Los Angeles Plays Itself

1

This is the city:

Los Angeles, California.

They make movies here.

I live here.

Sometimes I think that gives me the right

to criticize the way movies depict my city.

I know it's not easy.

The city is big.

The image is small.

Movies are vertical.

At least when they're

projected on a screen.

The city is horizontal, except

for what we call downtown.

Maybe that's why the movies

love downtown more than we do.

If it isn't the site of the action,

they try to stick its high-rise

towers in the back of the shot.

But movies have some advantages over us.

They can fly through the air.

We must travel by land.

They exist in space.

We live and die in time.

So why should I be generous?

Of course, I know movies

aren't about places,

...they're about stories.

If we notice the location,

...we are not really watching the movie.

It's what's up front that counts.

Movies bury their traces,

...choosing for us what to watch,

...then moving on to something else.

They do the work of our

voluntary attention,

...and so we must suppress

that faculty as we watch.

Our involuntary attention

must come to the fore.

But what if we watch with

our voluntary attention,

...instead of letting the movies direct us?

If we can appreciate documentaries

for their dramatic qualities,

...perhaps we can appreciate

fiction films...

...for their documentary revelations.

And what if suspense is just

another alienation effect.

Isn't that what Hitchcock taught?

For him, suspense was a means of

enlivening his touristy travelogues.

Then maybe I can find another way to

animate this city symphony in reverse.

Maybe this effort to see how

movies depict Los Angeles...

...may seem more than

wrong-headed or mean-spirited.

Los Angeles, it is said,

...is the most photographed

city in the world.

If you walk around enough,

...you'll start to notice...

...the mysterious temporary signs...

...that direct crew members

to a movie location.

If you walk through the

right neighborhoods,

...you'll see the long

rows of white trucks...

...that mark and fence

off a location shoot.

Los Angeles is where the relation between

reality and representation gets muddled.

[Newspaper headline: 2 Charged in

Murder Like One in Film They Produced]

Their film is about the killing

of a strip club mogul.

Six years earlier,

...the producer and the star

had conspired to murder...

...the real owner of the strip

club where the film is set...

...and take over his empire.

The strip clubs made them rich,

...but their movie flopped.

A real movie shoot...

...can create a better

public spectacle...

...than the fake movie studio tours.

In a city where only

a few buildings...

...are more than a hundred years old,

...where most traces of the city's

history have been effaced,

...a place can become

a historic landmark...

...because it was once a movie location.

As it is for people,

...so it is for places:

Getting into the movies becomes

a substitute for achievement.

Actors have head shots,

...buildings get

architectural photographs.

Plaques and signs mark the

sites of former movie studios.

Streets and parks are

named for movie stars.

Even movie writers.

A small bust near the

Griffith Park Planetarium...

...marks the spot...

...where James Dean once played

a rebel without a cause.

The inscription claims Dean

wasn't really a rebel:

Those were only roles he played.

But wasn't he more

of a rebel in life...

...than in the movies?

Where he always played

a milquetoast Oedipus,

...trying not to murder but to

please an imperfect father...

...who is either too stern...

...or too soft?

A narrow public stairway...

...between Vendome Street...

...and Descanso Drive

in Silver Lake...

...has been named the Music Box Steps,

...after the classic Laurel

and Hardy short...

...filmed there in 1932.

Some buildings that

look functional...

...are permanent movie sets.

A McDonald's in City of Industry...

...is never open to the public.

Here actors are paid...

...so we can see them smile...

...as they ingest their Big Macs.

A roadhouse...

...at the corner of Avenue Q

and 145th Street...

...in Palmdale...

...has never served a regular patron,

...but it appears prominently...

...in Swordfish and Brother.

And other buildings that

have lost their purpose...

...can be preserved

as movie locations,

...like the Ambassador Hotel,

...famous since 1968...

...because Sirhan Sirhan...

...assassinated Robert Kennedy there.

Sometimes it works the other way around:

A building constructed as a movie set...

...takes on an afterlife.

Mr. Blandings's dream house,

...fictionally located in the

woods of Connecticut,

...has been preserved as an

administration building...

...at Malibu Creek State Park.

Los Angeles...

...may be the most photographed

city in the world,

...but it's one of the least photogenic.

It's not Paris or New York.

In New York, everything

is sharp and in-focus,

...as if seen through a wide-angle lens.

In smoggy cities like Los Angeles,

...everything dissolves into the distance,

...and even stuff that's close-up...

...seems far off.

New York seems immediately

accessible to the camera.

Any image from almost

any corner of the city...

...is immediately recognizable

...as a piece of New York.

Los Angeles is hard to get right,

...maybe because traditional

public space...

...has been largely occupied...

...by the quasi-private space

of moving vehicles.

It's elusive,

...just beyond the reach of an image.

It's not a city that spread

outward from a center...

...as motorized transportation

supplanted walking,

...but a series of villages

that grew together,

...linked from the beginning...

...by railways and then motor roads.

The villages became neighborhoods...

...and their boundaries blurred,

...but they remain separate provinces,

...joined together primarily

by mutual hostility...

...and a mutual disdain for the

city's historic center.

Maybe that's why the movies turned

their back on their city of origin,

...almost from the beginning.

They claimed to come from Hollywood,

...not from Los Angeles,

...although the first southern California

studios weren't even in Hollywood,

...but in another suburb with

an even more idyllic name:

Edendale...

...just north of Echo Park Lake,

...where Jake Gittes would spy on

Hollis Mulwray in Chinatown.

Mack Sennett had his studio there,

...and when the lake

was drained in 1913,

...he could improvise

a movie plot around it.

The movies moved west,

...and Edendale doesn't exist anymore.

It somehow got lost between

Echo Park and Silver Lake.

The movies claimed

to come from Hollywood,

...even though there were more

movie studios in Culver City,

...one of the small independent municipalities

tucked into the west side of Los Angeles.

In the golden age of comedy,

...when an urban

setting was required,

...it was usually Culver City.

But Culver City was "The heart of screenland"

Rate this script:4.6 / 19 votes