Photographs by Ave Pildas—taken between 1972 and 1975 and collected in the recent book “Star Struck”—capture an enticingly seedy sliver of Hollywood history.
The photographer Ave Pildas arrived in Los Angeles in 1971, not a high point for Hollywood glamour. Smog choked the city, the Hollywood sign was crumbling, and the old movie palaces had become porno theatres. But Pildas was entranced by the Hollywood Walk of Fame, where he would run errands and eat lunch while working at Capitol Records, as an artistic director. “I was looking around and saying, ‘My goodness, this is like Times Square West!’ ” Pildas said recently. “It was just full of life.
“I would go a few times a week, especially if it was an overcast day,” he recalled. “I wasn’t into shadows at that point in time.” What interested him were the people: tourists and drifters and junkies and aspiring starlets. He would set up his camera on a tripod in front of storefronts or cinemas and wait to see who strolled by. “I would start chatting them up, way before they got to the camera, either remarking about their clothes or their dog.
At the time, Pildas was living in the Hollywood Hills, behind the Whiskey a Go Go. On a trip to Europe, he put a hundred or so prints in his backpack and wound up at the Paris headquarters ofmagazine. “The French love photography, and they also like Hollywood,” he said. “So the art directors there, they just went crazy over those pictures, and they ran eight or ten pages.” Soon, other magazines picked them up. Then, Pildas recalled, “I put the pictures to sleep.
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