Los Angeles Plays Itself Page #8

like a simulated city,

...and it played one in Virtuosity.

But the directors who did the most to

make Los Angeles a character in movies...

...and then a subject...

...were outsiders, like

Wilder, or tourists.

They weren't interested in what

made Los Angeles like a city;

They were interested in what made Los

Angeles unlike the cities they knew.

Just as there are highbrows and lowbrows,

...there are high tourists

and low tourists.

Just as there are highbrow

directors and lowbrow directors,

...there are high tourist directors

and low tourist directors.

Low tourist directors...

...generally disdain Los Angeles.

They prefer San Francisco and the

coastline of northern California.

More picturesque.

The greatest low tourist

director is, of course,

...Alfred Hitchcock,

...and he set four memorable films

around the San Francisco Bay Area.

But only one of his

thirty American films...

...is set even partially in Los Angeles.

The first ten minutes of Saboteur...

...are located in or

around Los Angeles,

...but it could be anywhere in America...

...where there is an aircraft factory.

The scenes were shot in the studio,

...and there is nothing distinctive

to the region in the sets.

Hitchcock even had Marion

Crane bypass Los Angeles...

...on her fateful journey from Phoenix to

the Bates Motel in northern California.

But he never had an unkind word

for his adopted home town,

...at least in his movies.

Another low tourist director,

...Woody Allen,

...plainly expressed his disdain for

Los Angeles in his most popular movie.

"No, I cannot... You

keep bringing it up..."

"...but I don't wanna live in a city..."

"...where the only cultural advantage is that

you can make a right turn on a red light."

As the cinematic chronicler of New

York's middle-brow middle class,

...the people who believe what they

read in the New York Times,

Allen rarely strays from

his native milieu.

But his best friend does

move to Los Angeles,

...and Woody follows...

...although only for a visit.

"You know, I can't believe that

this is really Beverly Hills."

"The architecture is really

consistent isn't it..."

"...French next to Spanish, next

to Tudor, next to Japanese."

"God, it's so clean out here."

"It's because they don't

throw their garbage away..."

"...they make it into television shows."

His tale of two cities becomes

a tale of two marquees.

In fact, The Sorrow and the

Pity did play in Los Angeles...

...I saw it here...

...and, for all I know,

...The House of Exorcism and Messiah

of Evil played in New York.

But if New York has Woody

Allen to live down,

...we can't feel superior.

We have Henry Jaglom,

...who is even balder,

...even more narcissistic,

...even more solipsistic.

"I've learned that risks

are the best thing..."

"...Everything that happens good and exciting,

that happens in film and in life..."

"...comes as a result of risk..."

"Risk is my middle name."

While New Yorkers are generally hostile,

...the British are often fascinated.

In The Loved One,

...Tony Richardson acknowledges

his ambivalence.

Tony Richardson acknowledges

his ambivalence.

The local architecture is kitsch,

...but it is transcendent kitsch.

A movie studio is a cruel court...

...where everyone is subject to the

most wayward whim of its mogul,

...but the back lot is an enchanted

village of accidental surrealism.

"The climate here suits me admirably..."

"...and the people here are

so kind and generous."

"They talk entirely for

their own pleasure,"

"...and they never expect you to listen."

People who hate Los Angeles...

...love Point Blank.

British director John Boorman...

...managed to make the city look

both bland and insidious,

...like the gangster organization

Lee Marvin smashes,

...which goes by the name

Multiplex Products Company.

For me...

...the highlight of the film...

...is the astonishing tableau of grotesque

interior decoration schemes.

It's enough to make you believe the

seventies began in the mid-sixties.

Is an LSD movie low

tourist or high tourist?

Roger Corman, the director of The Trip,

...is no tourist in Los Angeles,

...but he probably needed a guidebookto

open the doors of perception.

Luckily he had Jack Nicholson

to write the script,

...Peter Fonda and Bruce Dern

as traveling companions,

...and Dennis Jakob to create

the montage sequences.

Experimental high tourist

film-makers like Corman,

...Maya Deren,

...Andy Warhol,

...and Fred Halsted...

...discovered a pastoral arcadia

near the heart of Los Angeles.

...Deren and her collaborator

Alexander Hammid...

...could find a private Eden...

...just by gazing out the window of their

Spanish Colonial Revival duplex...

...above the Sunset Strip.

For Warhol,

...Hollywood formulas represented an innocence

that could be regained only "sort of"

...but Sam Rodia's towers in Watts...

...were a bit of paradise not yet lost.

In the early sixties,

...the Watts Towers were the first

world's most accessible,

...most user-friendly civic monument.

Fred Halsted's gay porn masterpiece...

...recapitulates the loss of Eden,

...moving from the idyllic

rural canyons...

...to the already mean

streets of Hollywood.

As the landscape becomes more urban,

...the sex gets rougher.

Continental European directors

are usually high tourists,

...so they appreciate Los Angeles,

...even the tacky stuff we hate,

...like the Sunset Strip.

In The Outside Man by Jacques Deray,

...a Parisian hit man

stranded in Los Angeles

...discovers a city of parking lots,

...motels,

...bus stations,

...coffee shops,

...strip bars,

...and real estate opportunities.

It's all quite ugly, I suppose,

...but it adds up to a precise

portrait of the city in 1973,

...just as I remember it.

Like most Europeans in

southern California,

...Antonioni was more interested

in the desert than in the city.

If you should ever find yourself

in Death Valley in August,

...you will hear more German

spoken than English.

But before heading

for Zabriskie Point,

...Antonioni took his protagonist on a

high tourist spin around Los Angeles,

...starting with the now-famous murals at the

Farmer John's meat packing plant in Vernon,

...later featured in

Brian De Palma's Carrie...

...and Jon Jost's Angel City.

His tour of industrial Los Angeles

ended abruptly and improbably...

...at Sunset and Rodeo.

Jacques Demy loved Los Angeles

as only a tourist can.

Or maybe I should say,

...as only a French tourist can.

I resented Model Shop

when it came out...

...because it was a westside movie.

Its vision of the city...

...didn't extend east of Vine Street.

But now I can appreciate...

...an early poignant attempt to

defend Los Angeles as a city.

It's totally incoherent,

...but if you live here,

you have to be moved.

"I was driving down Sunset..."

"...and I turned on one of those roads

that lead up into the hills..."

"...and I stopped at this place

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