A Ramble Through Pink Taco with The Players Club Founder’s Son, Tom Sturges

Tag: Martin Turnbull

Tom Sturges, left, and Martin Turnbull, outside Pink Taco, formerly the Players Club

A Ramble Through Pink Taco with The Players Club Founder’s Son, Tom Sturges

Here’s an interesting way to spend a June afternoon on the Sunset Strip. Have lunch and a drink at the Pink Taco with Martin Turnbull, my friend, the author of The Garden of Allah novel series, and Tom Sturges, a music executive who is the son of Preston Sturges, one of the most brilliant and eccentric writers and directors in the studio era.

The location was significant. Pink Taco occupies hallowed ground in Sunset Strip history. Originally a residence built in 1926, Preston Sturges extensively (and expensively) renovated it 14 years later and then opened it as a celebrity nightspot called The Players.

Garden of Allah, Crescent Heights Shopping Center to Be Focus of LAVA Salon on June 30

June 11, 2013 / Jon Ponder / 1 Comment

WeHo News:

The Los Angeles Visionaries Association (LAVA) has revived its free monthly Sunday Salon series. For their first program, they invite you to South Broadway, to the mezzanine of Les Noces du Figaro, which was recently opened by the family behind Figaro Bistro in Los Feliz. This handsome space was formerly Schaber’s Cafeteria (Charles F. Plummer, 1928), and the mezzanine features wonderful views of the Los Angeles Theatre.

The Salon’s theme [on Sunday, June 30, 2013, at noon] will be Jazz Age Los Angeles, and the two talks (45 minutes each) will focus on that theme at the intersection of Crescent Heights and Sunset Blvd…

The Garden on Sunset, by Martin Turnbull

May 29, 2013 / Jon Ponder / 0 Comments

The Garden on Sunset by Martin Turnbull

In Woody Allen’s 1985 film, “The Purple Rose of Cairo,” one of the characters in the film within the film — a black-and-white drawing-room comedy-romance from Hollywood’s golden age — breaks through the fourth wall and emerges from the screen so he can experience the real world.

A new, ongoing series of novels written by Martin Turnbull and set at the Garden of Allah Hotel in Hollywood do just the opposite. They transport readers through the literary fourth wall back in time so they can experience life as it may have been in Hollywood’s golden era.

Relying on rigorous period research and a powerful imagination, Turnbull has created a fully realized, unromanticized vision of this bygone world. In The Garden on Sunset, the first in the series, we get the glitz and glamour inside the Movie Colony as well as the grit and grime of the grim world outside the Colony’s imaginary gates.