Pamela Littky

Like many apartment buildings in Hollywood, the Villa Bonita was built during the film industry’s first heyday bridging the 1920s to the 1930s. Built for the vast crews and casts that Cecil B.DeMille was hiring during his fertile period, the Villa Bonita has housed great Hollywood figures from Errol Flynn to Francis Ford Coppola. In absence of traditionally scaled, walkable neighborhoods, Los Angeles has long created community within the confines of these kinds of apartment complexes. Young and old, employed and between gigs, dreamers and those whose dreams left long ago –everyone arrived at the Villa Bonita for one good reason or another. In a series of photographs that brings us into intimate distance of its subjects, The Villa Bonita surveys all of the inhabitants of this historic apartment tower in the middle of Hollywood, creating a collective portrait of the transient nature of the city. Those residents who have been there for decades reconcile themselves to the increasingly diverse group who all live under the same roof, including those who, like so many people before them, are just passing through.