CELEBRITY: This tree at the corner of Folsom and Indiana streets in Los Angeles, is known as El Pino Famoso and was featured for just a few seconds in a 1993 movie about LA gangs called Blood In, Blood Out. Despite its short appearance, it has garnered a cult following.
By Hector Becerra
After travelling to Los Angeles from a small town in Hungary, Richard Hellenbort could have shadowed the Brentwood Country Mart, the Chateau Marmont or the Ivy hoping to catch a glimpse of stars such as Kobe, Brad or Angelina.
But the celebrity he was looking for was a tall, dark and scruffy one named Araucaria bidwillii, whose last (and only) role was more than 20 years ago in Blood In Blood Out, a cult movie about gangs and family and betrayal on the Eastside. Luckily, this star never gets around town: Hellenbort found the Australian conifer where it always is: up the hill from a carnitas shop in East Los Angeles.
Taking a video selfie in front of the tree, Hellenbort spread the fingers of his left hand into the sign of a gang that exists only in the film and, doing his best East LA accent, intoned: “Vatos Locos forever.”
Hellenbort, 34, said that on his list of places to see, the tree was up there with NWA rapper Eazy-E’s grave in Rose Hills.
“I know some people dream about visiting the Eiffel Tower or the big wall in China. But that was my dream,” he said of visiting the towering tree — which, perhaps fittingly, has needles like little switchblades.
Plenty of places in Los Angeles have gotten their close-ups with the camera over the years, including the Griffith Observatory in Rebel Without a Cause, City Hall in Dragnet, the Silver Lake stairs where Laurel and Hardy tried to deliver a piano in Music Box and the solitary Bunker Hill bench in (500) Days of Summer.
But the strangest slice of celebrity might belong to El Pino Famoso. In a case of Hollywood fiction becoming reality, an anonymous tree in an unremarkable neighbourhood of stucco homes is cast as a landmark — and becomes one.
The tree doesn’t appear on any tour bus routes or maps of Hollywood stars’ homes. But neighbours say people of all races have made pilgrimages from as far away as China and as close as Boyle Heights. “They come over here and chill, looking at the tree,” said Daniel Gomez, 18, a gang member who grew up in the neighbourhood. “It’s nothing new to me. It’s just a tree. The pino. The famous pino.”
The vaguely peacock feather-shaped tree was portrayed in director Taylor Hackford’s Blood In Blood Out as a touchstone to the characters, a place that cousins Miklo, Paco and Cruz — who became a prison gang boss, an artist and a cop, respectively — kept returning to. In perhaps the best-known scene starring the tree, Miklo stares at it longingly and says, “That tree is East Los to me. It’s good to be home.”
But the tree wasn’t well-known before the movie. It’s atop a twisty, hilly neighborhood that isn’t easy to get to. And El Pino Famoso, botanically speaking, isn’t even a pine tree.
Hackford, whose better-known works include Ray and An Officer and a Gentleman, said he wanted to find “some kind of a rallying point” for the film. He was eating at Los 5 Puntos, a restaurant on what was then Brooklyn Avenue, when he spotted the tree.
“I’m eating a tamale and I look up there and there’s this very interesting tree. A really big tree, up on a hill,” Hackford recalled. “It was a perfect place for these guys to get together. I started asking around and people didn’t really have a sense of it. I’m not saying people in the community didn’t know about the tree. But there didn’t seem to be a story about the tree, or a legend about it.”
So he created one.
“I wanted an ethos, a landmark, a kind of epic place that would signify East Los Angeles for them in the future, because they kept coming back to El Pino,” Hackford said. “It was just a cinematic creation.”
Tell that to the tree’s fans.
One writer on the blog for the show East Los High wrote that Morrissey, the former frontman for the English band the Smiths who has a fanatical Mexican American following in LA, was said to have been spotted visiting the tree. While to some that may seem as likely as the famously sensitive Morrissey singing thrash metal, it adds to the tree’s legend.
While doing a tour in Iraq, the writer said his friend was chatting with Australian soldiers who beamed when they heard he was from East LA. “Do you know El Pino?” they asked, according to the blogger.
Though the action was set in the 1970s and ’80s, the film came out in the early 1990s, when LA was going through a bloody period of gang warfare. The movie, which featured Benjamin Bratt and Billy Bob Thornton, was not a hit, but as Hackford would later learn, it had an unusually broad following.
Hackford said that while he was speaking to a class of high school students in southern England a few years ago, he rattled off the films he had made. When he mentioned Blood In Blood Out, the reaction was surprising.
“One of the kids just lit up. He could quote lines, and he asked me about El Pino,” Hackford said. “He said that if he ever went to Los Angeles, he was going to visit El Pino.” — Los Angeles Times/MCT
Ashton Kutcher dances
to Bollywood number
Actor Ashton Kutcher recently grooved to the Bollywood tune at an Indian friend’s wedding wearing an aqua blue, embroidered kurta and a flowing white dhoti teamed up with turban, reports eonline.com. He was accompanied with pregnant fiance Mila Kunis when he attended the wedding at the Borgo Egnazia Resort in Savelletri di Fasano, Italy.
Kutcher, 36, sported what appeared be an aqua blue, embroidered kurta and a flowing white dhoti, or long loincloth while Kunis, 30, wore a mint gown with a drop waist, which hid her baby bump, and silver accents.
Details about the wedding were not released, although photos have been posted online and one of the pictures shows Kutcher treating the crowd to a traditional Bollywood-style dance, reports eonline.com.
He danced with a female dancer, who sported a one-shoulder clover green dress and leggings. Kunis and Kutcher began dating in early spring of 2012 and went public with their engagement earlier this year.
Kutcher was previously married to Demi Moore. The two have no children together and split in 2011 after six years of marriage. They finalised their divorce in 2013. — IANS
Tori Spelling wants
to rebrand herself
Actress Tori Spelling reportedly wants to rebrand herself without her husband Dean McDermott for the sake of her career. Spelling, who documented her battle to save her seven-year-old marriage on her latest reality TV series True Tori, after her husband checked into rehab following a two-day affair with another woman in December, recently said that she is still working on their relationship, but friends say she is eager to distance herself from him professionally, reports femalefirst.co.uk.
A source close to the 41-year-old actress, who recently changed her Twitter handle from @ToriandDean to @ToriSpelling, was quoted by In Touch magazine as saying: “This is the social media equivalent of a separation.”
“Dean was part of her brand. Now she’s adroitly rebranding herself with out.”
McDermott is currently in Toronto, Canada, filming a new series of Chopped Canada, while Tori is focusing on promoting her new series here with actress Jennie Garth. “If I were Dean, I’d be worried. This is one of the first steps in Tori asserting her independence, but it’s an important one,” said the source. — IANS