Eight years in the making, this haunting and highly watchable 35-millimeter experimental feature by Pat O’Neill (2002, 73 min.) is partly a color documentary on the ruins of Hollywood’s Ambassador Hotel (site of the first Oscar ceremony as well as the Robert Kennedy assassination) and partly a speculative patchwork of its decaying fictions. Working with sound designer George Lockwood and a team of 45 actors, O’Neill has superimposed transparent characters and props over the settings and added dialogue, music, and sound effects from black-and-white Hollywood features. A special-effects wizard whose day job is working on Hollywood blockbusters, O’Neill showed in his 1989 Water and Power a poetic feeling for human evanescence in relation to southern California locales; here he proves equally astute at showing how our sense of history becomes tainted by and entangled with Hollywood myths. (JR)