Hollywood Ending is a 2002 American film written and directed by Woody Allen, who also plays the principal character. It tells the story of a once-famous film director who suffers hysterical blindness due to the intense pressure of directing.

Val Waxman (Allen) is a one-time prestigious film director lately reduced to overseeing cheesy television commercials in order to pay his bills and support his current live-in girlfriend (Debra Messing). When he is thrown off his latest effort (a deodorant commercial being filmed in the frozen north), he desperately seeks a real movie project.

Out of the blue, Val receives an offer to direct a big-budget blockbuster movie to be set in New York City. However, the offer comes from his former wife (Tea Leoni) and her current boyfriend (Treat Williams), the studio head who stole Val's wife from him.

Pushed by his agent (Mark Rydell), Val agrees to the project, but a psychosomatic ailment strikes him blind just before production is to begin. The movie plays out with an aging director struggling to regain his vision, both metaphorically and literally. It is easy to envision the movie as a not-so-subtle metaphor for Allen's real-life struggles during the 1990s to regain (or retain) his early momentum in the film-making milieu.

Hollywood is a district in Los Angeles, California, United States situated west-northwest of downtown Los Angeles. Due to its fame and cultural identity as the historical center of movie studios and movie stars, the word Hollywood is often used as a metonym of American cinema. Today, much of the movie industry has dispersed into surrounding areas such as the Westside neighborhood, and the San Fernando and Santa Clarita Valleys, but significant auxiliary industries, such as editing, effects, props, post-production, and lighting companies remain in Hollywood, as does the backlot of Paramount Pictures.

On February 16, 2005, California Assembly Members Jackie Goldberg and Paul Koretz introduced a bill to require California to keep specific records on Hollywood as if it were independent, although it is not the typical practice of the City of Los Angeles to establish specific boundaries for districts or neighborhoods. For this to be done, the boundaries were defined. The bill was unanimously supported by the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce and the Los Angeles City Council. Assembly Bill 588 was approved by the Governor of California on August 28, 2006, and now the district of Hollywood has official borders. The border can be loosely described as the area east of West Hollywood, south of Mulholland Drive, Laurel Canyon, Cahuenga Boulevard, and Barham Boulevard, and the cities of Burbank and Glendale, north of Melrose Avenue and west of the Golden State Freeway and Hyperion Avenue. This includes all of Griffith Park and Los Feliz^{[citation needed]} – two areas that were hitherto considered separate from Hollywood by most Angelenos. The population of the district, including Los Feliz, as of the 2000 census was 123,436 and the median household income was $33,409 in 1999.