At midnight on Dec. 31, 1999, all the great cities of the world marked the turn of the millennium by lighting up their most iconic landmark. In Paris, it was the Eiffel Tower. In Cairo, the pyramids. In New York, the Statue of Liberty.

Los Angeles lit up the Hollywood sign.

It was just for television. There were no bleachers or chairs set up. No one was invited.

Isn’t that perfectly Hollywood? It’s only real on the screen, and nothing to see if you’re actually there.

Every year, millions of tourists come to see Hollywood. Some use GPS apps to get near the Hollywood sign and take a selfie. They want to post the picture and show everybody in the world that they really were in Hollywood.

Certain cities are associated with a particular feeling or emotion. People may travel to Paris, or Maui, or Jerusalem with an idea of how the city will make them feel. What do they expect from Hollywood?

If you saw photos of the interior of the now-closed Warner (recently Pacific) Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard, you’d know exactly.

In this stunningly beautiful picture palace, built in 1928, the price of a movie ticket transported an ordinary person into grandeur beyond imagination. Graceful chandeliers are suspended from ceilings painted with gold and emerald designs, framed like masterpieces with deep golden moldings. Elegant pillars and ornate white arches soar above carved wooden doors trimmed with gold. Beyond the doors, the walls are colonnades that seem to lean forward in anticipation, toward the silver screen.

In the years before the guardians of our culture applied their ointment of ridicule to such things, the people on the silver screen were impossibly heroic and unrealistically beautiful, and picture palaces held them the way settings hold diamonds.

That’s the feeling of Hollywood: to be captured by a story that takes you where life never will, face-to-face with people you could never meet. For two hours, you are right there, where it’s impossible to be.

About six blocks west of the old Warner Theatre, there’s a mysterious touch of movie grandeur at the Hollywood and Highland Center. Visitors who come up the staircase may not realize it, but they’re experiencing what it was like to be an extra in a D.W. Griffith picture.

There in the shopping center stands a huge arch—taller than the three-story courtyard — and, of nearly equal height, two curvaceous pedestals with elephants on top.

Why? The late science fiction author Ray Bradbury wrote in an essay published after his death that a group of people came to him for advice on rebuilding Hollywood, and he told them they had to build the Babylon set from the 1916 silent film, “Intolerance.”

And it’s there, at Hollywood and Highland: a full-scale replica of the Babylon arch plus two pedestals that, for no clear reason, have elephants on top.

Griffith wanted elephants on the pedestals and he wouldn’t be talked out of it.

The set for the Babylon exteriors in “Intolerance” was constructed on a site at 4473 Sunset Drive, east of Vermont Avenue, as a full-scale walled city. The walls were 90 feet high. After the film was released, there was no money left in the budget to tear down the set, so it stood there, aging in the sun, for three years before a fire destroyed what was left.

But today, you can stand next to Griffith’s vision, thanks to Ray Bradbury’s sense of what makes the place Hollywood.

Bradbury also wanted to save the picture palaces.

The exquisite Warner (Pacific) Theatre closed in 1994 due to structural damage from the Northridge earthquake and basement water damage from construction of the Red Line subway. The building’s owner, Robertson Properties Group, may be thinking ahead to the final curtain, but the Los Angeles Historic Theatre Foundation has been working with the Hollywood Heritage organization for two years to try to save the theater.

Imagine the possibilities if a deep-pocketed owner decided to make this magnificent picture palace the centerpiece of a hotel and entertainment complex that gives visitors the Hollywood they’ve traveled to see.

Maybe the Trump Organization could be talked into buying the Warner Theatre and building a hotel next to it, just for the fun of watching faces contort around frozen smiles every time the president comes to town and takes credit for saving a Hollywood legend.

It would make a great movie — half comedy, half caper. Now if it just had an arch.

Susan Shelley is a columnist for the Southern California News Group. Reach her at Susan@SusanShelley.com.