TCL Chinese Theatre

This guide to the TCL Chinese Theatre starts with a wet slab of forecourt concrete in 1927, when showman Sid Grauman was racing to finish his pagoda-shaped movie palace and actress Norma Talmadge left an accidental footprint in it. It traces Grauman's flair for spectacle and the competing accounts of whose idea the handprint tradition really was. You'll hear about Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford's private ceremony weeks earlier, before Talmadge's own slip on opening night for Cecil B. DeMille's The King of Kings.