Celebrating Sid Grauman's 132nd Birthday

The Egyptian remembers the man who molded Hollywood.

Hand prints in cement are rarely a huge draw. Usually you see them on a sidewalk and think, "really now? Did you, random passerby who saw a damp, cementy opportunity, have to leave such a permanent legacy?"

Hand prints and Hollywood go hand-in-hand print, of course. But then Hollywood is the rare city, and Sid Grauman, the man behind the hand prints, was the rare impresario. Try as we might, we're not able to not type "impresario" following Mr. Grauman's fabled handle, as he truly impresario'd Tinseltown in its nascent movie-making days. Call him a captain of Industry.

The Egyptian, which was and is a quintessential Grauman spectacle, is throwing a party for the man who brick-and-mortared some of Hollywood's great movie palaces with a special afternoon of film-fun to-dos on Saturday, March 19.

Mr. Grauman's birthday is actually March 17, and 2011 is the 132nd anniversary of his birth.

There will be cake, there will be a history-filled film, there will be some sort of tweet-off, which, of course, would have meant various birds engaging in competitive singing in Mr. Grauman's heyday. 

Aside: Don't you wish you could show people from a century ago some of our technology? And won't people a century from now wish the same?

Back to those hand prints, which the world knows are not in front of The Egyptian but rather the Egyptian's fairly close neighbor, The Chinese Theatre. Are your favorite slabs the ones that say "To Sid" on them? We mean *after* the R2D2 and C-3PO prints, and Betty Grable's leg?

The "To Sid" additions just go to show that Hollywood chumminess is nothing new. It's charms, in the way that things imprinted in cement rarely do.

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