If your idea of Hollywood is Lindsay, Paris and Kim, TMZ has a tour for you.
Harvey Levin's internet and TV tabloid juggernaut has gotten into the bus-tour business, ferrying tourists and locals around Hollywood, West Hollywood and Beverly Hills three or four times a day on a snarky, gossipy two-hour tour that bites the hand that feeds it and bypasses a lot of the things you'd normally expect on a Hollywood tour.
This, for instance, is a tour that takes you to the site of the first Academy Awards, the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, and then ignores that particular piece of history as it focuses on the fact that the place used to employ Lindsay Lohan's girlfriend as a deejay.
It drives you through an historic West Hollywood intersection that was the location of Schwab's drugstore and the Garden of Allah apartments (home to F. Scott Fitzgerald, Humphrey Bogart, Marlene Dietrich, Orson Welles and many others).
That same intersection is also the site of the Sunset Strip Riots and the inspiration for two classic rock songs, Joni Mitchell's "Big Yellow Taxi" and Buffalo Springfield's "For What It's Worth."
But don't expect to hear about any of that stuff, because the TMZ bus is way too busy showing video of Michael Richards' racist Laugh Factory meltdown, which happened a block east.
And along the way, the tour manages to trash other tours (which, they say, amount to "Oh, that's Brad Pitt's mailbox!"), the Walk of Fame ("where celebrities pay $30,000 to get their own stars that homeless people can pee on"), O.J. Simpson (who, Levin explains on video, is legally a killer but not a murderer) and many of the stores and restaurants the tour passes (Kitson is "a store of overpriced crap," Mr. Chow the home of "wildly overrated meals").
Paris Hilton, the tour informs us, is "not very bright," Tori Spelling is talentless, and Drew Carey is "no Bob Barker, though he tries."
The TMZ Tour is no Starline (though it is operated by Starline), and it certainly isn't the tour for anybody who wants Hollywood history that dates back much further than Lindsay Lohan's first arrest.
No, that's unfair: it goes all the way back to Hugh Grant's and Winona Ryder's arrests.
This is a tour for people who think Hollywood is full of sleazy no-talents but who are nonetheless fascinated by every last one of 'em, and a tour from people who love simultaneously mocking and riding that sleaze all the way to the bank.
It's fun, in a dirty kind of way, but you sort of need a shower afterwards even if you don't go on a hot day.
This Wrap writer took the tour on the Fourth of July weekend, giving up a Saturday morning to ride the bus and hear all about the starlets and studmuffins I normally try to avoid.
And while it was a couple of hours of mildly entertaining sleaze, I figure the tour deserves a breakdown in the same snarky tone with which they treat everything they show us.
