Notting Hill Goes Hollywood

Notting Hill asks the eternal question: What happens when an ordinary English guy bumps into a fabulously famous American film star?

The answer is love, of course, but it's not just the movie's cast and premise making a buzz. It's also the London setting, Notting Hill, that gives the movie its title, reports CBS News Correspondent Richard Roth.

Tourists know it as the neighborhood of Portobello Road where, for 160 years, a bustling market turned a profit on everything from porcelain to produce.

"It's brilliant here," says resident Cheryl Devlin. "I don't know why they're making it a big thing now. It's always been a lively place."

Now, there is star power in the mix.

The fame Hollywood has added: Julia Roberts as the rich but lonely celebrity, and Hugh Grant as the charming nobody, a mostly inept bookseller and, most of all, poor. So poor in the movie, he has to live around the corner from his shop, behind the blue door.

Actually, it is the movie's writer, Richard Curtis, who really lives behind the blue door, in a house that is now up for sale, with an asking price over $2 million. Notting Hill, says Curtis, is a melting pot.

"Notting Hill is an extraordinary mixture of cultures he says. "It is rich and poor, and Portuguese and Jamaican and English, and it seemed like a proper, realistic world where two people from different worlds actually could meet and co-exist."

Some worry the co-existence was already strained by soaring real estate prices and stylish restaurants. Hollywood didn't manufacture the gentrification; just recorded it.

Bu even at Notting Hill's movie house, where they liked the film, they're not sure they like the attention.

"I think it has become so fashionable that there is a real threat that it will lose its original village character," says one Notting Hill gentleman.

Maybe it is too late.

"I want to try and get to Hollywood," says Barry Durango, who has been working in Notting Hill for nearly 20 years. "Once I get to Hollywood, I won't be coming back here weekends."

Now, he's another man with a dream that maybe life could be just like in the movies.