Los Angeles Plays Itself Page #7

...and practically

nothing to everyone else,

...except perhaps when they represent things that

have disappeared from urban centers everywhere,

...like drive-in restaurants...

...or drive-in movies.

Of course, there are certain types of

buildings that aren't designed to last.

They must be rebuilt

every five or ten years...

...so they can adapt to changing

patterns of consumption.

So the image of an obsolete gas station...

...or grocery store...

...can evoke the same kind of nostalgia we

feel for any commodity whose day has passed.

Old movies allow us to

rediscover these icons,

...even to construct a documenary

history of their evolution.

"Tell this character we want to go..."

"Can I help you, sir?"

"Oh, yeah. Give me five

gallons of regular."

"Regular."

"I thought you said we

were going to dancing..."

"Come here, homes. Come here,

I want to talk to you."

"Could you check under

the hood, too, please?"

"Sure."

"Hello, there. Fill'er up?"

"Two dollars, no knock!"

"Yes, sir."

"There goes Williams. He slides.

He's in there, safe."

But who cares about our old

minor league baseball parks,

...Wrigley Field, home of the Angels,

...and Gilmore Field, home

of the Hollywood Stars,

...or the Twinks, as our local

sportswriters liked to call them?

"Cushions a dime. Ten cents only. Be comfortable

for a dime. Get your cushions here."

Who remembers Steve Bilko and

Bobby Bragan and Carlos Bernier?

The crowd scenes in The Atomic

City feature real baseball fans,

...not professional extras,

...who were then still cast...

...according to the requirements of a

production code that prohibited...

...any scenes showing the social

intermingling of white and colored people.

They suggest that Los Angeles may have

been more comfortably integrated in 1952...

...than it is today.

And who mourns the

Pan Pacific Auditorium,

...our Streamline Moderne palace,

...once the city's most famous landmark,

...where the college basketball

teams played their games,

...where Robert Frank photographed

the Motorama in 1956.

It played a dog racing

track in Johnny Eager...

...and an arena for ice

skating shows in Suspense.

In 1980, after the Pan

Pacific had been abandoned,

...Lawrence Gordon produced

an ill-fated fantasy...

...of what the preservationists

call adaptive reuse.

A muse inspires a young artist to

convince an aging clarinetist...

...that it is the ideal locale for

the nightclub he wants to open.

"You really think this

could work out for Danny?"

"I think this place could be

anything you want it to be."

"Yeah, but what the hell to call it?"

"In Xanadu did Kublah Khan a

stately pleasure dome decree."

Alas, their dream turns out to be...

...a roller disco.

The film failed,

...and what was left of the Pan Pacific

burned down nine years later.

It deserved better,

...both in the movies and in reality.

"A place where nobody dared to go..."

...A love that we came to know...

"...They call it Xanadu."

So did the Richfield Building,

...which had to make way for taller,

...uglier skyscrapers.

There are many photographs,

...but only a few movie shots.

Thanks to Antonioni.

What about Ship's Westwood,

...a coffee shop that was open all night?

It was an institution,

...but it didn't stand a chance when someone realized

you could put a skyscraper in the same space.

"Thanks, Amy."

At least the Far East Caf is still there.

It closed down after the 1994 earthquake,

...but it is supposed to reopen soon.

And so is the Angel's Flight.

Our beloved funicular,

... "the shortest railway in the world"...

...built in 1901,

...ripped up in 1969 by the

Community Redevelopment Agency,

...reconstructed in 1996,

...a block south of its original location,

...closed after a crash in February 2001,

...just a few days after I filmed it.

But it's still there...

...sort of.

The reconstructed Angel's

Flight was a tourist ride,

...a simulation,

...because it had lost

its original purpose.

Bunker Hill,

...the residential neighborhood at

the top of the Angel's Flight,

...had vanished.

The movies loved Bunker Hill.

The lords of the city hated it.

Rents were low, so it put the wrong

kind of people too close to downtown.

Bunker Hill became a target for

slum clearance or urban renewal.

They had to destroy

it in order to save it.

And destroy it they did,

...although it took more than ten years.

Bunker Hill was the most photographed

district in Los Angeles,

...so the movies unwittingly documented

its destruction and depopulation.

In the late forties,

...it could represent a solid

working-class neighborhood,

...a place where a guy could take his

girl home to meet his mother.

"Ah, buena sera, mamma mia."

"Buena sera."

It was film noir territory,

...but it was a refuge from the

meaner streets of the city.

By the mid-fifties,

...it had become a neighborhood

of rooming houses

...where a man who knows too much

might hole up or hide out.

Hollywood had come to accept Raymond

Chandler's vision of Bunker Hill.

As old town, wop town,

crook town, arty town...

...where you could find anything...

...from crooks on the lam to

ladies of anybody's evening...

...to County Relief clients

brawling with haggard landladies...

...in grand old houses with

scrolled porches...

"A guy could get a heart

attack walking up here."

"Who invited you?"

The best Bunker Hill

movie is The Exiles,

...an independent low-budget

film by Kent MacKenzie,

...about Indians from Arizona

exiled in Los Angeles,

...shot in 1958,

...completed in 1961.

It reveals the city as a place

where reality is opaque,

...where different social orders...

...coexist in the same space...

...without touching each other.

Better than any other movie,

...it proves that there

once was a city here,

...before they tore it down

and built a simulacrum.

The end of Bunker Hill is

visible in The Omega Man.

By 1971...

...it made a good location for

a post-apocalyptic fantasy.

Charlton Heston plays an urban

survivalist in a cityscape...

...depopulated by biological warfare.

He has learned to become

totally self-reliant.

If he wants to see a movie,

...he has to project it himself.

"This is really beautiful, man..."

"...If we can't all live

together and be happy?..."

"...If you have to be afraid

to walk out in the street,"

"...if you have to be afraid to

smile at somebody, right?"

"What kind of a way is that

to go through this life?"

All his movie shows are matinees,

...because at night he must fight off

a gang of Luddite hippie vampires,

...his only companions in the city.

Thirteen years later,

...the same plot and

the same location...

...reappear in Night of the Comet.

In the wake of a disaster...

...apparently brought on by comet dust,

...a small band of human survivors...

...again battle zombie-like mutants,

...but the center of the action,

Bunker Hill,

...has been totally transformed.

The new Bunker Hill looks

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