People did not raise much of an eyebrow when film trucks started arriving in Long Beach’s Belmont Shore last week. The oceanfront neighborhood was designed for a movie stage—whether for Jeep commercials, “Dexter,” or the Netflix miniseries “Griselda.” Spectators shrugged when they saw crews arriving and made sure to steer their curious dogs out of the catering tents.
It was a different story to tell last week as trucks were seen arriving in numbers that shocked everyone, as no one had seen before.
Information went around that they were filming a section of the Olympics closing show by Saturday morning, when that section of the beach was enclosed in a privacy tent—the segment where the torch is passed from the current host city to the next.
The mystery became a thing of the past as the giant “LA28” sculpture showed up.
Soon, Snoop Dogg, Dr. Dre, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and Billie Eilish were the A-list artists who performed on a makeshift stage that was set up beside a make-believe palm tree that was small enough to fit into the camera frame, before a small but enthusiastic crowd of extras.
Locals were unbothered about the parking and traffic inconveniences that generally took the event in stride—until some of the media organizations that came there mistakenly portrayed the venue as the more famous Venice Beach.
“This is Long Beach erasure,” Alyssayung, a Tiktoker, lamented, pointing to a shot in the direction of her TV screen that obviously displayed the offshore oil wells—disguised as islands with palm trees—in the background.
Citizens from Southern California, especially those that reside on Long Beach, will not find it difficult to recognize those landmarks immediately.