Lifestyle
Lassie has one. So do Kermit and Godzilla. Why can't P-22 have a star in Hollywood?
• Famed cougar P-22 is a rock star in the wildlife world, inspiring a novel, songs, murals, documentaries and festivals that have drawn thousands since his death in December 2022.
• An advocate credits his life story with making the Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing a reality and inspiring legislation to build more.
• But attempts to get P-22 a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame have been rebuffed. He’s one of L.A.’s biggest celebrities, advocates say. Why can’t he get a star?
An advocate for L.A.’s most famous feline, P-22, is asking why the puma can’t get a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, which has honorees including Lassie and Rin Tin Tin and fictional characters such as Batman and Godzilla.
“He is as Hollywood as anyone on that Walk of Fame,” conservationist Beth Pratt, regional executive director of the National Wildlife Federation and leader of the Save L.A. Cougars campaign, wrote in a text message Monday.
The stars cost money to install, more than $75,000, plus a $250 nomination application fee, but advocates say they’re confident they could easily raise the cash to honor one of L.A.’s biggest celebrities, who not only has plenty of recognition but also has made a real difference in the wildlife community. P-22’s story was used as inspiration for building the Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing in Agoura Hills and has led to legislation requiring jurisdictions around the state to create safe passages for wildlife.
Big cat photographer Steve Winter worked for 15 months to capture this famous photo of P-22 prowling under the Hollywood sign in Griffith Park on June 5, 2013, at 11:02 p.m.
(Steve Winter / National Wildlife Federation)
Attempts to get P-22 a star have been repeatedly rebuffed because the cougar doesn’t have enough screen credits, said Pratt, though there are four documentaries about him — “The Secret Diary of P-22,” “America’s Most Infamous Mountain Lion,” “P22: That Cat That Changed America” and its sequel, “Strong Hunter.”
But it isn’t screen credits per se that make someone eligible, said Ana Martinez, producer of the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce’s Hollywood Walk of Fame, which has been honoring stars on Hollywood Boulevard since 1958. Martinez has been at her post for 37 years, and she’s seen plenty of requests that haven’t made the cut.
“They have to be entertainers,” she said Monday. “He [P-22] is a beautiful animal, and I wish we could do something, but he doesn’t qualify. We get lots of requests — the Aflac duck wanted one, but he didn’t get one. They have to be entertainers in the entertainment business.”
A quick glance at the list of 2,793 names on the Walk of Fame reveals many names less recognizable than P-22’,s such as longtime Variety columnist Army Archerd and entertainer and impersonator Fred Travalena, as well as several stars featuring the names of characters that don’t exist in real life, including Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, Big Bird, Kermit the Frog, Shrek, Winnie the Pooh and Woody Woodpecker.
People crowd the sidewalk on Hollywood Boulevard posing or looking at stars on the Walk of Fame.
(Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times)
The cartoon characters are included to appeal to children walking the route, Martinez said. And again, she added, they are all entertainers.
There have been exceptions: The Apollo 11 mission got recognition on the Walk of Fame in 1973, “with a uniquely designed special award in the category of Television as a tribute to the first televised Walk on the Moon,” according to the Walk of Fame website. However, Martinez emphasized, Apollo 11’s recognition is in the form of round plaques at all four corners of Hollywood and Vine, listing the names of the astronauts involved in the first moon landing. “They do not have Walk of Fame stars,” she said.
P-22 walks out of a drain pipe in Griffith Park at 1:09 a.m. Dec.19, 2016, more than four years after he was first spotted in the park.
(Miguel Ordeñana)
In 2019, Car and Driver reported that the Chevrolet Suburban had gotten a star on the boulevard — “the first inanimate object to be so honored,” according to the publication, because “Chevy’s largest SUV has been in more than 1,750 films, and has made an appearance in a movie every year since 1960.” But that “star” was just a publicity stunt, Martinez said.
It was never actually installed on Hollywood Boulevard’s Walk of Fame. It was on private property, she said, and later, Chevrolet took the star on the road to display at shows.
Pratt disagrees with the idea that P-22 doesn’t qualify as an entertainer.
“He IS more Hollywood than any celebrity — the Brad Pitt of the cougar world. But did Brad actually sleep under the Hollywood sign at night?” Pratt said via text, referring to a famous Steve Winter photo of P-22 walking under the Hollywood sign at night.
That point is certainly debatable, but it’s hard to imagine a Hollywood script more dramatic and poignant than P-22’s life story.
He was born in the Santa Monica Mountains around 2010, and he must have had many adorable moments as a frolicking cub. But things got dark when he approached adulthood and had to flee his home to escape death from an older, stronger and very territorial male — his father, P-1 — whom researchers believe had already killed one of his mates and at least two of his cubs in the past.
A remote camera set by Miguel Ordeñana, a researcher at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, captured P-22 climbing down some rocks in Griffith Park.
(Miguel Ordeñana / Natural History Museum)
This is the way for male cougars, highly territorial creatures that prefer a “home range” of more than 100 square miles for hunting and mating. It’s complicated in Los Angeles, however, because those green spaces are crisscrossed with freeways that have led to the deaths of many other cougars that attempted to roam.
P-22 got lucky, however. The young tawny cougar with the broad, handsome features headed east for nearly 50 miles to escape his father, wandering through whatever green spaces he could find “and probably more than few backyards,” Pratt said.
Researchers believe he followed the backbone of the Santa Monica Mountains, crossing the 405 Freeway and then likely following the narrow green space along Mulholland Drive, Pratt said, to the 101 Freeway. Sometime in early February 2012, researchers believe he wandered off the Mulholland Scenic Parkway at the Jerome C. Daniel Overlook above the Hollywood Bowl and crossed the 101 to enter Griffith Park in the shadow of the Hollywood sign.
A map showing the 50-mile route researchers believe P-22 took between his birthplace in the Santa Monica Mountains to Griffith Park.
(Kate Keeley / National Wildlife Federation)
His entry was noticed almost immediately on Feb. 12, 2012, thanks to cameras set up by the Friends of Griffith Park to document wildlife there. “The Friends were doing a study with Miguel Ordeñana [of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County], and he was checking the cameras, zipping through thousands of photos of mostly skunks and coyotes and then he was like, ‘Oh, my God. Is that a mountain lion?,’” Pratt said last week. “It was like seeing Big Foot in Griffith Park. What a moment.”
It wasn’t long after that biologists were able to collar P-22 to track his movements, and for the next 10 years, he thrilled and sometimes terrified the community with infrequent sightings such as the time he decided to hang out under the crawl space of a family home in Los Feliz in 2015.
In March 2014, scientists captured P-22 after noticing crusting on his hair and skin and treated him for mange.
(National Park Service)
He was treated for a bad case of mange and other maladies in 2014, but he never found a mate, as far as scientists could discover, although Pratt holds out hope that his DNA will turn up in some young cougar someday. And he never left his tiny (at least for male cougars) territory around Griffith Park, which is just 6.5 square miles. He was basically trapped by human development, Pratt said, but there were plenty of deer there attracted by the many human-made “celebrity gardens” in the homes around the park. So even if P-22 was unlucky in love, his belly was likely full.
More important, though, was the way P-22 inspired people to recognize the plight of wildlife cut off from natural roaming grounds by freeways. His story helped make the Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing a reality, Pratt said. It’s under construction now in Agoura Hills with a scheduled opening in late 2025 or early 2026.
P-22 was hit by a car sometime in December 2022, and when doctors captured him to check his injuries on Dec. 12, they discovered he also had several untreatable health issues, including second-stage kidney failure, Pratt said. He was euthanized five days later, on Dec. 17, 2022, causing a great outpouring of grief, along with stories, documentaries, songs and festivals to celebrate his life. And his story inspired bipartisan legislation to create wildlife corridors around the state, Pratt said.
California Department of Fish and Wildlife captured a sickly and injured P-22 in the backyard of a home in the Los Feliz area of Los Angeles on Dec. 12, 2022.
(Sarah Picchi)
More than 15,000 people attended the first festival honoring his life last year, and at least 10,000 turned out for this year’s festival last Saturday, she said. It’s a rare Angeleno who doesn’t recognize the name P-22.
Pratt just completed the personal pilgrimage she’s made for the last nine years: following the 50-mile route P-22 took to escape his father and settle in Griffith Park.
With his tracking collar and remote cameras in and out of the park, P-22 was almost as surveilled as the title character in “The Truman Show.” Pratt had always longed to spot him in the wild, but she didn’t meet him face to face until the night before he was euthanized, when she sat outside his enclosure trying to soothe him with words.
“He didn’t have to, but he sat next to me; I could feel his breath,” she said, “and I told him he was a good boy.”
When they couldn’t get him a Walk of Fame star, Pratt commissioned L.A. artist Corie Mattie to give the puma a “star” in a mural on the side of a building at 6421 Hollywood Blvd., between Cahuenga Boulevard and Wilcox Avenue. The mural was officially unveiled Oct. 16.
The bright yellow, black and white mural includes a QR code that allows people with smartphones to project an image of a star honoring P-22 over a blank Walk of Fame star in front of the building. The National Wildlife Federation is also partnering with the Friends of Griffith Park to create a memorial at the park honoring the puma. (Artists can request details by sending an email to p22mountainlion@nwf.org by Dec. 31.)
Months after P-22 was treated for mange in March 2014, he seemed much healthier in this image captured by a remote camera.
(National Park Service)
Despite all this recognition for P-22, Pratt said she won’t give up on getting him his spot on the Walk of Fame.
“The mural is an amazing tribute, but he deserves a star,” Pratt wrote in a text. “You cannot over-memorialize P-22. People in L.A. and all over the world have a deep connection to him that didn’t end with his death. And what a wonderful precedent to have a wild animal on the Walk of Fame to inspire people to help protect the wild world. P-22 is a celebrity. And in Hollywood, celebrities never die.”
A screenshot from George Mélière’s Gugusse et l’Automate. The pioneering French filmmaker’s 1897 short, which likely features the first known depiction of a robot on film, was thought lost until it was found among a box of old reels that had belonged to a family in Michigan and restored by the Library of Congress.
The Frisbee Collection/Library of Congress
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The Frisbee Collection/Library of Congress
The Library of Congress has found and restored a long-lost silent film by Georges Méliès.
The famed 19th century French filmmaker is best known for his groundbreaking 1902 science fiction adventure masterpiece Le Voyage dans la Lune (A Trip to the Moon).
The 45-second-long, one-reel short Gugusse et l’Automate – Gugusse and the Automaton – was made nearly 130 years ago. But the subject matter still feels timely. The film, which can be viewed on the Library of Congress’ website, depicts a child-sized robot clown who grows to the size of an adult and then attacks a human clown with a stick. The human then decimates the machine with a hammer.
In an Instagram post, Library of Congress moving image curator Jason Evans Groth said the film represents, “probably the first instance of a robot ever captured in a moving image.” (The word “robot” didn’t appear until 1921, when Czech dramatist Karel Čapek coined it in his science fiction play R.U.R..)
“Today, many of us are worried about AI and robots,” said archivist and filmmaker Rick Prelinger, in an email to NPR. “Well, people were thinking about robots in 1897. Very little is new.”
A long journey
Groth said the film arrived in a box last September from a donor in Michigan, Bill McFarland. “Bill’s great grandfather, William Frisbee, was a person who loved technology,” Groth said. “And in the late 19th century, must have bought a projector and a bunch of films and decided to drive them around in his buggy to share them with folks in Pennsylvania, Ohio, New York.”
McFarland didn’t know what was on the 10 rusty reels he dropped off at the Library of Congress’ National Audio-Visual Conservation Center in Culpeper, Va. A Library article about the discovery describes the battered, pre-World War I artifacts as having been, “shuttled around from basements to barns to garages,” and that they, “could no longer be safely run through a projector,” owing to their delicate condition. “The nitrate film stock had crumbled to bits on some; other strips were stuck together,” the article said. It was a lab technician in Michigan who suggested McFarland contact the Library of Congress.
“The moment we set our eyes on this box of film, we knew it was something special,” said George Willeman, who heads up the Library’s nitrate film vault, in the article.
Willeman’s team carefully inspected the trove of footage, which also contained another well-known Méliès film, Nouvelles Luttes extravagantes (The Fat and Lean Wrestling Match) and parts of The Burning Stable, an early Thomas Edison work. With the help of an external expert, they identified the reel as having been created by Méliès because it features a star painted on a pedestal in the center of the screen – the logo for Méliès Star Film Company.
A pioneering filmmaker
Méliès was one of the great pioneers of cinema. The scene in which a rocket lands playfully in the eye of Méliès’ anthropomorphic moon in Le Voyage dans la Lune is one of the most famous moments in cinematic history. And he helped to popularize such special effects as multiple exposures and time-lapse photography.
This moment from George Méliès’ Le Voyage dans la Lune (A Trip to the Moon) is considered to be one of the most famous in cinematic history.
George Méliès/Public Domain
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George Méliès/Public Domain
Presumed lost until the Library of Congress’s discovery, Gugusse et L’Automate loomed large in the imaginations of science fiction and early cinema buffs for more than a century. In their 1977 book Things to Come: An Illustrated History of the Science Fiction Film, authors Douglas Menville and R. Reginald described Gugusse as possibly being, “the first true SF [science fiction] film.”
“While it may seem that no more discoveries remain to be made, that’s not the case,” said Prelinger of the work’s reappearance. “Here’s a genuine discovery from the early days of film that no one anticipated.”
Joshua Jackson
I Got the Eye of the Tiger!!!
Published
BACKGRID
Joshua Jackson may have picked up a thing or two from “Karate Kid: Legends” … we got video of him going H.A.M. in a boxing gym with a trainer.
Watch the video … the 47-year-old actor ditched his shirt for the workout, really working up a sweat as he bobbed and weaved in the ring while throwing in some pretty impressive jabs!
He later goes to work solo on a speed bag like an old pro.
Joshua has publicly said that starring in “Karate Kid: Legends” in the role of a former boxer was a dream for him, but there’s no word on whether he’s training for another role or just really fell in love with boxing.
Either way … you’re looking great, Joshua!
Tracy Morgan, left, and Daniel Radcliffe star in The Fall and Rise of Reggie Dinkins.
Scott Gries/NBC
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Scott Gries/NBC
Tracy Morgan, as a presence, as a persona, bends the rules of comedy spacetime around him.
Consider: He’s constitutionally incapable of tossing off a joke or an aside, because he never simply delivers a line when he can declaim it instead. He can’t help but occupy the center of any given scene he’s in — his abiding, essential weirdness inevitably pulls focus. Perhaps most mystifying to comedy nerds is the way he can take a breath in the middle of a punchline and still, somehow, land it.
That? Should be impossible. Comedy depends on, is entirely a function of, timing; jokes are delicate constructs of rhythms that take time and practice to beat into shape for maximum efficiency. But never mind that. Give this guy a non-sequitur, the nonner the better, and he’ll shout that sucker at the top of his fool lungs, and absolutely kill, every time.
Well. Not every time, and not everywhere. Because Tracy Morgan is a puzzle piece so oddly shaped he won’t fit into just any world. In fact, the only way he works is if you take the time and effort to assiduously build the entire puzzle around him.
Thankfully, the makers of his new series, The Fall and Rise of Reggie Dinkins, understand that very specific assignment. They’ve built the show around Morgan’s signature profile and paired him with an hugely unlikely comedy partner (Daniel Radcliffe).
The co-creators/co-showrunners are Robert Carlock, who was one of the showrunners on 30 Rock and co-created The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, and Sam Means, who also worked on Girls5eva with Carlock and has written for 30 Rock and Kimmy Schmidt.
These guys know exactly what Morgan can do, even if 30 Rock relegated him to function as a kind of comedy bomb-thrower. He’d enter a scene, lob a few loud, puzzling, hilarious references that would blow up the situation onscreen, and promptly peace out through the smoke and ash left in his wake.
That can’t happen on Reggie Dinkins, as Tracy is the center of both the show, and the show-within-the-show. He plays a former NFL star disgraced by a gambling scandal who’s determined to redeem himself in the public eye. He brings in an Oscar-winning documentarian Arthur Tobin (Radcliffe) to make a movie about him and his current life.
Tobin, however, is determined to create an authentic portrait of a fallen hero, and keeps goading Dinkins to express remorse — or anything at all besides canned, feel-good platitudes. He embeds himself in Dinkins’ palatial New Jersey mansion, alongside Dinkins’ fiancée Brina (Precious Way), teenage son Carmelo (Jalyn Hall) and his former teammate Rusty (Bobby Moynihan), who lives in the basement.
If you’re thinking this means Reggie Dinkins is a show satirizing the recent rise of toothless, self-flattering documentaries about athletes and performers produced in collaboration with their subjects, you’re half-right. The show feints at that tension with some clever bits over the course of the season, but it’s never allowed to develop into a central, overarching conflict, because the show’s more interested in the affinity between Dinkins and Tobin.
Tobin, it turns out, is dealing with his own public disgrace — his emotional breakdown on the set of a blockbuster movie he was directing has gone viral — and the show becomes about exploring what these two damaged men can learn from each other.
On paper, sure: It’s an oil-and-water mixture: Dinkins (loud, rich, American, Black) and Tobin (uptight, pretentious, British, practically translucent). Morgan’s in his element, and if you’re not already aware of what a funny performer Radcliffe can be, check him out on the late lamented Miracle Workers.
Whenever these two characters are firing fusillades of jokes at each other, the series sings. But, especially in the early going, the showrunners seem determined to put Morgan and Radcliffe together in quieter, more heartfelt scenes that don’t quite work. It’s too reductive to presume this is because Morgan is a comedian and Radcliffe is an actor, but it’s hard to deny that they’re coming at those moments from radically different places, and seem to be directing their energies past each other in ways that never quite manage to connect.
Precious Way as Brina.
Scott Gries/NBC
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Scott Gries/NBC
It’s one reason the show flounders out of the gate, as typical pilot problems pile up — every secondary character gets introduced in a hurry and assigned a defining characteristic: Brina (the influencer), Rusty (the loser), Carmelo (the TV teen). It takes a bit too long for even the great Erika Alexander, who plays Dinkins’ ex-wife and current manager Monica, to get something to play besides the uber-competent, work-addicted businesswoman.
But then, there are the jokes. My god, these jokes.
Reggie Dinkins, like 30 Rock and Kimmy Schmidt before it, is a joke machine, firing off bit after bit after bit. But where those shows were only too happy to exist as high-key joke-engines first, and character comedies second, Dinkins is operating in a slightly lower register. It’s deliberately pitched to feel a bit more grounded, a bit less frenetic. (To be fair: Every show in the history of the medium can be categorized as more grounded and less frenetic than 30 Rock and Kimmy Schmidt — but Reggie Dinkins expressly shares those series’ comedic approach, if not their specific joke density.)
While the hit rate of Reggie Dinkins‘ jokes never achieves 30 Rock status, rest assured that in episodes coming later in the season it comfortably hovers at Kimmy Schmidt level. Which is to say: Two or three times an episode, you will encounter a joke that is so perfect, so pure, so diamond-hard that you will wonder how it has taken human civilization until 2026 Common Era to discover it.
And that’s the key — they feel discovered. The jokes I’m talking about don’t seem painstakingly wrought, though of course they were. No, they feel like they have always been there, beneath the earth, biding their time, just waiting to be found. (Here, you no doubt will be expecting me to provide some examples. Well, I’m not gonna. It’s not a critic’s job to spoil jokes this good by busting them out in some lousy review. Just watch the damn show to experience them as you’re meant to; you’ll know which ones I’m talking about.)
Now, let’s you and I talk about Bobby Moynihan.
As Rusty, Dinkins’ devoted ex-teammate who lives in the basement, Moynihan could have easily contented himself to play Pathetic Guy™ and leave it at that. Instead, he invests Rusty with such depths of earnest, deeply felt, improbably sunny emotions that he solidifies his position as show MVP with every word, every gesture, every expression. The guy can shuffle into the far background of a shot eating cereal and get a laugh, which is to say: He can be literally out-of-focus and still steal focus.
Which is why it doesn’t matter, in the end, that the locus of Reggie Dinkins‘ comedic energy isn’t found precisely where the show’s premise (Tracy Morgan! Daniel Radcliffe! Imagine the chemistry!) would have you believe it to be. This is a very, very funny — frequently hilarious — series that prizes well-written, well-timed, well-delivered jokes, and that knows how to use its actors to serve them up in the best way possible. And once it shakes off a few early stumbles and gets out of its own way, it does that better than any show on television.
This piece also appeared in NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour newsletter. Sign up for the newsletter so you don’t miss the next one, plus get weekly recommendations about what’s making us happy.
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