Classic Mr NYC

The one and only time that I've been to Los Angeles was in late March 1995. My brother was living there and I visited him during my Spring break. I was there for a week and we drove north with a friend and visited San Francisco and then drove back along the Pacific Coast Highway, visiting San Simeon and gorgeous Central Valley places like Monterrey and Carmel.

I blogged about it extensively in 2018. And I concluded the post about how, just before I boarded my flight back home to NYC, I spoke to my dad by phone, informing me of my college acceptance.

Something I didn't mention, however, because it was totally irrelevant, was that my last full night in LA was the same night as the 67th annual Academy Awards. It was the same night that Forrest Gump swept the Oscars but also when Quentin Tarantino won Best Original Screenplay for Pulp Fiction. 

So I was fascinated to stumble upon an article about the Oscar party held that night in LA by Harvey Weinstein and his company Miramax that had produced Pulp Fiction. Apparently, in a city and business known for wild parties, this was the wildest party in Oscar history. Many big stars at the time congregated, people got into fistfights, Harvey Weinstein threatened to go steal the Oscars from the Forrest Gump people -- and a wanted criminal crashed the party, apparently being persued by the cops while Hollywood partied.

It was, apparently, the last kind of wild, out-of-control Oscar party that Hollywood used to have. In the decades afterwards, the business and the parties became more sedate. And as you always see when you look at a moment frozen in time, some of the people at the party have continued to thrive -- like Leonardo DiCaprio, Jodie Foster, Samuel L Jackson -- while others -- like the host, Harvey Weinstein himself, and Kevin Spacey -- went into infamy ... and prison.

And to think that yours truly Mr NYC was in LA that night. Crazy. Only in the movies ...

P.S. This Oscars ceremony also had another NYC twist -- David Letterman was the host and he notoriously bombed. "Uma" ... "Oprah" ... "Uma" ... "Oprah."

Yeah, it didn't work.