LOS ANGELES -- The city Friday gave Fox Broadcasting Corp. permission to change the famed Hollywood sign to read 'Fox' for a week-long publicity stunt criticized by opponents as a commercialization of the landmark.
The city Recreation and Parks Commission voted unanimously to allow the television network to alter the 65-year-old sign for the first five days in April in exchange for a $27,000 donation to refurbish it.
Representatives from the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce urged approval of the plan, saying it would help convince media magnate Rupert Murdoch to keep his new network based in Hollywood.
The approval enables the network to block out most of the sign with cloth, alter the first three letters so that they read 'Fox' and illuminate the sign at night from April 1-5 to publicize the network's first prime-time television broadcast.
On April 6, the lights will be removed and the sign reverted back to read 'Hollywood.'
Nearly 30 opponents of the plan, most of them residents in the area, argued it will commercialize one of the city's most important historic monuments as well as create traffic jams, a fire hazard and attraction for vandals.
'This would be like using the Statue of Liberty to advertise for Liberty (Mutual) Insurance,' Joel Schiller, a Hollywood production designer, said during an often emotional public hearing.
Ted Leutzinger, vice president of the Hollywood Land Improvement Association, said the city would be 'prostituting' itself for Fox.
Others warned the approval would invite requests from a flood of other organizations wanting to change the sign for promotional purposes.
But commissioners voted 6-0 for the plan, saying the sign was already commercial, having originally read 'Hollywoodland' when erected in 1922 as an advertisement for a housing development in the Hollywood Hills.
'The very name Hollywood, the word Hollywood, has a commercial context,' Commisioner Mary Nichols said.
'If you live in Hollywood ... you expect a certain amount of bright lights,' Commissioner J. Stanley Sanders.
To appease the homeowners and preservationists, the commission agreed to create an advisory committee for future uses of the sign.
Each of the sign's nine white letters stand 55 feet tall and stretch along the Hollywood Hills. The city took possession of the sign in 1946 and removed the 'land' from 'Hollywood.'
The sign has been unofficially altered three times in the past to read 'Hollyweed,' 'Go Navy,' and 'Raffeysod.'
It was last painted and lit up at night during the 1984 Olympics.
