Los Angeles Plays Itself Page #4

"Use caution."

Director Toby Halicki realized

Dziga Vertov's dream:

An anti-humanist cinema of

bodies and machines in motion.

His materialist masterpiece

was the first manifesto...

...for a cinema of

conspicuous destruction.

It was also the first Southern Californian

movie Centered in the South Bay,

...the unglamorous southern coastal

region of the Los Angeles basin...

stretching from Long Beach to El Segundo

...that would later become the

domain of William Friedkin...

Quentin Tarantino...

...and Michael Mann,

...who would accidentally rename the most

familiar icon of South Bay movies,

...the Vincent Thomas Bridge.

"Saint Vincent Thomas Bridge,

that's escape route number one."

Vincent Thomas was San Pedro's representative

in the state assembly for many years,

...but he hasn't been canonized yet,

...not even in Pedro.

Accidents happen,

...but some lies are malignant.

They cheapen or trivialize the real city.

One of the glories of Los Angeles is its

modernist residential architecture,

...but Hollywood movies have almost

systematically denigrated this heritage...

...by casting many of these houses...

...as the residences of movie villains.

It begins with The Damned

Don't Cry in 1950.

Frank Sinatra's Palm Springs retreat,

...designed by Stewart Williams,

...plays the home of a local gangster boss.

Then in 1955,

...a band of psycho kidnappers

led by John Cassavetes...

...holes up in a prototypically

mid-century modern house...

...in the Hollywood Hills.

And there has usually been something

sinister about the Ennis house.

Its most frequent role is the

mansion of some gangster chieftain,

...often a representative

of the yellow peril.

The most celebrated episode in Hollywood's

war against modern architecture...

...is L.A. Confidential.

Richard Neutra's Lovell house,

...the first great manifestation of the

International Style in southern California,

...plays the home of Pierce Patchett,

...pornographer,

...pimp,

...prince of the shadow city...

...where whatever you desire is for sale.

Actually director Curtis Hanson

greatly admires the Lovell house.

He even gives it a special

credit at the end of the film,

...according it the honorific title

favored by its original owner:

The Lovell Health House.

Is it just a convention then?

The architectural trophy house...

...is the modern equivalent of

the black hat or the mustache.

It's nothing to take seriously.

Well, the architecture critic of the

Los Angeles Times took it seriously.

He cited L.A. Confidential

as some kind of proof...

...that the utopian aspirations of

modernist architecture were bogus.

He wrote,

..."The house's slick, meticulous forms seem

the perfect frame for that kind of power..."

"Neutra's glass walls open up to

expose the dark side of our lives..."

"...they suggest the erotic, the broken,

the psychologically impure."

So now we know.

As the movies have shown,

...these pure modern machines for

better living were dens of vice.

In fact,

...this fiction is contradicted not only by

the original spirit of the Lovell house,

...but by its entire history.

It was designed as a kind of

manifesto for natural living,

...and it became a center for radical

left-wing political meetings in the thirties.

There is one modernist architect

Hollywood lets off lightly:

Pierre Koenig.

Perhaps it's because he had a knack

for turning steel-and-glass cubes...

...into Hollywood Regency

style mini-mansions.

His Stahl house is an icon

of modern architecture...

...and lately a movie star.

In The Marrying Man,

...it plays the Hollywood pied--terre

of a multimillionaire playboy,

...although the film is set twelve

years before it was built.

In The First Power,

...it plays the home

of a police psychic,

...and in Why Do Fools Fall in Love?

It is the west coast base of Zola Taylor,

...the female vocalist in the Platters.

We feel bad when

Frankie Lymon trashes it.

On the other hand,

...the architect Hollywood most

loves to hate is John Lautner.

In Twilight,

...a Lautner house overlooking

the San Fernando Valley...

...is a crooked cop's reward

for his corruption.

"Nice place you got here...

...It sure beats Los Feliz".

"You're up above the smog."

"Quite a pad you got here, man."

A more elaborate Lautner house

in the hills of Beverly...

...plays the Malibu beach house

of porn king Jackie Treehorn...

...in The Big Lebowski.

"How's the smut business, Jackie?"

"I wouldn't know, dude.

I deal in publishing."

Lautner's most famous

house is the Chemosphere,

...a hexagon of wood,

steel, and glass,

...raised above its hillside lot

on a single concrete column.

It appears in Body Double...

...as the bachelor pad of a

lunatic driller killer.

Lautner's interiors may

be sometimes vulgar,

...or excessively ostentatious,

...but he can't be blamed for this one,

...a bit of excessive art direction

designed to parody eighties excesses.

The ultimate insult to Lautner's

work came in Lethal Weapon 2.

The Garcia house on Mulholland...

...is the home office of a drug ring

organized by the South African consulate.

Enraged by their diplomatic immunity,

...Mel Gibson pulls down their

house with his pickup truck.

Not only is Lautner

slick and superficial,

...he's incompetent.

Lethal Weapon 2 is also the work

of a modern architecture fan.

Producer Joel Silver is famous for his tasteful

restoration of a Frank Lloyd Wright house in...

...Hollywood and a Wright-designed

plantation in South Carolina.

Even though Lautner was Wright's disciple,

...Hollywood's conventional ideology once

again trumped personal conviction.

At least Silver has also trashed

post-modernist architecture.

The thirty-four-story Fox

Plaza in Century City...

...co-starred with Bruce

Willis in Die Hard.

When a gang of high-stakes robbers...

...posing as terrorists take over the

building and capture thirty plus hostages,

...the FBI would sacrifice a

good number of the hostages...

...in order to save the building.

"What you figure the breakage?"

"I figure we take out the terrorists...

...lose twenty, twenty-five per

cent of the hostages. Tops."

"I can live with that."

But the rogue cop inside has other ideas.

Among all the authority

figures on the scene,

...he alone places people above property.

"Get down, get the f*** down!"

"Nail that sucker."

The Fox Plaza played the Nakatomi Plaza,

...the Los Angeles branch office

of a Japanese multinational.

In the late eighties,

...Japanese corporations did own

many of the local office towers.

In the movies, they owned them all.

"Jesus, if an elevator's gonna talk,

it should speak in American."

There are a few Los Angeles landmarks

that almost always play themselves:

City Hall...

...Grauman's Chinese Theatre...

...Griffith Planetarium...

...the four-level freeway interchange...

...the concrete channel of

the Los Angeles River...

...the Eastern Columbia Building

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