Tinseltown! (SOLD OUT)

In Tours by 1034media

November 12, 2024 - November 19, 2024

Tinseltown! (SOLD OUT)

Classic Hollywood and the City of Angels

Starting at $5,395

About Tinseltown! (SOLD OUT) Tour

The screen may be silver, but the itinerary we’ve lined up for this fall’s tour of Classic Hollywood and the City of Angels is pure gold. As the name suggests it’s really two trips in one. For movie lovers there’s the stunning new Academy of Motion Pictures Museum, 300,000 square feet of cinematic history; the new TCM–Warner Brothers studio tour; a visit to the famed Paramount lot; dinner at Charlie Chaplin’s favorite watering hole (Bogie and Bacall, too); lunch at the Roosevelt Hotel, scene of the first Academy Awards; a tour of the Dolby Theater, site of today’s Oscars; and the final resting places of Judy Garland, Marilyn Monroe, Mickey Rooney, Fanny Brice, Jack Lemmon, Walter Matthau, George C. Scott and many more.

But there’s much more to see in southern California than the Hollywood Sign. The Watts Towers and the mission church of San Juan Capistrano. The recently renovated Nixon Library and Birthplace. Will Rogers’ Ranch and Paul Getty’s astonishing Roman villa. The Griffith Observatory – remember it from LaLa Land? – and the La Brea Tar Pits, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Hollyhock House and the thought provoking, state of the art Museum of Tolerance.

And maybe the best attraction of all. Our home for seven nights – the newly restored Queen Mary, now permanently docked in Long Beach, a short drive from L.A. Perhaps the most famous of all the great Cunard liners, a thousand feet of Art Deco and prewar nostalgia.

Your staterooms are waiting. Just follow the Yellow Brick Road…

Tour Itinerary

Day 1
November
12
Grand Salon

We meet as a group this morning in the Grand Salon on the RMS Queen Mary, now permanently moored in Long Beach Harbor. Our first stop today is the stunning new Academy Museum of Motion Pictures. The largest museum of its kind in the U.S. with some 300,000 sq. ft devoted to the history, science, and cultural impact of the film industry. Lunch today is at the Roosevelt Hotel. Site of the very first Academy Awards in the 1920’s, the hotel is situated across the street from Mann's Chinese Theater and the Hollywood Walk of Fame. This afternoon we visit Westwood Village Memorial Park, final resting place of Marilyn Monroe, Dean Martin, Farrah Fawcett, Frank Zappa, Walter Matthau, Fanny Brice, Truman Capote, Jack Lemmon, George C. Scott and hundreds more Hollywood favorites. A special Welcome Dinner this evening is planned.

Meet Your Host

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Richard Norton Smith is a nationally recognized authority on the American presidency and a familiar face to viewers of C-SPAN, as well as The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. Following graduation from Harvard in 1975, he worked as a White House intern and a speech writer for Massachusetts Senator Edward Brooke. In 1979 he went to work for Senator Bob Dole, with whom he collaborated on several volumes of autobiography and political humor.

Smith’s first major book, Thomas E. Dewey and His Times, was a finalist for the 1983 Pulitzer Prize. He has also written An Uncommon Man: The Triumph of Herbert Hoover (1984), The Harvard Century: The Making of a University to a Nation (1986), Patriarch: George Washington and the New American Nation (1993), The Colonel: The Life and Legend of Robert R. McCormick, which received the prestigious Goldsmith Prize awarded by Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School, and has been described by Hilton Kramer as “the best book ever written about the press.” In October 2014 Random House published On His Own Terms, a monumental life of Nelson Rockefeller described by Douglas Brinkley as “one of the greatest cradle to grave biographies written in the past 50 years,” and tagged in advance by Amazon as one of the fall’s Twenty Big Books in Biography and Memoir.

Between 1987 and 2001, Mr. Smith served as Director of the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library and Museum in West Branch, Iowa; the Dwight D. Eisenhower Center in Abilene, Kansas; the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and the Reagan Center for Public Affairs in Simi Valley, California; the Gerald R. Ford Museum and Library in Grand Rapids and Ann Arbor, Michigan respectively.

In December, 2001 Mr. Smith became director of the new Robert J. Dole Institute of Politics at the University of Kansas in Lawrence. There he supervised construction of the Institute’s $11.3 million permanent home and launched a Presidential Lecture Series and other high profile programs. In October, 2003 he was appointed the first Executive Director of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum, a four building complex in Springfield, Illinois. The Library opened to the public in 2004 and the Museum opened the next year.

Much in demand as a speaker, in 2009 Smith was invited by Congress to be one of two historians addressing it on the two hundred anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s birth. Earlier, millions of television viewers heard him deliver the final eulogy at Gerald Ford’s Michigan funeral, a role he repeated at Betty Ford’s request when she was laid to rest beside her husband in 2011. Smith is currently at work on a biography of President Ford. Twice a year he personally leads historical tours (www.presidentsandpatriots.com) emphasizing American presidents and history rarely found in the text books.

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