Good afternoon Truthwinds team. Oh, our topic, A Light in the Darkness. If you look at the
picture behind us, a friend of mine painted it, and on the bottom of it, which might be
a little hard to read from this distance, it's Matthew 622. And it says, let's see,
their whole body will be filled with the light. And so since this is a time when the light
shines strong, its resurrection Sunday is coming, we're actually going to populate this
a little bit early, just in the celebration of Jesus. So, and this is produced by Shining
City Media. The name of it is A Light in the Darkness, and it was produced by Jeffrey
and Rami Black. They spent probably years on producing this film. It's a very nice documentary
on the 100 year anniversary of the Hollywood Cross. Probably, and a lot of you don't even
know that it exists. But the next time you go to Hollywood, you can do that. As you can
see also up on the back, it says Hollywood next to the clock. The reason why this is
so exciting to us is, as a lot of you know, my great grandfather is the father of Hollywood.
He's H.J. Whitley, and he played a big part in all of this. Oh yeah, Willie. He had the
visionary to bring the media system or production to Southern California. Right, and then it
went and spread to the world because as we know, this is a way to share your vision through
media. So, we'll jump into the movie. We won't be back with you when the movie ends. That
will be it. We just hope you- Play it over and over and sit and have all your friends
and neighbors and everybody watch this. This is very, very good. Right. You can wish them
all happy Easter and a celebration of the 100th year of the Hollywood Cross and have
fun and get a bowl of popcorn and enjoy. Amen.
Once upon a time, there was an extraordinary land, an amazing place where dreams came through,
but nightmares also abounded. It was a land of wealth the entire world looked to for escape
and inspiration, but it was also a place where the eternal forces of good and evil battled
and where many fell slain. High on a hill overlooking the land, a huge glowing cross
stood lighting the way for all who had looked to it. As time passed, however, few remembered
why the cross was ever built or what it even stood for. Those who did remember fought bravely
to keep its light from being extinguished. This is the story of that extraordinary cross,
the brave heroes who battled to protect it and those who have been inspired by its light
for the past 100 years. The story of the Hollywood Cross begins long before it was ever built
in the hills above Hollywood in 1923, for there would be no Hollywood Cross without
the name Hollywood. Many stories abound how Hollywood got its name, that it was named
after Christmas Holly that grew throughout the Santa Monica Mountains and nearby hills,
or that it was taken from an Illinois estate named Hollywood. No proof exists to back up
any of these claims. The only real evidence for the name's true origin comes from a page
in the diary of a man named H.J. Whitley. Whitley was the owner of the original 480 acre tract
of land that became Hollywood, which Whitley purchased for $22,000 in gold. In 1886, Whitley
noted in his diary that one day he came across a Chinese man carrying wood in a horse-drawn
wagon who spoke politely to him in a thick accent saying he was hauling wood. To Whitley,
it sounded like the man said, Hollywood. The name struck a chord with Whitley and the rest
is history. An honest businessman and a committed Christian in later life, H.J. Whitley was
also instrumental in bringing the film industry to Hollywood. Although the California film
industry began in 1909, when prolific East Coast filmmaker Colonel William Selig opened
his Selig Polyscope Studios in the Edendale District of downtown Los Angeles, Whitley
helped create the first movie studio in Hollywood, the Nestor Film Company that soon merged
along with several other companies to form the Universal Film Manufacturing Company, a
conglomerate that would one day become Universal Studios, the first and the oldest major film
studio in Hollywood. For these accomplishments and for many others, H.J. Whitley is now known
as the father of Hollywood. In 1887, a Christian couple named Harvey and Data Wilcox purchased
a 120-acre tract of land from Whitley, centered at what would one day become Hollywood and
Vine. Harvey Wilcox officially established the name Hollywood when he recorded it on
the land's deed in 1887. Harvey and Data Wilcox's original vision for Hollywood was
to create a utopian Christian community and center for the arts, a place free from the
vices of alcohol, gambling, and prostitution. In 1902, Hollywood officially became a city.
The first laws passed banned liquor, pool halls, bowling alleys, and even riding bicycles
on the sidewalk. The LA Times described Hollywood in 1905 as a place where the saloon and its
kindred evils are unknown. Soon, Hollywood was filled with churches from every major
denomination that had taken up Data Wilcox's offer of free land and the faithful flocked
to the area. In 1910, Hollywood's cherished dream of righteous independence came to an
abrupt halt when its expanding water needs forced Hollywood's incorporation as a district
into the city of Los Angeles and its corrupting influences.
One believer drawn to Hollywood during that time was Christine Weatherall Stevenson, an
heiress to the Pittsburgh paint fortune who became a patron of the arts in Hollywood.
In 1919, she helped to found the Hollywood Bowl, contributing nearly one half the money
— $21,000 — to purchase the Bolton Canyon site, popularly known as Daisy Dell, on which
the Bowl sits. In 1921, Stevenson organized the first Hollywood
Bowl Easter Sunrise Service, a tradition that continues to this day. After a dispute with
partners who wished to produce non-religious productions, Stevenson purchased a 29-acre
tract of land across from the Bowl. Shows at her new Pilgrimage Theater became an immediate
hit with Los Angeles audiences, and her pilgrimage play, based on the life of Jesus, continued
to be performed at the theater for the next 42 years.
Then, in 1922, at the tender age of 44, Stevenson unexpectedly passed away. Grieving friends
and supporters built a huge 40-foot-lighted wooden cross on the hill next to the Pilgrimage
Theater as memorial to her in 1923. It is this monument that has come to be known
as the Hollywood Cross.
The original Hollywood Cross was constructed for $200 and lit by hundreds of incandescent
light bulbs that outlined the structure. The lights were turned on during evening performances
at the Pilgrimage Theater and also for the annual Hollywood Bowl Easter Sunrise Service.
Sunday school children initially paid for the electricity. Then, Southern California
Edison provided it free of charge. In 1941, the Pilgrimage Theater donated the cross and
the land beneath it to the county of Los Angeles, which then provided routine maintenance.
Later that year, just three months before the bombing of Pearl Harbor thrust America
into World War II, Hitler partisans drew a huge Nazi swastika beneath the cross using
bags of white lime. No suspects were ever caught.
Following the war in 1949, a great worldwide phenomenon began in downtown Los Angeles in
view of the Hollywood Cross when Reverend Billy Graham came to national prominence. His Los
Angeles crusade lasted for eight weeks and was attended by 350,000 people. One of Graham's
great themes was the cross of Christ and its great significance to mankind.
If you could have bought your way or if you could have worked your way or if you could
have skimmed your way to heaven, Jesus would have never gone to the cross. There is no
other way of salvation except at the foot of the cross. And when I look at that cross,
I see first the terribleness of sin. I know that I am a sinner. When I look at Christ
dying in my place on the cross and realize the things that I have done and that it was
my sins that nailed him there, I must cry out to God, oh God, I am a sinner.
Then the second thing I see is the amazing love of God, that God commended his love
toward us in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. You rebelled against God,
you've sinned against God, you've done things that you know you shouldn't have done, you've
helped even crucify Jesus. But in spite of it, God loves you. And on the cross there
is written in gigantic letters in neon fire, God so loved the world that he gave his only
begotten son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish but have everlasting
life. There is the love of God. And if you have any doubt concerning the love of God,
look at the cross. It was there that he died for us.
In 1963, Billy Graham returned to Los Angeles, this time speaking to nearly one million people
at the LA Coliseum. And the cross of Christ was always central to his message.
It doesn't make any difference what race you come from, what your nationality background
is, what state you live in, how rich or how poor, how educated or uneducated you have
to come to the cross. You say, but Billy, that's foolish. Do you mean to say I can't
be accepted by God unless I come to the cross? That's right.
And the Bible says the preaching of the cross is foolishness to them that perish. God said
you'd say it's foolish. You may be a PhD in the university, but if you're ever to have
a piece of soul with God, you'll have to come like a little child to the foot of the cross.
The original wooden Hollywood cross stood tall on its hilltop until 1965, when it was
suddenly destroyed in a Hollywood brush fire. The county of Los Angeles replaced the wooden
cross with a more resilient steel and plexiglass structure that was illuminated from within
by fluorescent lights. LA County involvement with the Hollywood
cross, however, came under fire in 1979 following a California state Supreme Court ruling that
ended a 30-year tradition of lighting Los Angeles City Hall windows in the shape of
a cross at Christmas and Easter. Citing that decision, activist attorneys saw it an injunction
to prevent public money from being spent on the Hollywood cross. Caving to pressure,
Los Angeles County pulled the plug on the cross, selling it later that year along with
its land for $1,000 to the preservation group Hollywood Heritage.
And the Bible says the preaching of the cross is foolishness to them that perish. God said
you'd say it's foolish. During that dark season, the cross was defaced
and vandals sawed through several of its steel braces, sending it crashing to the ground
in a 1984 Santa Ana windstorm. Just before the 1985 Hollywood Bowl Easter
Sunrise service, volunteers built a temporary 17-foot cross out of pieces from the old one.
For nearly a decade, numerous attempts to permanently rebuild the cross failed, including
a cross built out of balloons and an Easter Sunrise service to draw attention to the missing
landmark. The Hollywood cross was resurrected in its
present form in 1993 when High Adventure Ministries, a CME Valley shortwave radio evangelism
organization donated $110,000 for its reconstruction.
We saw the original cross sitting flat on the ground. It was bent. It had been weathered,
rusted, and looked like it had been sitting there for a century. It was terrible, terrible
shape. I would imagine that somebody went up there and cut their metal saw up there
and cut it and tipped it over like a tree. It fell flat on the ground and that's where
it laid for many, many years until they hired us to come and resurrect it.
We then hired a structural engineer to go out there and make it stronger and design it
so that it can stand back in place again and this time we're going to try to make it indestructible.
We took a field trip up to the cross. We all hiked up there and we all looked at it. We
all had a game plan and we all decided, okay, we need to hire an engineer and an architect
to figure out how we're going to get this thing built and stronger to stand back up
again. So we hired a fellow by the name of Jeff Warling to be the designer of the engineering,
structural engineering on the project and Dean White was the architect who drew up the
plans and submitted for plan check, which we got the permit for. Once we got the permit,
we started construction. We got a little static. You know, after we got the building permit
and after we got up there and started working on it, word got out that we were going to
resurrect the cross. There was a group of people that didn't like it. There were protesters
that got involved. Angry people, they didn't want us to build it and let it be known that
they didn't want us to do it. We told them that if you didn't leave, we'd call the police
because it's private property and they left. We decided not to put the cross back where
it originally was, where the original concrete footing was because that would cost more money
to remove the old footing. So we decided to place it to the side of it where we can dig
a fresh hole in the ground for the footings, which was six foot by six foot by six foot.
We dug that in, we laced it, reinforced it with steel. We erected that steel out of the
ground about eight feet and then we were ready for inspection. So once we got the inspection,
we scheduled the concrete pour and the forms didn't hold and the forms exploded and all
the concrete went rolling down the hill into the Ford feeder. Not once, twice. So that
was a snafu. Anyways, once we were able to reinforce the, because the footings stood
up out of the ground by eight feet and was full of concrete. So I had to get something
and devise a way to make a strong form and I ended up doing that with chains, three quarter
inch chains wrapped around the whole thing like you'd see Houdini did back in the day.
And that held it together and we were able to pour. So once the footing was poured, then
we were able to strip the forms and prep the area for the cross. So during the time we're
working on the foundation of the of the Hollywood Cross, 15 or 20 feet of the whole lower section
was wrapped in half inch steel plate, machine bolt every three inches on the entire perimeter
of all four corners, each direction and welded. Once we got that thing done, then we got the
helicopter, we had a Sikorsky out there. We had the helicopter crew in the helicopter
and we had a ground crew. Once the helicopter pulled that cross up off the ground and it
was airborne, we had lines coming down from it, three or four lines. And once those lines
got close to a man to grab, we would hold on to them and then pull as best we could
it into place so the helicopter pilot can drop it. Once we got it within inches of where
it needed to be, tugging on it certain directions helped it along pretty good. As we navigated
this cross into position and lowered it down, the sleeve of half inch steel plate slid down
over the footing and once it slid down, they released it and gravity holds it in place.
So once the gravity held it in place, we went in and bolted it into the concrete around
the whole perimeter. After that, we poured a four foot circular concrete reinforcement
around it. So it's encased. So you can't really get to the steel casing because it's covered
in a foot of concrete. Somewhere along the line, they asked us to put in a time capsule
and there's a time capsule in there too. The rest of the cross was the existing framing
stayed as is and how we covered it was the actual sign company that came out. He went
out and put fluorescent lights on the front face and the back face and then connected
the ends with sheet metal so you wouldn't ever see the framework of the existing cross
and then we stuckled the surface of that four foot diameter concrete encasement and that
was the finished product. I mean it went through that 94 quake and it's still standing.
One member of the team that helped to guide the cross into position was the legendary
Hollywood stuntman and circus high wire performer Bob Yerkes. Immediately after construction
was complete, a lawsuit was brought to have the cross removed. I used to get it back up
and then they took us to court for putting it up and they said it was offensive and I
said well it's always offensive to atheists and vampires and it's just to complain because
it was lit up inside so it was too bright and the judge said well maybe that's because
the doctors in your heart you threw it on the court. Every time I drive by there and
see it up still, yeah, still up. It is this cross that stands high over Hollywood today.
In 1997, ownership of the Hollywood cross and the quarter acre of land around it was
transferred to the church on the way, a Van Nuys Pentecostal congregation that set up a
perpetual endowment to care for the cross and to keep it lit into eternity. Having the
sturdy new Hollywood cross on firm footing, however, didn't keep fresh attacks from coming.
In 2004, activist attorneys and politicians conspired to remove the Hollywood cross from
the Los Angeles County seal where it had been placed in 1957 above an image of the Hollywood
Bowl. The revised 2004 Los Angeles County seal eliminated the Hollywood cross in a second
revision in 2016 prompted by an activist judge's ruling caused the cross over the San Fernando
mission to be removed as well. God said you'd say it's foolish. Despite being attacked by
vandals and Nazis, destroyed by fire and wind storms, and assaulted by lawyers, judges and
politicians, the Hollywood cross still stands high over Hollywood after 100 years. A light in
the darkness showing the way so all may see, draw inspiration and believe. You rebelled against
God, you've sinned against God, you've done things that you know you shouldn't have done,
you've helped even crucify Jesus. But in spite of it, God lurched. And on the cross there is
written in gigantic letters in neon fire. God so loved the world that he gave his only the
God son, the who's so other. Believe it in him should not perish but have everlasting life.
There is the love of God. And if you have any doubt concerning the love of God, look at the
cross. It was sad that he died for us.