The city of Los Angeles, usually a dusty smog-pink at this time of year, is turning purple and gold as movie stars and plumbers prepare for the LA Lakers’ first home game in the national basketball championship.

Fans are spending about £500,000 a day on Lakers junk, not just shirts and pennants but, new this year, a 6ft 6in blow-up doll of main man Kobe Bryant. It is a rare public frenzy in an anti-social city. Suddenly all the Hollywood stars, noticeably absent over the past two seasons, when the team was knocked out of the playoffs in the first round and Bryant acted like a brat on and off the court, are back.

Courtside seats for this week’s games against old rivals the Boston Celtics are priceless, traded with influence rather than mere dollars, and brokers have even run out of the £8,000 seats in the rafters of the Staples Center. At least such retail therapy — something Angelinos do with a passion, even as their Porsches are being repossessed — is keeping the fans cheerful as they wait for the whistle to blow here in LA on Tuesday.

They need such succour after the start to the seven-game series in Boston last Thursday night when the underdogs creamed them 98-88. This was not in the script — even on enemy turf the best offensive team in the league were supposed to run rings around the best defensive team. But Bryant kept shooting and missing rather than passing — flashes of his juvenile past — and, even more worryingly, the Lakers were outmanoeuvred by Celtics captain Paul Pierce.

Pierce injured his knee and was carried out on a stretcher moaning, only to return a few minutes later to the Rocky soundtrack, praising God for a miracle and scoring big time — the Lakers did not know how to deal with it all. It was a return to the theatre that hallmarked the 1980s rivalry between Magic Johnson of the Lakers and Larry Bird of the Celtics, a joyous, spectacular feud dominated by personalities that lifted the ghetto sport into the stratosphere.

It was marked by dirty tricks — Celtic fans waking up Laker players in their Boston hotel at 3am; Lakers dumping a barrel of courtside water fearing it had been doped; the leaking of complex but bogus strategy plans. Arnold “Red” Auerbach, the Celtics’ fearsome coach, reputedly used to turn up the heat in the visitors’ locker room — “Let them sweat there so they have less to sweat on the court,” was his motto. Not that it stopped the Lakers coming out on top.

Looking back, Bird, now president of the Indiana Pacers, who were knocked out of the championship race by his former team in April, said for years that he could not shake Johnson’s hand without privately chanting: “Suffer, Magic, suffer, I hope this is killing you.” These were the words Bird had thought years before on seeing a dejected Johnson leaving the stadium in Los Angeles after losing to the Celtics.

It has been 21 years since the Lakers and the Celtics met in an NBA final, but the anger is still there. For Phil Jackson, the bearish Lakers coach, it is all about Asian-style honour. His coaching manual, Sacred Hoops, merges Zen philosophies with Native American spiritual practices in search of inner peace on the court and is a school text. But this will be put to the test as he surges up and down the line at Staples Center, trying to remain patient with Bryant.

It’s also about statistics. The late Auerbach is not only remembered as the coach who broke down racial divides in basketball, but also for accumulating a record nine NBA championship titles, the same as Jackson, who wants just one more to perfect his Zen bliss. Having coached the Chicago Bulls to six NBA trophies, and the Lakers to three during their famous “threepeat” of 2000-2, only to see the team disintegrate as Bryant and Shaquille O’Neal battled for the premier role, Jackson believes in life after death, and taking this trophy will confirm it.

Everyone hates everyone with a passion: the Celtics are too rough, too defensive, just too working-class Irish ugly. The Lakers are too smug, too rich, too Hollywood.

There is plenty to hiss about, yet the loyalties get tangled. The father of Luke Walton of the Lakers, Bill Walton, played for the Celtics and raised him as a Boston fanatic. Pierce was raised in LA, rooting for the Lakers. At home the Celtics are adding £800 “celebrity seats” to increase their glamour quotient, but apart from natives Ben Affleck and Matt Damon, who are more comfortable at nearby Fenway Park of baseball’s Red Sox . . . well, the club built them, but the stars have yet to come.

At the Staples Center the front row will be full of Hollywood royalty. Leonardo DiCaprio always tries to go incognito, with his cap pulled down over his eyes, but his premier seat gives it away. “He sits right behind my wife Vanessa, and they get a little rowdy because they are so passionate about the game,” said Bryant last year.

Denzel Washington, Dustin Hoffman, the rapper Ice Cube and Flea and Anthony Kiedis of The Red Hot Chili Peppers, who wrote two songs about the team on their 1989 album Mother’s Milk, are also pretty hardcore — but still outclassed by “The Laker Three”. These are Jack Nicholson and his “handmaidens”, actress Dyan Cannon and director Penny Marshall, who uses royalty income from her movies such as Big and A League of Their Own to hire private jets for away matches. “I should have been a ball player,” she has said more than once.

For three decades, Nicholson has been a courtside feature at Lakers games, haranguing referees, arguing with opposing coaches and psyching out visiting players with manic grins and insults. He takes no prisoners. Directors work their filming schedules around Lakers games.

When filming The Departed in Boston, Nicholson reportedly banned all Celtic gear from the set and got into character as a crime boss by studying Auerbach. Nicholson has promised Jerry Buss, the Lakers owner, that he will remain calm whatever happens over the next few days. So, no “Here’s Johnny”.

What Nicholson wants to see is “Here’s Kobe”. For someone who has just picked up the NBA’s Most Valuable Player of 2008 award and is being warily compared to basketball’s greatest player, the former Chicago Bull Michael Jordan, Bryant was slow and clumsy in Game 1.

The Lakers will return to the Celtics’ home tonight, their bus moving slowly through ranks of booing Bostonians, knowing they must shine or perish. If they do not win the title, the team will slink back two years.

The Celtics, who beat the Lakers twice this season, are stronger than many think. They are moving from “Happy to be here” to “We could win this thing”. They only have to remember not to be dazzled by that Hollywood glitz. After all, nothing is real in the City of Angels.