Named after the "thirty mile zone" that defined Hollywood in the 1930s, AOL's new entertainment site TMZ.com goes live today. Expect many illicit "stars-behaving-badly" viral videos to follow.
One item on the site this morning relates to an eBay auction purporting to offer "The old Hollywood sign" for sale. The listing generated so much confusion in recent weeks that the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce issued a news release to reporters last night, which reads in part (sorry, no copy online):
Hollywood Chamber President and CEO Leron Gubler emphatically affirms: "The existing Hollywood Sign (…) is not, and never will be, for sale. When the Chamber rebuilt the Sign in 1978, we built it to last, and it is now being well maintained by the Hollywood Sign Trust."
The confusion began Tuesday evening, when during an EBay auction, fragments of the "HOLLYWOOD" Sign, built in 1949, were purchased for $450,000. The seller was a West Los Angeles entrepreneur who had acquired the Sign from an individual who had obtained the remains of the Sign in 1978, and who had kept it in storage for decades.
