Los Angeles Showed Its True Colors After Sept. 11

One morning in October 2001 — about a month after Sept. 11 — Los Angeles woke up with a new landmark. Towering over the intersection at Wilshire and Westwood, covering the entire side of a 12-story building, was a 60-foot-tall, fully glammed-up soldier in combat fatigues cradling an M-16. She looked like a Victoria’s Secret model who’d wandered into Fallujah — beautiful, scary and ridiculous — but at the time she somehow made perfect sense.

Twenty-five years on, it’s hard to remember just how terrified Hollywood was after 9/11. Studios turned into fortresses: Warners closed its gates and put up concrete barriers, Fox set up a cement maze, and Paramount guards used mirrors to search underneath cars for bombs. Trunks were opened, IDs checked, tours canceled — everyone was petrified the backlots might be next on al-Qaida’s hit list.

Meanwhile, half the entertainment Hollywood had been making suddenly looked horrifying. Big Trouble, a Tim Allen comedy about smuggling a nuclear device onto a plane, was supposed to open Sept. 21. Disney pushed it to April. Bad Company, a spy spoof starring Chris Rock and Anthony Hopkins as agents trying to stop a suitcase bomb from detonating in Manhattan, moved from Christmas to June. And Collateral Damage, with Arnold Schwarzenegger as a firefighter whose family is killed in a terrorist skyscraper bombing, was held from October until February.

In that jittery autumn, the giant soldier in Westwood didn’t seem as ridiculous as she does now. Her creator, renegade billboard artist Mike McNeilly, may have had his own motives for putting her up without a permit — he claimed free speech when City Hall ordered her removal. Still, he somehow devised the perfect avatar for L.A. at that moment: frightened but defiant, patriotic but tacky, absurdly over-the-top and, even with the world coming apart, determined to look hot while holding an M-16.

This story appeared in the Sept. 9 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.