Los Angeles Plays Itself Page #3

...but also for infomercials

and music videos.

Blade Runner was his proudest catch,

...but my favorite is A Passion to Kill,

...a low-budget Neo-noir film.

It plays a psychiatric clinic...

...where a patient can sometimes

seduce her therapist.

But director Rick King allows the

architecture to upstage the action.

The Ennis house apparently

transcends space and time.

It could be fictionally

located in Washington...

...or Osaka.

It could play an ancient villa...

...a nineteenth century haunted house...

...a contemporary mansion...

...a twenty-first century

apartment building...

...or a twenty-sixth

century science lab...

...where Klaus Kinski

invents time travel.

"I got my blood into this..."

And now you have it...

Look, right in the palm of my hand.

Time!

"We can go back into the past

and change it as we wish."

The Union Station is a more

recognizable landmark.

As the major gateway to Los Angeles

in the forties and fifties,

...it has been a location

for many movies...

...and a favorite site

for movie kidnappings.

"Listen, madam."

"You stole that."

"Know what this is?"

"- It's a game."

"- It's no game. Just walk."

"- Why?" "Cuz if you don't, I'll

blow your f***ing heart out."

Through its corridors and

grand lobby have passed...

...gangsters...

...drug dealers...

...political protesters...

Munchkins...

...even an alien in heat disguised

as a railroad conductor.

Yet Union Station hasn't

always played itself.

During its fallow days

in the early eighties,

...before its revival as an

interurban railway hub,

...it was a police station

in Blade Runner.

In the 1950 movie Union Station,

...the only film in which

it has a starring role,

...it is not located in Los Angeles.

Actually it's never located

anywhere precisely.

The station is only a commuter

ride from Westhampton,

...which would place it in New York City,

...yet one of the villains takes an

elevated train out of the station,

...suggesting Chicago.

The police chase him into the stockyards.

This must be Chicago,

...but what about those palm trees?

In The Replacement Killers,

...Union Station played the Los

Angeles International Airport,

...LAX.

Our airport is certainly replaceable.

The best anyone might say for it is

that it looks like all the others,

...maybe just a little worse.

The railway terminal had been

designed as public space;

...The airport was designed

for crowd control.

It has been an inevitable if uninspiring

location for movies set in Los Angeles,

...but some directors have tried to

sidestep its terminal blandness.

Clint Eastwood set The

Rookie in Los Angeles,

...but he filmed the climactic airport terminal

chase at the San Jose International Airport.

In "Why Do Fools Fall in Love",

...the "theme" restaurant in the

middle of the airport parking lot,

...originally intended

as the control tower,

...portrayed a passenger terminal.

Of course movies lie about Los Angeles,

...but sometimes they make us wish the real

city corresponded more closely to their vision.

In Miracle Mile,

...Johnie's Coffee Shop at

Wilshire and Fairfax...

...has a fantastic revolving sign,

...and it's open all night.

At the time the film was made,

...Johnnie's had no revolving sign,

...and it closed before dinnertime.

Now it's closed indefinitely.

Other lies are simply benign.

Government agencies sometimes

get fictional names.

"Dr. Stevens, meet Special Agent Pomeroy

of the National Bureau of Investigation."

"N.B.I.?"

"You don't look like an N.B.I.

man to me, Mr. Pomeroy."

"Well, you don't look

like a doctor, doctor."

People have fake addresses.

"Stark, Jim Stark. Here it is,

1753 Angelo. Well, well."

Or fake phone numbers...

"Lexington 0-five-five-four-nine."

"What's the number?"

"Five-five-five-seven-six-o-five."

"Five-five-five-four-four-eight-seven."

"Five-five-five-sixty-nine-sixty-nine."

"Write down my number..."

"...five-five-five-six-three-two-one.

Got it?"

"Wait a minute,"

"...five-five-five's not a real number.

They only use that in the movies."

"No sh*t, honey. What do you

think this is? Real life?"

Other lies are annoying.

To someone who knows Los

Angeles only from movies,

...it might appear that everyone who has a

job lives in the hills or at the beach.

The dismal flatland between...

...is the province exclusively

of the lumpen proletariat.

And most of them live

next to an oil refinery.

And in death they will rest

next to an oil derrick.

A hillside house may be appropriate

for a hack composer...

...or a drug dealer on the way up.

"Where'd you get this furniture?"

"Nice Italian lady picked this out."

"Oh, so nice. Gianni Versace, right?

Mike Tyson wears Versace."

"David, come on. Take your feet off the couch. You

don't do that at your mother's house, do you?"

"Nouveau anal, I think this is called.

But all right."

"And here... here... here...

coaster... coaster."

Or a music promoter on the way down.

"Terry Valentine."

"Very nice to meet you."

"You know...

...you could see the sea out

there if you could see it."

But in reality, a bookstore clerk couldn't

afford to rent a house above Sunset Plaza,

...even if it is, as she claims...

"...small and kind of run-down."

A fixer with jetliner views,

in the local realtor jargon,

...would still have rented for two or

three thousand dollars per month in 1995,

...no matter how much in need of TLC.

Her bank robber boyfriend

might live in Malibu.

And back in the sixties,

...bohemian young people did

live by the sand in Venice,

...although I don't remember

the Infinite Pad.

We may regard Cobra's Venice loft

as a relic of the golden eighties...

...when product placement

superseded script-writing...

...and movie cops abandoned the

suburbs to become urban pioneers.

But what about a struggling

true-crime writer...

...and an unemployed

photographer so cash-strapped...

...they must recruit paying passengers for

their move from Pittsburgh to California?

Yet when they arrive in Los Angeles,

...they immediately take up residence

in a spacious Malibu beach cottage.

And I don't like geographic license.

It's hard to make a theoretical

argument against it.

After all, in a fiction film,

...a real space becomes fictional.

Why shouldn't a car chase

jump from the Venice canals...

...to the Los Angeles harbor

thirty miles away?

Why shouldn't the exit from

a skating rink in Westwood...

...open directly onto Fletcher Bowron

Square in downtown Los Angeles,

...fifteen miles east?

But one fiction is not

always as good as another,

...and like dramatic license,

...geographic license is usually

an alibi for laziness.

Silly geography makes for silly movies.

"I warned you I'd kill her."

And the best Los Angeles

car chase movie...

...is stubbornly,

...even perversely literalist.

"Attention, all units..."

...Roadblock being set up at

Torrance Mazda agency...

One-Nine-O street

and Hawthorne Boulevard.

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