8MM | You Are the Star Mural, Wilcox Avenue — the empty seat left for you

The wall has been painted since 1983. Thomas Suriya filled it with a movie theater seen from the screen's side: rows of stars in the dark, Chaplin and Monroe and Bogart and Dean, all of them turned outward toward Wilcox Avenue, and one seat in the front row left conspicuously empty. It is called You Are the Star. Tourists photograph it and grin at the joke.

8MM stops Tom Welles in front of it, and the joke stops being funny. He has flown into Los Angeles carrying a reel he wishes he had never threaded, hunting a girl who left home and was never looked for again. The mural promises the city's oldest bargain — come here and be seen. The case he is working is the proof of what happens to the people the bargain forgets. Joel Schumacher put those two things in the same frame and let them sit.

The mural is at 1648 N Wilcox Avenue, half a block off Hollywood Boulevard, painted on the flank of a low commercial building above a parking lot. There is no plaque and no ticket. Walk up, stand in the sightline of that empty chair, and notice how quickly you look away.

Photo: Hollywood Boulevard, Wikimedia Commons.