Since the 1960s, Los Angeles’s Sunset Strip has hosted a kaleidoscope of custom-built billboards. They’ve been labeled variously as “sky trash” and art. An architecture critic once called a 70-foot Marlboro Man “one of the most effective landmarks in the confusing landscape of our city.” Timeline put together a photographic field trip to the Sunset Strip’s last 50 years of billboard advertising.
I was out in the area when I realized that I could go and find it. I thought it was closer in the main Hollywood area, but it was further west. No big deal.
Today in the Department of Before They Were Star Trek Stars, DeForest Kelley guest stars in "88 Bars," episode 7 of the sixth season of 77 Sunset Strip (original air date November 1, 1963). Kelley plays a charming society playboy whose finances are controlled by his spinster sister. He hires a thug to stalk him and tries to frame the sister's boyfriend for it, because he believes if she gets married her husband will convince her to be less generous with his allowance.
This is that weird final season of 77 Sunset Strip where they got new producers who fired the entire supporting cast, tried to retool the show into a gritty noir, and turned Efrem Zimbalist, Jr.'s character from a genial, professorial type into a hardboiled Philip Marlowe wannabe with a bad narration habit.
Other Trek connections: Grace Lee Whitney has a short scene as a tough-talking exotic dancer.