Chateau Marmont

thumb|Chateau Marmont Chateau Marmont, located in Los Angeles at 8221 Sunset Boulevard, is a hotel, notable for the many celebrities who stay there as short-term guests or long-term residents. Inspired by the Château d'Amboise Chateau d'Amboise, the attorney Fred Horowitz commissioned the architects Arnold A. Weitzman and William Douglas Lee to design an apartment building, which opened in February 1929. Because of the Great Depression, the apartment building was not a financial success and, after a change of ownership, was converted into a hotel, which opened in 1931. In 1976, Chateau Marmont was designated a Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument. Quotes Ray and I regarded our new acquisition as an investment, nothing more. It wasn't until Ray moved in and the renovation began that our thinking began to change. The Marmot, we discovered, was a most friendly castle. The atmosphere was warm and genuinely real. We fell in love with the place.As the months passed, we met many of the Marmont's guests. There were regulars, wonderful people, like Tony Randall, Maximilian Schell, Colleen Dewhurst, Carol Lynley, Richard Gere, Donald Sutherland, Diane Keaton, Lauren Hutton, Lee Grant, Lorne Michaels, and Robert De Niro. Karl Kantarjian in the foreword to: Foreword Life at the Marmont: The Inside Story of Hollywood's Legendary Hotel of the Stars—Chateau Marmont Sarlot, Raymond Basten, Fred E. Penguin 2013 0143123114 https://books.google.com/books?id=GedvDwAAQBAJ&pg=PR17 xv–xviii (quote from p. xvii) A month after buying the Sunset Strip property with business partner Karl Kantarjian, Sarlot moved in and oversaw its renovation over the next few years. The walls and floors were redone, tacky plastic fixtures were banished, pilfered antiques were replaced, and the pool was rebuilt. The new owners also added more guest bungalows, including the one where actor John Belushi would later be found dead. ...The most notorious event in the Marmont’s history occurred in 1982, when Belushi was found dead of a drug overdose in Bungalow 3.When the news broke, Sarlot was having lunch with Kantarjian in Beverly Hills and rushed back to the hotel. “It was bedlam,” he said in his book. “The place was swarming with outsiders,” not only police but reporters and scores of curiosity-seekers. ...After Belushi’s death, the worst experience Sarlot may have had at his beloved hotel occurred in 1984, when he saw a copy of author Bob Woodward’s newly published biography of the comic actor, “Wired (book) Wired.”On the inside flap, Woodward had written that Belushi died “in a seedy hotel bungalow off Sunset Boulevard.”Sarlot and Kantarjian sued Woodward’s publisher for $18 million in damages. Woodward subsequently apologized, explaining that he had been referring to the squalid state of Belushi’s room on the day he died, not the hotel itself. The lawsuit was dropped. Elaine Woo, Raymond Sarlot, investor who restored Chateau Marmont, dies at 89 May 10, 2014 Los Angeles Times https://www.latimes.com/local/obituaries/la-me-raymond-sarlot-20140510-story.html The Castle on Sunset (2019) From Greta Garbo to Howard Hughes, Bette Davis to Marilyn Monroe, Jim Morrison to Tony Randall, Johnny Depp to Lindsay Lohan, Chateau Marmot has drawn the most iconoclastic and outlandish personalities from the worlds of film, music, and other creative arts. It has been the site of wild parties and scandalous liaisons, of creative breakthroughs and marital breakdowns, of one-night stands and days-long parties, of famous triumphs and untimely deaths. Shawn Levy, The Castle on Sunset: Life, Death, Love, Art, and Scandal at Hollywood's Chateau Marmont Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group 2020 0525435662 https://books.google.com/books?id=1wDfDwAAQBAJ&pg=PA1 1 (1st edition, 2019) The story of Chateau Marmont parallel the story of Hollywood so thoroughly as to be inseparable from it: the Silent film#Silent era silent era, the Studio system golden age of the studios, the Golden Age of Television rise of television, the influx of World cinema foreign cinema, the New Hollywood rebel heyday of the sixties and seventies, the Blockbuster (entertainment)#Blockbuster era blockbuster era, the Independent film indie movie upsurge, and the current mingling of film and digital media. p. 4 In October 1932, Los Angeles newspapers carried accounts of the Chateau Marmont for $750,000 cash* to Albert E. Smith (producer) Albert E. Smith, one of the men who had built from scratch the Cinema of the United States business that would help define Southern California for the world.* Approximately $13.977 million in 2019 p. 32 External links Look At This!: Chateau Marmont KCAL News, YouTube March 14, 2023 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D81ajIIdZ_g The fascinating history of Chateau Marmont: Hollywood's iconic landmark Strange History X, YouTube June 11, 2022 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYZPCBfi6xE Category:Hotels in the United States Category:Los Angeles