Halloween House. It seems there was this man in Marina del Rey who was found dead on his balcony that Friday. He'd been dead on his balcony since Monday and by the time police found him he had been sitting in the warm California sun for a considerable time and was in a state of advanced decomposition.
He was in full view of neighbors everywhere since they, too, all had balconies. Why hadn't somebody called police? Neighbors said they didn't call because they thought the guy on his balcony who looked dead was just part of a Halloween display.
Which he was in a way. He just didn't realize it. Not being fully composed at the time.
Beware where you step on Halloween night in the Southland.Read more!
