Grauman's Chinese Theatre: The Cement Set in Nineteen Twenty-Seven

Sid Grauman opened his Chinese Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard on May eighteenth, nineteen twenty-seven, with the world premiere of Cecil B. DeMille's King of Kings. The building was extraordinary: a forecourt of red lacquered columns and stone foo dogs, a pagoda tower, carved dragons, the entire vocabulary of a stylized Chinese imperial architecture filtered through Hollywood's instinct for spectacle.

Within weeks of opening, the forecourt cement tradition began. Accounts differ on exactly how it started. The most widely told version credits silent film star Norma Talmadge with accidentally stepping into wet cement during construction, and Grauman formalizing the mishap into a ritual. Whether Talmadge's foot was first is documented in lore more reliably than in the primary record.

What followed over the next century was something genuinely without precedent: a running index of physical human presence. Humphrey Bogart, seventeen years before his death. Elizabeth Taylor, at the age of twenty-three. Jack Nicholson. The Harlem Globetrotters, who pressed their sneakers into the cement in nineteen seventy-six. More than two hundred individual entries over ninety-seven years, each one dated, each one irreversibly set.

The cement is, in its way, the only honest archive in Hollywood: it tells you exactly when people were alive, and it does not edit.