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Mary Lou Dudas used to enjoy strolling along Hollywood Boulevard until the night she found herself in the middle of a shootout.
She was walking with her husband, reading the names on the street’s famous gold stars, when she heard a series of shots. Moments later, the couple found themselves surrounded by police. When the police began shooting too, Dudas fled. “I was an army brat, but I had never experienced anything like that,” she says.
The experience had a profound effect. As the newly elected president of the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce, Dudas has a mission: to clean up the streets of Hollywood.
“Safe and clean. I’ve got to do it,” says Dudas. “If we can’t create an environment like Third Street Promenade and Old Pasadena, we have to at least give the impression that it’s safe.”
A longtime executive with A & M; Records who has worked in the heart of Hollywood for about 20 years, Dudas intends to accomplish that by strengthening the chamber’s ties to law enforcement, as well as by increasing membership and helping out with the neighborhood’s Business Improvement District.
Dudas has been involved in community affairs for two decades, ever since the Hollywood Boulevard shootout. After that incident, she organized a neighborhood and business watch program to protect local employees as they walked to their cars at night.
But with businesses continuing to flee the crime-ridden neighborhood, Dudas decided to join Hollywood Chamber’s public safety commission, where she helped build stronger ties between local businesses and the police and fire departments. “The most significant thing I’ve done is bring those agencies in to work with the businesses and residents,” she says.
But more is needed to be done, says Dudas especially now, with Hollywood on the verge of several major new developments that many hope will overhaul the neighborhood’s tawdry image.
Those include a new theater for the Academy Awards, the re-opening of the Egyptian Theater and the opening of a new multiplex movie theater. The MTA, meanwhile, plans to open a subway stop that will link Hollywood with Universal City.
Much of Dudas’ job during her one-year term as chamber president will consist of capitalizing on these openings and championing the law-and-order measures that she believes make it all possible.
“It’s happening,” Dudas says. “It’s neat when you believe that something will change your community positively and it happens. It makes you feel like you’re doing the right thing.”
Lauren Hollingsworth
