Biography | Peter Cullen — The Chinese Theatre Forecourt Where a Voice Left Hands in Cement

Hollywood's cement ritual is built for faces. On 30 September 2014 it was used for a voice.

Peter Cullen stood in the forecourt of the TCL Chinese Theatre at 6925 Hollywood Boulevard and pressed his hands into wet concrete at a ceremony billed for Optimus Prime.

A full-size Autobot figure stood with him. A second slab took a tire print for the character. The occasion was timed to the home-video release of Transformers: Age of Extinction.

Sid Grauman opened this house on 18 May 1927. The forecourt squares, beginning with Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks that same spring, became the industry's most photographed ledger of who counted.

By the 2010s the theatre was also running studio-paid promotional ceremonies. Later inventories of the official forecourt treat some of those slabs, including the Optimus Prime event, as ceremonial rather than permanently set in the tourist walk.

The photograph from that morning still shows Cullen at the work. The voice that had led the Autobots since 1984 was, for one hour, a pair of hands on Hollywood Boulevard.

What a visitor finds in the pavement today may not include that square. The date and the theatre are not in dispute.

Photo: Mingle Media TV, Peter Cullen at the 30 September 2014 ceremony, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.