Just another citizen/workbot of Hollywood, doing my civic duty...
Every trip back home from a visit to the chiropractor (a healing ritual observed by many of us who toil in the salt mines of Hollywood) brings me to a red light at the intersection pictured above, where Barham Boulevard meets Cahuenga. While sitting at this red light, Warner Brothers and Universal Studios are directly behind me, CBS Radford is two miles to the right, Paramount lies a couple of miles to the left (not far from the other CBS studio facility), while Fox and Sony are roughly straight ahead another eight to ten miles as the crow flies.
You'd have to be a crow to do that, of course, since Barham dead-ends into this faux-Tudor piece of architectural garbage apparently being rented by "Valhalla Motion Pictures," but you get the point -- a case can be made that this intersection represents the geographical nexus of the Hollywood studio system as it exists today.*
Maybe that's why there's always one or two enormous billboards hawking new television shows staring me in the face as I wait for red to turn green.
I've been intermittently staring at this particular billboard for nearly three months now, and something about it strikes me as a little odd. From what I understand (never having seen the show), "Nikita" is about the adventures of a sexy female assassin -- but in this billboard, "she" looks a lot more like a "he" wearing a little red dress. Seriously, look at that horse-like face and rectangular head (sorry for the lousy through-the-windshield photo): the rest of the package is fine -- curves in all the right places -- but the face on that billboard looks more like Zenyatta than any female actress I've ever seen.**
I'm not exactly sure what the CW is trying to tell us here.
Not that it really matters. As a native Californian raised within the sphere of influence cast by the infamous Summer of Love in San Francisco, I'm a tolerant guy. Live and let live, I say, and if CW's Nikita is actually just a guy in a dress lugging around a really big gun, then more power to him/her.
Hey, you go, girl!
Still, it's hard to believe CW would broadcast, much less heavily promote, a show featuring a cross-dressing and/or trans-gendered assassin. FX, maybe, or Showtime, but CW? I don't think so, which means this is probably just a supremely crappy billboard -- and in that case, whoever's responsible really ought to know.
The thing is, I've seen print and television ads for this show in which it was abundantly clear that the actress playing Nikita is in fact a very attractive woman. And that means CW's advertising department -- especially those clowns in charge of billboards -- have done her no favors at all.
If I was her agent, I'd be on the phone yelling at somebody right now...
* Granted, there's not much point in making such a case, but hey, it's a rainy Wednesday on the Home Planet, where I'm doing my best to put up a mid-week post...
** No offense to this truly great race horse...
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