On the not-to-distant heels of Franklin Avenue’s walk from one end of Wilshire Boulevard to the other (dowtown to Santa Monica), I’ve decided I’m going to set aside a Saturday or Sunday some time in this coming year to do the same thing with Sunset Boulevard, and finally document this diverse pipeline that courses from Union Station all the way to the sea.

This is something I’ve wanted to do since high school. I’m pretty sure I’ve written about it before, so in consideration for any who might remember such ramblings I’ll attempt to keep the coming bytes synop-sized:

Back in my junior year at Beverly High I found a poster announcing that submissions were being accepted for the school’s annual film festival. One thing led to another and I’m not sure how but I hooked up with a guy I had French class with named Hovik — who conveniently had a Super 8 movie camera — and sold him on my documentary idea, which was to film Sunset from its east end, beginning with the sunrise around Union Station, and traveling west to its terminus at Pacific Coast Highway at sunset.

So one pre-dawn Saturday I showed up at his house where I remember his barely English-speaking Armenian dad had televangelist Earnest Angely preaching from the TV. Shortly thereafter we piled into some old beige vehicle and with Hovik’s father behind the wheel we headed east. Arriving at Union Station we found it was overcast and there was no chance of capturing anything resembling the sun’s actual rise.

Milling about for a few minutes we realized that this wasn’t going to be as easy as we’d hoped, and we certainly didn’t have enough film to capture the length and breadth of the boulevard and its diverse socio/economic regions.

So we cancelled the project and went and got breakfast.

Ever since it’s always been a project on one of any of several of the backburners of my mind. No longer.

And how’s this for coincidence: the 24-mile stretch that’s involved hoofing it from Alameda Avenue downtown to the ocean’s edge at PCH would be a nice (and by “nice” I mean ”rigorous” and by that I mean “blister-inducing”) training warm-up for the 2007 L.A. marathon I’ll be doing in March.

So weather permitting and allowing an adequate time to heal I’m going to schedule my “Sunset To Sunset” trek for February 4, 2007.

According to the Old Farmer’s Almanac the sunrise for L.A. that day is scheduled for 6:47 a.m. so let’s set the start time at 7 a.m. And since the sunset is 5:27 p.m. that should give me a couple hours waiting for it over margaritas at Gladstones.

Anyone care to join me… either for the walk and/or maggies at Gladstones?