Barry Diller And Diane von Fürstenberg Want To Ferry Tourists To The Hollywood Sign

Oh, that’s nice. It does sound like getting up there is a pain in the balls.
Deadline reports that famed media mogul Barry Diller and his fashion designer wife Diane von Fürstenberg want to spend 20 to 30 million on creating a gondola to ferry tourists up to the Hollywood sign. This would be a philanthropic effort. These two are billionaires so they’ve got money to do things. Even silly things. Like sending me their spare $$$.

Oh, by the way, they mean the kind of gondola you ride up a mountain to ski or whatever. Not the Venetian kind. Lusty Italian men in striped shirts will not be trying to drive their boats up the Hollywood Hills with poles.

Residents in the area have reportedly been gnashing their teeth for years at people from Kansas hiking through their yards to see the letters. This is supposed to remedy that because no one likes tourists but cities still need them. Eventually, someone’s going to turn a hose on a family of six from Muncie and violence could break out. Diller and Diane first proposed the plan to LA city officials three years ago. These two contributed 35 million to the construction of NYC’s High Line. Diller is referring to his idea as “The Sky Line.” New York City’s High Line is super pleasant. J. Harvey Travel Tip – If you’re drunk at NYC Gay Pride, the High Line makes for a nice walk while you’re trying to sober up and remember the name of your hotel.

The gondola ride would begin in the LA Zoo’s parking lot and carry visitors up the side of Mount Lee for a close-up view of the big white letters. Diane’s son Alexander, who is the chairman of the Diller-von Furstenberg Family Foundation, is heading up the project. But his surely incredibly-wealthy-if-mom-is generous lips are sealed.

In an email, Alexander von Furstenberg declined to comment on the project.

“I wish I had more info to share with you but I don’t at this time,” he wrote.

And how do Hollywood officials feel about this gondola?

“There’s nothing definitive at this point. It’s just an idea,” said Leron Gubler, president and CEO of the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce, who added that the Chamber supports the idea. “If you had a gondola coupled with a visitor center, we think something like that would truly work to get people out of the neighborhoods.”

This isn’t Diller’s only plan to build potentially cool shit for cities. He’s also trying to get a $250 million dollar floating park called Pier 55 built on the West Side of Manhattan. We can assume that “floating park” means a park on columns or something. They probably don’t mean a park hovering over the city via anti-gravity devices. Or do they? Have we come that far already? Is this finally the future we’ve seen in movies? THEN WHERE IS MY FLYING CAR? AND JETPACK? AND OUTDOOR TOILETS FOR DOGS? AND FAT-MELTING CREAM? AND A HANGOVER PILL THAT WORKS???

Pic: WENN