Los Angeles Plays Itself Page #2

only in the eyes of its civic fathers.

The greater renown of

Hollywood so frustrated them...

...that they once proposed appropriating

the name for themselves.

Culver City would have

been renamed Hollywood.

Why not?

After all, Hollywood isn't just a place,

...it's also a metonym for the

motion picture industry.

But if you're like me and you identify

more with the city of Los Angeles...

...than with the movie industry,

...it's hard not to resent

the idea of Hollywood,

...the idea of the movies as standing

apart from and above the city.

People blame all sorts

of things on the movies.

For me, it's their betrayal

of their native city.

Maybe I'm wrong, but...

...I blame them for the custom of

abbreviating the city's name to L.A.

"Gotta find somebody in L.A."

"Maybe he's not even in L.A."

"How far did you say you're going?"

"Los Angeles."

"L.A.?"

"L.A.'s good enough for me, mister."

"L.A. was the gang capital of America."

"Hello, L.A!"

"Hello, Plissken.

Welcome to L.A!"

The acronym functions here as a

slightly derisive diminutive.

Now it's become second nature,

...even to people who live here.

Maybe we adopted it as a way of immunizing

ourselves against the implicit scorn,

...but it still makes me cringe.

Only a city with an inferiority

complex would allow it.

When people say "L.A.",

...they often mean "show business."

"I'm an actress..."

[Did you ever see Massacre in Blood City?"]

That's another presumption of the movies:

That everyone in Los Angeles is part

of their "industry" or wants to be.

Actually,

...only one in forty residents

of Los Angles County...

...works in the entertainment industry.

But the rest of us simply don't exist.

We might wonder if the movies...

...have ever really depicted Los Angeles.

The City as Background.

At first, Los Angeles was just

a destination, not a place.

Movie characters visited,

...they didn't live here.

"Are you sure we're still

in the United States?"

"I think Los Angeles is."

It was a resort, not a city.

When its streets and buildings

appeared in movies,

...they were just anonymous backdrops.

Nobody called Los Angeles the

capital of the Pacific Rim...

...or worried about how it stacked up

with the great cities of the world.

The varied terrain and

eclectic architecture...

...allowed Los Angeles and its

environs to play almost any place.

Lake Arrowhead,

...seventy-eight miles from

downtown Los Angeles,

...could play Switzerland,

...and Calabasas in the

San Fernando Valley...

...could play the valley

of Ling in China...

...after M-G-M excavated

some rice paddies.

More often than not,

...Los Angeles played some other city...

...Sinclair Lewis's

Zenith in Babbitt...

...Chicago in The Public Enemy...

"Say, you can let me off here. I'm going

to meet my friends on the corner."

Jimmy Cagney drops off Jean Harlow in front of

the new Bullock's Wilshire department store.

Our Art Deco "Cathedral of commerce"

had opened in September 1929,

...seventeen months before The

Public Enemy was filmed.

It was a new kind of dry goods emporium,

...located in the suburbs

for the motorcar trade.

Presumably only locals would

recognize this Los Angeles landmark,

...but as they drove aimlessly around what

is now called the Wilshire Center district,

...anyone who knows

anything about Chicago...

...might find the

cityscape strangely rural.

"From Chicago?"

"Not exactly. I came from Texas."

In The Street with No Name,

...Los Angeles played Center City.

Again and again, it has

played a city with no name.

Its landmarks are obscure enough

that they could play many roles.

The most venerable of these landmarks is the

Bradbury Building at Third and Broadway,

...dating from 1893.

It was discovered by architectural

historian Esther McCoy in 1953.

She claimed architect

George Herbert Wyman...

...had been inspired by Edward Bellamy's utopian

vision of a socialist architecture in the year 2000:

A vast hall full of light,

...received not alone from the windows

on all sides but from the dome.

But the movies discovered the Bradbury Building

before the architectural historians did.

The earliest appearance

I know came in 1943.

In China Girl, it played the

Hotel Royale in Mandalay, Burma.

The following year, in The

White Cliffs of Dover,

...it played a London military hospital

overflowing with wounded soldiers.

Its first indelible role was in D.O.A.:

Fatally poisoned by a luminous toxin

slipped into his drink at a jazz club,

...Frank Bigelow has one day before

dying to track down his killer,

...and he finds him at the Phillips

Import-Export Company...

...room 427.

The Bradbury Building was again the site of a

bizarre revenge killing in Indestructible Man.

This time, an executed convict,

...brought back to life...

...and given superhuman strength by a

scientific experiment gone awry,

...hunts the three sleazy hoodlums

who set him up to take the fall.

In Marlowe, the mayhem was less lethal.

Here the Bradbury Building

houses Philip Marlowe's office,

...which Raymond Chandler had located in a

shabby building on Hollywood Boulevard.

"Mr. Marlowe?"

"Yes."

"What can I do for you?"

The Bradbury Building had become just

another clich in a film of clichs,

...the most misanthropic of

all the Marlowe movies.

Screenwriter Hampton Fancher

and director Ridley Scott...

...disagreed about employing the Bradbury

Building as a location for Blade Runner.

Fancher argued it was

too familiar, overdone.

Scott responded,

... "Not the way I'll do it."

He gave the building a new, more

elaborate facade through mattework,

...and he turned the interior

atrium into a picturesque ruin.

After a long overdue restoration

in the early nineties,

...it went upscale.

In Murder in the First,

...a period movie set in 1941,

...it housed the offices of a

prosperous San Francisco lawyer,

...and in Wolf, the office of a

prominent New York publishing firm.

Now it has found a use that seems

consonant with its career in the movies.

Another Blade Runner location,

...Frank Lloyd Wright's Ennis house,

...has had an even longer movie career.

The most massive of the

Mayan Revival houses...

Wright designed around Los

Angeles in the twenties,

...it first appeared in

the movies in 1933...

...as the home of a female auto tycoon.

The interiors are studio sets,

...typical Warner Bros. Art Deco,

...as are some of the exteriors.

Wright had left out the swimming pool.

William Castle rediscovered it in 1958,

...just before Wright's death.

Vincent Price has offered

$10,000 to five people...

...if they can last the night in

this century-old haunted house.

Once again, the interiors are

unrelated to Wright's architecture.

In 1968 Gus Brown bought the

Ennis house and restored it.

To help pay the maintenance

and preservation costs,

...he began promoting

it as a location site,

...not only for movies and TV shows,

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