The Building Blocks of Publicity

Sometimes LAist wishes we lived in a city that wasn't all about the movies and publicizing them. Somtimes LAist wishes we could go down a city block without being overshadowed by a building-sized fish featuring the voice of Will Smith (Highland and Santa Monica), or a Christmas-Kranked Jamie Lee Curtis (Beverly and Robertson) or the huge monoliths on Sunset Boulevard. Sometimes LAist wishes the movie studios would pay us to have huge movie banners pasted on the outside of our homes.

Because it's coming next.

Sure, you can go around your city and laugh or ignore the fact that any tall building in town also has a double-use as a billboard and you can say that it's because of the town that we live in, but when does enough become enough? When studios post movie posters at the urinals? (Oops, already done.) When studios put movie posters on the backs of valet parking tickets? (Oops, that's going on.) When studios get local city officials to plaster their movie posters on your city-owned garbage cans (blue for recycling, black for trash, green for foliage)?

Blue for tentpole movies opening this weekend.
Green for TV shows with November sweeps episodes you can't miss.
Black for independent features sure to be the sleeper of the month.

At what point does advertising become overblown? At what point does it define a city? At what point does a place like Los Angeles become one huge billboard?

At what point does it stop?

(These are not rhetorical questions, by the way.)