Hollywood

The simplest district in the city to read, once you know the rule: wealth is a function of elevation. Everything above the flats is money. Everything on the boulevards is not.

Up in the hills — Beachwood, Whitley Heights, the streets off Mulholland, Los Feliz on its slope, Hancock Park down on the flat but walled and old about it — you get houses with gates, private patrol, and residents whose business is the industry rather than the street. Those neighbourhoods came through the last thirty years intact. Some of them are the most desirable addresses left in Los Angeles, precisely because they're above the flood line, uphill of the air, and inside their own arrangements.

Down on Hollywood Boulevard, Western, Vine, Sunset east of Highland, it's another city. Residential hotels renting by the week to people with no SIN. Storefront clinics, storefront churches, storefront chip shops. Tourists who came for the handprints and hold their bags differently after ten minutes. Thai Town and East Hollywood are dense and poor and functioning, full of people who work in the industry's basement — the crews, the loaders, the extras, the ones who make the thing everyone else takes credit for.

Simsense was invented here — see Simsense for what a master is and why one is worth more than a building — in the twenty-teens, by people trying to make a better picture — and the lots are still the largest employer on this side of the river, because sim is made the way film was made: on lots, with crews, in buildings a century old. For thirty years the masters were pressed in San Diego, in electronics plants a hundred and twenty miles down the coast — and when the border closed in 2050 the industry discovered it had outsourced the one part of the process it could not do itself. Pressing is local again now, in smaller plants that are worse at it. Paramount on Melrose is the last of the majors still inside Hollywood proper. Sunset Bronson and Sunset Gower take everyone else's overflow, and the work that can't be done on a permitted lot gets done in the old soundstages off Santa Monica Boulevard.

Canon reference: Hollywood on the Sixth World Wiki, for the published version. Where it and this page disagree, this page is what happened here.

What the crew knows

• The line is about four blocks wide. You can walk from a gated street to a boulevard where nobody will help you in under ten minutes, and everyone who lives here knows exactly where that line is.
• The studios run their own security and their own courier logistics, and their content is worth more than most cargo in the port. Simsense piracy is the district's real economy.
• Chips are everywhere on the boulevards. The good stuff comes out of the lots through somebody's cousin; the bad stuff is cooked locally and takes people apart.
• Residential hotels are the best place in Los Angeles to not exist for a month, and the worst place to leave anything you need.
• Hill people call patrol. Boulevard people don't, because there's nobody to call and never has been.

Getting in

Nothing gates the flats. The hills are private roads, gate codes, and patrol cars that will follow a vehicle they don't recognise for as long as it takes.

The lots are credentialed, badged and unionised, and a crew badge gets you further inside them than any forged executive ID will.