Los Angeles Plays Itself Page #9

that overlooks the whole city."

"...It was fantastic..."

"I suddenly felt exhilarated."

"I was really moved by the

geometry of the place,"

"...its conception, its baroque harmony."

"It's a fabulous city."

"To think some people claim it's an ugly

city when it's really pure poetry,"

"...it just kills me."

"I wanted to build something right then,"

"...create something."

"Do you know what I mean?"

"Yeah, I do. I understand."

The opinion expressed by Raquel

Welch in Flareup is more typical.

"It's better from up here than down close."

Roman Polanski later

stole her line...

...and improved upon it:

"There's no more beautiful

city in the world..."

"...provided it's seen by night

and from a distance."

It was the outsider Polanski...

...who made Los Angeles

a subject for movies,

...working in collaboration

with a native screenwriter...

...Robert Towne.

The city could finally become a

subject in the early seventies...

...because it had finally

become self-conscious.

It could no longer be mistaken

for a sunny Southern town.

It had big-city problems:

Big-city racism...

...and big-city race riots.

The 1965 Watts uprising...

...had revealed a racial

faultline in Los Angeles.

The open secrets of

police brutality...

...and housing discrimination...

...could no longer be swept aside.

The rioting could be

evoked in movies...

...only after it had safely

passed into history,

...and even then it required a

golden oldies soundtrack.

Yet the shadow of Watts loomed

over movies about Los Angeles.

Isn't the notion of Chinatown...

...as the forsaken hellhole

of civic negligence...

...a displaced vision of Watts?

The endless boom was ending,

...and the new depression hit southern

California particularly hard.

As David Gebhard and Robert Winter wrote in

their guide to architecture in Los Angeles:

"No one seemed sure of

the future any longer."

"Smog,"

"...the congestion of people..."

"...and their extension,

the automobile,"

"...the continual

destruction of farm land,"

"...potential and real

water shortages..."

"...created doubts of

such magnitude..."

"...that even the usual boosterism

of Southern California..."

"...found it increasingly difficult

to reassert the old beliefs."

The questions began.

How did we go wrong?

When did we go wrong?

Although Los Angeles is

a city with no history,

...nostalgia has always been the dominant

note in the city's image of itself.

At any time in its history,

...Los Angeles was always

a better place...

..."A long time ago"...

...than in the present.

What was new in the seventies...

...was a nostalgia for

what might have been,

...a sense that everything might have been

different except for one defining event.

We began to look for an originary sin.

Robert Towne took an urban myth...

...about the founding of Los Angeles on

water stolen from the Owens River Valley...

...and made it resonate.

Chinatown isn't a docudrama,

...it's a fiction.

The water project it depicts...

...isn't the construction of

the Los Angeles Aqueduct...

...engineered by William Mulholland

before the First World War.

Chinatown is set in 1938,

...not 1905.

The Mulholland-like figure,

...Hollis Mulwray,

...isn't the chief

architect of the project,

...but rather its strongest opponent,

...who must be

discredited and murdered.

Mulwray is against the

Alto Vallejo Dam...

...because it's unsafe,

...not because it's stealing

water from somebody else.

"In case you've forgotten, gentlemen..."

"...over five hundred lives were lost

when the Van der Lip Dam gave way..."

"And now you propose yet another

dirt-banked terminus dam..."

"...with slopes of two

and one half to one,"

"...one hundred twelve feet high,"

"...and a twelve-thousand

acre water surface."

"Well, it won't hold."

"I won't build it. It's that simple."

But there are echoes of Mulholland's

aqueduct project in Chinatown.

"That dam's a con job."

"What dam?"

"The one your husband opposed..."

"...they're conning L.A.

into building it..."

"...but the water's not gonna go

to L.A. It's coming right here."

"To the Valley?"

"Everything you can see.

Everything around us..."

"They're blowing these farmers out of their

land and then picking it up for peanuts.""

"You have any idea at all what this land'll

be worth with a steady water supply?"

"About thirty million more

than they paid for it."

Mulholland's project

enriched its promoters...

...through insider land deals

in the San Fernando Valley,

...just like the dam

project in Chinatown.

The disgruntled San Fernando

Valley farmers of Chinatown,

...forced to sell off their

land at bargain prices...

...because of an artificial drought,

...seem like stand-ins for

the Owens Valley settlers...

...whose homesteads

turned to dust...

...when Los Angeles took the

water that irrigated them.

The Van Der Lip Dam disaster,

...which Hollis Mulwray cites to explain

his opposition to the proposed dam,

...is an obvious reference to the collapse

of the St. Francis Dam in 1928.

Mulholland built this dam after

completing the aqueduct,

...and its failure was the greatest man-made

disaster in the history of California.

These echoes have led many

viewers to regard Chinatown...

...not only as docudrama,

...but as truth,

...the real secret history of how

Los Angeles got its water,

...and it has become a ruling metaphor...

...for non-fictional critiques

of Los Angeles development.

"Chinatown Revisited"...

...is the phrase

Mike Davis coined...

...for the downtown skyscraper

boom of 1973 to 1986,

...and he cast future mayor Richard

Riordan as its prime fixer.

A publicly financed civic project...

...had again generated

windfall profits...

...for a wealthy ring of insiders.

Chinatown set a pattern.

Films about Los Angeles

would be period films,

...set in the past or in the future.

They would replace a public history...

...with a secret history.

Jake Gittes tries to expose a con job,

...but he fails.

"This is Noah Cross, if you don't know..."

"Evelyn's father, if you don't know..."

"He's the bird you're after, Lou..."

"I can explain everything, but

just give me five minutes."

"That's all I need."

"He's rich. Do you understand?"

"- Shut up!

- ...can get away with anything."

"I am rich. I am Noah Cross..."

- "Evelyn Mulray is my daughter.

- He's crazy, Lou."

"He killed Mulray because

of the water thing."

"I'm telling you. Just listen

to me for five minutes."

Noah Cross is too powerful.

He can murder his incorruptible

ex-partner and get away with it.

He can rape the land, figuratively,

...and rape his own daughter, literally,

...and keep the child produced

by this incestuous union.

The truth will never come out.

I could quote David Thomson again:

"I know the additive of

corruption in L.A.'s water..."

"I've seen Chinatown,"

"...and I know there's no

sense in protesting."

"Forget it, Jake, it's Chinatown."

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