All of LA’s a set and all the men and women in it merely actors.

Everything seems a cliché from the movies. The pap-pa-pap-pap of impatient drivers. The apocalyptic howl of the siren on a ladder truck. The Harpo Marx horn on the fire truck behind it. The cops congregating in the coffee shop. Their angular black and white cars with chirping sirens and “To protect and to serve” on the doors.

There is, in the hills, the establishing shot from numberless movies – the stock symbol of the movie business – a seventies replica of a twenties advert for a housing development: forty-five foot letters erratically spaced to spell HO LLY W OOD.

‘Hollywood’ is an anachronistic shorthand now, like ‘Fleet Street’ for the London press. Of the old majors from Hollywood’s Golden Age, roughly between Warner’s The Jazz Singer in 1927 and Universal’s The Birds in 1963, only Paramount remains. The rest of what is now the Big Six long ago moved out into Los Angeles County.

Hollywood Boulevard has the much-photographed, much-parodied Walk of Fame with its 2,500 pink stars embossed with the names of the biggest stars in this city of stars; it has Grauman’s Chinese Theater with the hand and footprints of more big stars, and the Dolby Theater where another constellation of stars assembles each year for the Oscars.

But it soon fades to the west into soulless suburbia and to the east into discount stores and beyond to Thai Town and Little Armenia. Drop two blocks south and you are on the legendary Sunset Boulevard, but east of the Strip, it is a characterless stretch of gas stations and orthodontists.

Universal Studios is not technically in LA, because it stands on a 415 acre plot of unincorporated land within the city boundary. Los Angeles firemen have access to it but Los Angeles taxmen do not. It is part working studio, part theme park, and all tourist trap. But it is as good a way as any to pass an afternoon in LA, if you check your pretensions in at the door.

A tram takes you through generic sets which you have seen in dozens of movies: a Wild West town, a Mexican village, the business district of every city in the world with skyscrapers which stop at third floor level and a square of townhouses which can be anywhere from eighteenth century Vienna to Hell’s Kitchen last week. It passes through the sets of War of the Worlds, with a real Boeing 747 chopped into pieces among ruined houses, Jaws, where ‘Bruce’ the mechanical shark breaks out of the water as the tram approaches, and Psycho where an actor dressed as Norman Bates dumps Marion’s body in the trunk of the Ford and stumps towards you with a knife.

There is a simulated flash flood and a simulated earthquake, in which the tram shakes and everything around it disintegrates; there is a collection of cars from the movies, a demonstration of special effects, a room of memorabilia, and movie-themed roller coasters.

It is crassly commercial, of course; it is as cheesy as a family-sized quattro formaggi pizza. But you can hardly attack it for that. Might as well attack an elephant for being big and having a trunk.

© Richard Senior 2015