Original subtitles

, 00:01:34:00 , This is the city:

, 00:01:36:00 , Los Angeles, California.

, 00:01:39:00 , They make movies here.

, 00:01:43:00 , I live here.

, 00:01:51:00 , Sometimes I think that gives me the right to criticize the way movies depict my city.

, 00:01:53:00 , I know it's not easy.

, 00:01:54:00 , The city is big.

, 00:01:56:00 , The image is small.

, 00:02:00:00 , Movies are vertical.

, 00:02:02:00 , At least when they're projected on a screen.

, 00:02:07:00 , The city is horizontal, except for what we call downtown.

, 00:02:12:13 , Maybe that's why the movies love downtown more than we do.

, 00:02:18:00 , If it isn't the site of the action,

, 00:02:20:07 , they try to stick its high-rise towers in the back of the shot.

, 00:02:29:01 , But movies have some advantages over us.

, 00:02:32:11 , They can fly through the air.

, 00:02:34:17 , We must travel by land.

, 00:02:37:12 , They exist in space.

, 00:02:40:16 , We live and die in time.

, 00:02:44:00 , So why should I be generous?

, 00:02:50:21 , Of course, I know movies aren't about places,

, 00:02:52:05 , they're about stories.

, 00:02:56:00 , If we notice the location,

, 00:02:58:00 , we are not really watching the movie.

, 00:03:03:00 , It's what's up front that counts.

, 00:03:07:09 , Movies bury their traces,

, 00:03:09:00 , choosing for us what to watch,

, 00:03:11:00 , then moving on to something else.

, 00:03:17:00 , They do the work of our voluntary attention,

, 00:03:20:13 , and so we must suppress that faculty as we watch.

, 00:03:25:00 , Our involuntary attention must come to the fore.

, 00:03:30:00 , But what if we watch with our voluntary attention,

, 00:03:32:00 , instead of letting the movies direct us?

, 00:03:38:00 , If we can appreciate documentaries for their dramatic qualities,

, 00:03:41:00 , perhaps we can appreciate fiction films

, 00:03:43:13 , for their documentary revelations.

, 00:03:52:00 , And what if suspense is just another alienation effect.

, 00:03:55:00 , Isn't that what Hitchcock taught?

, 00:04:01:00 , For him, suspense was a means of enlivening his touristy travelogues.

, 00:04:07:00 , Then maybe I can find another way to animate this city symphony in reverse.

, 00:04:12:00 , Maybe this effort to see how movies depict Los Angeles

, 00:04:16:13 , may seem more than wrong-headed or mean-spirited.

, 00:04:29:00 , Los Angeles, it is said,

, 00:04:31:00 , is the most photographed city in the world.

, 00:04:35:01 , If you walk around enough,

, 00:04:37:00 , you'll start to notice

, 00:04:39:00 , the mysterious temporary signs

, 00:04:41:00 , that direct crew members to a movie location.

, 00:05:03:00 , If you walk through the right neighborhoods,

, 00:05:05:00 , you'll see the long rows of white trucks

, 00:05:07:00 , that mark and fence off a location shoot.

, 00:05:19:00 , Los Angeles is where the relation between reality and representation gets muddled.

, 00:05:21:17 , [Newspaper headline: 2 Charged in Murder Like One in Film They Produced]

, 00:05:25:00 , Their film is about the killing of a strip club mogul.

, 00:05:29:00 , Six years earlier,

, 00:05:31:00 , the producer and the star had conspired to murder

, 00:05:34:00 , the real owner of the strip club where the film is set

, 00:05:36:00 , and take over his empire.

, 00:05:48:00 , The strip clubs made them rich,

, 00:05:50:00 , but their movie flopped.

, 00:05:55:00 , A real movie shoot

, 00:05:57:00 , can create a better public spectacle

, 00:05:59:00 , than the fake movie studio tours.

, 00:06:35:00 , In a city where only a few buildings

, 00:06:37:00 , are more than a hundred years old,

, 00:06:41:00 , where most traces of the city's history have been effaced,

, 00:06:44:00 , a place can become a historic landmark

, 00:06:46:00 , because it was once a movie location.

, 00:06:51:00 , As it is for people,

, 00:06:53:00 , so it is for places:

, 00:06:57:00 , getting into the movies becomes a substitute for achievement.

, 00:07:01:00 , Actors have head shots,

, 00:07:04:00 , buildings get architectural photographs.

, 00:07:19:00 , Plaques and signs mark the sites of former movie studios.

, 00:07:32:22 , Streets and parks are named for movie stars.

, 00:07:42:00 , Even movie writers.

, 00:07:48:13 , A small bust near the Griffith Park Planetarium

, 00:07:50:00 , marks the spot

, 00:07:52:13 , where James Dean once played a rebel without a cause.

, 00:07:57:00 , The inscription claims Dean wasn't really a rebel:

, 00:07:59:13 , those were only roles he played.

, 00:08:05:00 , But wasn't he more of a rebel in life

, 00:08:07:00 , than in the movies?

, 00:08:11:00 , where he always played a milquetoast Oedipus,

, 00:08:15:00 , trying not to murder but to please an imperfect father

, 00:08:18:00 , who is either too stern...

, 00:08:28:14 , or too soft?

, 00:08:48:00 , A narrow public stairway

, 00:08:49:13 , between Vendome Street

, 00:08:51:13 , and Descanso Drive in Silver Lake

, 00:08:54:00 , has been named the Music Box Steps,

, 00:08:58:13 , after the classic Laurel and Hardy short

, 00:09:01:00 , filmed there in 1932.

, 00:10:14:13 , Some buildings that look functional

, 00:10:16:13 , are permanent movie sets.

, 00:10:19:13 , A McDonald's in City of Industry

, 00:10:21:13 , is never open to the public.

, 00:10:23:13 , Here actors are paid

, 00:10:25:00 , so we can see them smile

, 00:10:27:00 , as they ingest their Big Macs.

, 00:10:32:00 , A roadhouse

, 00:10:35:00 , at the corner of Avenue Q and 145th Street

, 00:10:36:13 , in Palmdale

, 00:10:38:00 , has never served a regular patron,

, 00:10:41:00 , but it appears prominently

, 00:10:43:00 , in Swordfish and Brother.

, 00:11:02:00 , And other buildings that have lost their purpose

, 00:11:04:02 , can be preserved as movie locations,

, 00:11:07:00 , like the Ambassador Hotel,

, 00:11:10:00 , famous since 1968

, 00:11:12:00 , because Sirhan Sirhan

, 00:11:14:00 , assassinated Robert Kennedy there.

, 00:11:18:00 , Sometimes it works the other way around:

, 00:11:21:13 , a building constructed as a movie set

, 00:11:23:13 , takes on an afterlife.

, 00:11:26:13 , Mr. Blandings's dream house,

, 00:11:29:00 , fictionally located in the woods of Connecticut,

, 00:11:31:13 , has been preserved as an administration building

, 00:11:34:00 , at Malibu Creek State Park.

, 00:11:39:04 , Los Angeles

, 00:11:41:00 , may be the most photographed city in the world,

, 00:11:43:00 , but it's one of the least photogenic.

, 00:11:46:00 , It's not Paris or New York.

, 00:11:49:22 , In New York, everything is sharp and in-focus,

, 00:11:53:00 , as if seen through a wide-angle lens.

, 00:11:57:00 , In smoggy cities like Los Angeles,

, 00:12:00:00 , everything dissolves into the distance,

, 00:12:02:00 , and even stuff that's close-up

, 00:12:04:00 , seems far off.

, 00:12:08:20 , New York seems immediately accessible to the camera.

, 00:12:11:13 , Any image from almost any corner of the city

, 00:12:14:00 , is immediately recognizable

, 00:12:15:00 , as a piece of New York.

, 00:12:19:00 , Los Angeles is hard to get right,

, 00:12:21:13 , maybe because traditional public space

, 00:12:23:13 , has been largely occupied

, 00:12:26:00 , by the quasi-private space of moving vehicles.

, 00:12:29:16 , It's elusive,

, 00:12:31:14 , just beyond the reach of an image.

, 00:12:34:13 , It's not a city that spread outward from a center

, 00:12:37:13 , as motorized transportation supplanted walking,

, 00:12:42:00 , but a series of villages that grew together,

, 00:12:44:00 , linked from the beginning

, 00:12:46:00 , by railways and then motor roads.

, 00:12:49:00 , The villages became neighborhoods

, 00:12:51:00 , and their boundaries blurred,

, 00:12:53:00 , but they remain separate provinces,

, 00:12:56:00 , joined together primarily by mutual hostility

, 00:13:00:00 , and a mutual disdain for the city's historic center.

, 00:13:05:00 , Maybe that's why the movies turned their back on their city of origin,

, 00:13:07:00 , almost from the beginning.

, 00:13:09:00 , They claimed to come from Hollywood,

, 00:13:11:00 , not from Los Angeles,

, 00:13:16:00 , although the first southern California studios weren't even in Hollywood,

, 00:13:19:00 , but in another suburb with an even more idyllic name:

, 00:13:21:13 , Edendale

, 00:13:23:13 , just north of Echo Park Lake,

, 00:13:28:13 , where Jake Gittes would spy on Hollis Mulwray in Chinatown.

, 00:13:32:00 , Mack Sennett had his studio there,

, 00:13:35:00 , and when the lake was drained in 1913,

, 00:13:39:00 , he could improvise a movie plot around it.

, 00:13:54:13 , The movies moved west,

, 00:13:57:00 , and Edendale doesn't exist anymore.

, 00:14:02:00 , It somehow got lost between Echo Park and Silver Lake.

, 00:14:07:00 , The movies claimed to come from Hollywood,

, 00:14:11:00 , even though there were more movie studios in Culver City,

, 00:14:16:13 , one of the small independent municipalities tucked into the west side of Los Angeles.

, 00:14:20:00 , In the golden age of comedy,

, 00:14:22:00 , when an urban setting was required,

, 00:14:25:00 , it was usually downtown Culver City.

, 00:14:37:00 , But Culver City was ?the heart of screenland" only in the eyes of its civic fathers.

, 00:14:40:13 , The greater renown of Hollywood so frustrated them

, 00:14:44:13 , that they once proposed appropriating the name for themselves.

, 00:14:49:00 , Culver City would have been renamed Hollywood.

, 00:14:52:13 , Why not?

, 00:14:55:00 , After all, Hollywood isn't just a place,

, 00:14:58:00 , it's also a metonym for the motion picture industry.

, 00:15:04:00 , But if you're like me and you identify more with the city of Los Angeles

, 00:15:06:00 , than with the movie industry,

, 00:15:09:00 , it's hard not to resent the idea of Hollywood,

, 00:15:13:13 , the idea of the movies as standing apart from and above the city.

, 00:15:17:13 , People blame all sorts of things on the movies.

, 00:15:21:00 , For me, it's their betrayal of their native city.

, 00:15:23:00 , Maybe I'm wrong, but

, 00:15:27:13 , I blame them for the custom of abbreviating the city's name to L.A.

, 00:15:30:00 , "Gotta find somebody in L.A."

, 00:15:31:13 , "Maybe he's not even in L.A."

, 00:15:33:00 , "How far did you say you're going?"

, 00:15:34:13 , "Los Angeles."

, 00:15:36:00 , "L.A.?"

, 00:15:38:00 , "L.A.'s good enough for me, mister."

, 00:15:40:00 , "L.A. was the gang capital of America."

, 00:15:44:00 , "Hello, L.A!"

, 00:15:49:00 , "Hello, Plissken.

, 00:15:51:00 , Welcome to L.A!"

, 00:15:57:00 , The acronym functions here as a slightly derisive diminutive.

, 00:15:59:00 , Now it's become second nature,

, 00:16:01:00 , even to people who live here.

, 00:16:06:00 , Maybe we adopted it as a way of immunizing ourselves against the implicit scorn,

, 00:16:09:00 , but it still makes me cringe.

, 00:16:14:00 , Only a city with an inferiority complex would allow it.

, 00:16:37:00 , When people say "L.A."

, 00:16:39:03 , they often mean "show business."

, 00:16:41:13 , "I'm an actress...

, 00:16:46:20 , Did you ever see Massacre in Blood City?"]

, 00:16:49:23 , That's another presumption of the movies:

, 00:16:55:00 , that everyone in Los Angeles is part of their "industry" or wants to be.

, 00:16:56:05 , Actually,

, 00:16:59:00 , only one in forty residents of Los Angles County

, 00:17:01:13 , works in the entertainment industry.

, 00:17:04:00 , But the rest of us simply don't exist.

, 00:17:08:00 , We might wonder if the movies

, 00:17:10:13 , have ever really depicted Los Angeles.

, 00:17:22:13 , The City as Background

, 00:17:28:13 , At first, Los Angeles was just a destination, not a place.

, 00:17:31:18 , Movie characters visited,

, 00:17:34:00 , they didn't live here.

, 00:17:42:00 , "Are you sure we're still in the United States?"

, 00:17:44:00 , "I think Los Angeles is."

, 00:17:47:00 , It was a resort, not a city.

, 00:17:57:00 , When its streets and buildings appeared in movies,

, 00:18:00:00 , they were just anonymous backdrops.

, 00:18:04:00 , Nobody called Los Angeles the capital of the Pacific Rim

, 00:18:08:00 , or worried about how it stacked up with the great cities of the world.

, 00:18:12:00 , The varied terrain and eclectic architecture

, 00:18:17:00 , allowed Los Angeles and its environs to play almost any place.

, 00:18:23:13 , Lake Arrowhead,

, 00:18:26:13 , seventy-eight miles from downtown Los Angeles,

, 00:18:29:00 , could play Switzerland,

, 00:18:41:00 , and Calabasas in the San Fernando Valley

, 00:18:43:00 , could play the valley of Ling in China

, 00:18:46:00 , after M-G-M excavated some rice paddies.

, 00:18:54:13 , More often than not,

, 00:18:57:00 , Los Angeles played some other city...

, 00:19:00:00 , Sinclair Lewis's Zenith in Babbitt...

, 00:19:10:13 , Chicago in The Public Enemy...

, 00:19:14:00 , "Say, you can let me off here. I'm going to meet my friends on the corner."

, 00:19:19:00 , Jimmy Cagney drops off Jean Harlow in front of the new Bullock's Wilshire department store.

, 00:19:27:00 , Our Art Deco ?cathedral of commerce" had opened in September 1929,

, 00:19:30:00 , seventeen months before The Public Enemy was filmed.

, 00:19:34:00 , It was a new kind of dry goods emporium,

, 00:19:37:00 , located in the suburbs for the motorcar trade.

, 00:19:43:00 , Presumably only locals would recognize this Los Angeles landmark,

, 00:19:47:13 , but as they drove aimlessly around what is now called the Wilshire Center district,

, 00:19:50:13 , anyone who knows anything about Chicago

, 00:19:53:00 , might find the cityscape strangely rural.

, 00:19:56:13 , "From Chicago?"

, 00:19:59:00 , "Not exactly. I came from Texas."

, 00:20:02:00 , In The Street with No Name,

, 00:20:04:00 , Los Angeles played Center City.

, 00:20:14:00 , Again and again, it has played a city with no name.

, 00:20:20:00 , Its landmarks are obscure enough that they could play many roles.

, 00:20:26:00 , The most venerable of these landmarks is the Bradbury Building at Third and Broadway,

, 00:20:28:00 , dating from 1893.

, 00:20:34:13 , It was discovered by architectural historian Esther McCoy in 1953.

, 00:20:38:00 , She claimed architect George Herbert Wyman

, 00:20:44:00 , had been inspired by Edward Bellamy's utopian vision of a socialist architecture in the year 2000:

, 00:20:47:00 , a vast hall full of light,

, 00:20:51:13 , received not alone from the windows on all sides but from the dome.

, 00:20:59:13 , But the movies discovered the Bradbury Building before the architectural historians did.

, 00:21:03:00 , The earliest appearance I know came in 1943.

, 00:21:09:13 , In China Girl, it played the Hotel Royale in Mandalay, Burma.

, 00:21:18:13 , The following year, in The White Cliffs of Dover,

, 00:21:23:00 , it played a London military hospital overflowing with wounded soldiers.

, 00:21:32:13 , Its first indelible role was in D.O.A.:

, 00:21:37:00 , fatally poisoned by a luminous toxin slipped into his drink at a jazz club,

, 00:21:42:00 , Frank Bigelow has one day before dying to track down his killer,

, 00:21:47:13 , and he finds him at the Phillips Import-Export Company...

, 00:21:51:00 , room 427.

, 00:22:25:00 , The Bradbury Building was again the site of a bizarre revenge killing in Indestructible Man.

, 00:22:29:13 , This time, an executed convict,

, 00:22:31:00 , brought back to life

, 00:22:35:13 , and given superhuman strength by a scientific experiment gone awry,

, 00:22:40:00 , hunts the three sleazy hoodlums who set him up to take the fall.

, 00:23:05:13 , In Marlowe, the mayhem was less lethal.

, 00:23:09:13 , Here the Bradbury Building houses Philip Marlowe's office,

, 00:23:14:13 , which Raymond Chandler had located in a shabby building on Hollywood Boulevard.

, 00:23:18:13 , "Mr. Marlowe?"

, 00:23:20:00 , "Yes."

, 00:23:29:03 , "What can I do for you?"

, 00:23:50:00 , The Bradbury Building had become just another cliché in a film of clichés,

, 00:23:53:13 , the most misanthropic of all the Marlowe movies.

, 00:24:00:00 , Screenwriter Hampton Fancher and director Ridley Scott

, 00:24:04:13 , disagreed about employing the Bradbury Building as a location for Blade Runner.

, 00:24:09:13 , Fancher argued it was too familiar, overdone.

, 00:24:12:00 , Scott responded,

, 00:24:14:13 , "Not the way I'll do it."

, 00:24:21:00 , He gave the building a new, more elaborate facade through mattework,

, 00:24:25:00 , and he turned the interior atrium into a picturesque ruin.

, 00:24:31:13 , After a long overdue restoration in the early nineties,

, 00:24:33:13 , it went upscale.

, 00:24:38:00 , In Murder in the First,

, 00:24:40:13 , a period movie set in 1941,

, 00:24:44:13 , it housed the offices of a prosperous San Francisco lawyer,

, 00:24:53:00 , and in Wolf, the office of a prominent New York publishing firm.

, 00:25:02:00 , Now it has found a use that seems consonant with its career in the movies

, 00:25:10:13 , Another Blade Runner location,

, 00:25:12:13 , Frank Lloyd Wright's Ennis house,

, 00:25:15:00 , has had an even longer movie career.

, 00:25:19:00 , The most massive of the Mayan Revival houses

, 00:25:22:00 , Wright designed around Los Angeles in the twenties,

, 00:25:26:13 , it first appeared in the movies in 1933

, 00:25:29:00 , as the home of a female auto tycoon.

, 00:25:36:00 , The interiors are studio sets,

, 00:25:39:00 , typical Warner Bros. Art Deco,

, 00:25:42:00 , as are some of the exteriors.

, 00:25:45:13 , Wright had left out the swimming pool.

, 00:25:51:13 , William Castle rediscovered it in 1958,

, 00:25:54:00 , just before Wright's death.

, 00:26:04:00 , Vincent Price has offered $10,000 to five people

, 00:26:08:00 , if they can last the night in this century-old haunted house.

, 00:26:17:13 , Once again, the interiors are unrelated to Wright's architecture.

, 00:26:41:00 , In 1968 Gus Brown bought the Ennis house and restored it.

, 00:26:47:13 , To help pay the maintenance and preservation costs,

, 00:26:51:00 , he began promoting it as a location site,

, 00:26:53:00 , not only for movies and TV shows,

, 00:26:56:13 , but also for infomercials and music videos.

, 00:27:14:00 , Blade Runner was his proudest catch,

, 00:27:19:00 , but my favorite is A Passion to Kill,

, 00:27:22:00 , a low-budget neo-noir film.

, 00:27:24:00 , It plays a psychiatric clinic

, 00:27:28:00 , where a patient can sometimes seduce her therapist.

, 00:27:47:00 , But director Rick King allows the architecture to upstage the action.

, 00:27:53:00 , The Ennis house apparently transcends space and time.

, 00:27:57:00 , It could be fictionally located in Washington

, 00:27:59:13 , or Osaka.

, 00:28:04:00 , It could play an ancient villa...

, 00:28:11:00 , a nineteenth century haunted house...

, 00:28:16:00 , a contemporary mansion...

, 00:28:21:00 , a twenty-first century apartment building...

, 00:28:28:00 , or a twenty-sixth century science lab

, 00:28:31:00 , where Klaus Kinski invents time travel.

, 00:28:34:13 , "I got my blood into this...

, 00:28:36:00 , And now you have it...

, 00:28:38:00 , Look, right in the palm of my hand.

, 00:28:40:00 , Time!

, 00:28:44:00 , We can go back into the past and change it as we wish."

, 00:28:52:00 , The Union Station is a more recognizable landmark.

, 00:28:56:00 , As the major gateway to Los Angeles in the forties and fifties,

, 00:28:59:00 , it has been a location for many movies

, 00:29:03:00 , and a favorite site for movie kidnappings.

, 00:29:07:13 , "Listen, madam."

, 00:29:10:13 , "You stole that."

, 00:29:12:13 , "Know what this is?"

, 00:29:14:13 , "- It's a game."|"- It's no game. Just walk."

, 00:29:18:00 , "- Why?"|"Cuz if you don't, I'll blow your fucking heart out."

, 00:29:21:00 , Through its corridors and grand lobby have passed

, 00:29:23:00 , gangsters...

, 00:29:27:00 , drug dealers...

, 00:29:33:00 , political protesters...

, 00:29:45:00 , Munchkins...

, 00:29:53:00 , even an alien in heat disguised as a railroad conductor.

, 00:29:58:00 , Yet Union Station hasn't always played itself.

, 00:30:02:00 , During its fallow days in the early eighties,

, 00:30:05:00 , before its revival as an interurban railway hub,

, 00:30:08:00 , it was a police station in Blade Runner.

, 00:30:13:00 , In the 1950 movie Union Station,

, 00:30:16:13 , the only film in which it has a starring role,

, 00:30:19:00 , it is not located in Los Angeles.

, 00:30:24:13 , Actually it's never located anywhere precisely.

, 00:30:31:00 , The station is only a commuter ride from Westhampton,

, 00:30:35:00 , which would place it in New York City,

, 00:30:42:00 , yet one of the villains takes an elevated train out of the station,

, 00:30:45:00 , suggesting Chicago.

, 00:30:51:00 , The police chase him into the stockyards.

, 00:30:53:00 , This must be Chicago,

, 00:30:57:00 , but what about those palm trees?

, 00:31:42:00 , In The Replacement Killers,

, 00:31:45:13 , Union Station played the Los Angeles International Airport,

, 00:31:47:13 , LAX.

, 00:31:58:00 , Our airport is certainly replaceable.

, 00:32:02:00 , The best anyone might say for it is that it looks like all the others,

, 00:32:05:00 , maybe just a little worse.

, 00:32:09:00 , The railway terminal had been designed as public space;

, 00:32:14:00 , the airport was designed for crowd control.

, 00:32:22:00 , It has been an inevitable if uninspiring location for movies set in Los Angeles,

, 00:32:27:00 , but some directors have tried to sidestep its terminal blandness.

, 00:32:31:00 , Clint Eastwood set The Rookie in Los Angeles,

, 00:32:37:00 , but he filmed the climactic airport terminal chase at the San Jose International Airport.

, 00:32:49:13 , In Why Do Fools Fall in Love?,

, 00:32:53:00 , the "theme" restaurant in the middle of the airport parking lot,

, 00:32:56:00 , originally intended as the control tower,

, 00:33:00:00 , portrayed a passenger terminal.

, 00:33:16:13 , Of course movies lie about Los Angeles,

, 00:33:21:00 , but sometimes they make us wish the real city corresponded more closely to their vision.

, 00:33:26:05 , In Miracle Mile,

, 00:33:29:13 , Johnie's Coffee Shop at Wilshire and Fairfax

, 00:33:32:00 , has a fantastic revolving sign,

, 00:33:34:00 , and it's open all night.

, 00:33:37:00 , At the time the film was made,

, 00:33:39:00 , Johnnie's had no revolving sign,

, 00:33:41:00 , and it closed before dinnertime.

, 00:33:45:00 , Now it's closed indefinitely.

, 00:33:50:00 , Other lies are simply benign.

, 00:33:53:13 , Government agencies sometimes get fictional names.

, 00:33:59:13 , "Dr. Stevens, meet Special Agent Pomeroy of the National Bureau of Investigation."

, 00:34:01:20 , "N.B.I.?"

, 00:34:04:13 , "You don't look like an N.B.I. man to me, Mr. Pomeroy."

, 00:34:07:13 , "Well, you don't look like a doctor, doctor."

, 00:34:09:00 , People have fake addresses.

, 00:34:17:00 , "Stark, Jim Stark. Here it is, 1753 Angelo. Well, well."

, 00:34:20:13 , Or fake phone numbers...

, 00:34:23:13 , "Lexington 0-five-five-four-nine."

, 00:34:25:00 , "What's the number?"

, 00:34:27:00 , "Five-five-five-seven-six-o-five."

, 00:34:30:13 , "Five-five-five-four-four-eight-seven."

, 00:34:34:00 , "Five-five-five-sixty-nine-sixty-nine."

, 00:34:46:13 , "Write down my number, ...

, 00:34:50:13 , five-five-five-six-three-two-one. Got it?"

, 00:34:53:00 , "Wait a minute...

, 00:34:57:00 , Five-five-five's not a real number. They only use that in the movies."

, 00:35:00:00 , "No shit, honey. What do you think this is? Real life?"

, 00:35:05:00 , Other lies are annoying.

, 00:35:08:00 , To someone who knows Los Angeles only from movies,

, 00:35:14:00 , it might appear that everyone who has a job lives in the hills or at the beach.

, 00:35:21:00 , The dismal flatland between

, 00:35:25:00 , is the province exclusively of the lumpen proletariat.

, 00:35:30:00 , And most of them live next to an oil refinery.

, 00:35:55:00 , And in death they will rest next to an oil derrick.

, 00:36:08:00 , A hillside house may be appropriate for a hack composer ...

, 00:36:22:00 , or a drug dealer on the way up.

, 00:36:24:00 , "Where'd you get this furniture?"

, 00:36:26:00 , "Nice Italian lady picked this out."

, 00:36:28:00 , "Oh, so nice. Gianni Versace, right? Mike Tyson wears Versace."

, 00:36:33:00 , "David, come on. Take your feet off the couch. You don't do that at your mother's house, do you?"

, 00:36:36:00 , "Nouveau anal, I think this is called. But all right."

, 00:36:38:00 , "And here...here...here...coaster...coaster."

, 00:36:41:13 , Or a music promoter on the way down.

, 00:36:43:00 , "Terry Valentine."

, 00:36:46:00 , "Very nice to meet you."

, 00:36:54:13 , "You know, ...

, 00:36:58:13 , ...you could see the sea out there if you could see it."

, 00:37:04:13 , But in reality, a bookstore clerk couldn't afford to rent a house above Sunset Plaza,

, 00:37:07:00 , even if it is, as she claims

, 00:37:09:00 , "small and kind of run-down."

, 00:37:13:13 , A fixer with jetliner views, in the local realtor jargon,

, 00:37:18:13 , would still have rented for two or three thousand dollars per month in 1995,

, 00:37:22:00 , no matter how much in need of TLC.

, 00:37:26:13 , Her bank robber boyfriend might live in Malibu.

, 00:37:29:13 , And back in the sixties,

, 00:37:32:13 , bohemian young people did live by the sand in Venice,

, 00:37:35:13 , although I don't remember the Infinite Pad.

, 00:37:44:00 , We may regard Cobra's Venice loft as a relic of the golden eighties

, 00:37:47:13 , when product placement superseded script-writing

, 00:37:53:00 , and movie cops abandoned the suburbs to become urban pioneers.

, 00:38:12:00 , But what about a struggling true-crime writer

, 00:38:15:00 , and an unemployed photographer so cash-strapped

, 00:38:20:00 , they must recruit paying passengers for their move from Pittsburgh to California?

, 00:38:25:14 , Yet when they arrive in Los Angeles,

, 00:38:30:13 , they immediately take up residence in a spacious Malibu beach cottage.

, 00:38:35:00 , And I don't like geographic license.

, 00:38:39:10 , It's hard to make a theoretical argument against it.

, 00:38:42:00 , After all, in a fiction film,

, 00:38:44:00 , a real space becomes fictional.

, 00:38:48:13 , Why shouldn't a car chase jump from the Venice canals

, 00:38:52:00 , to the Los Angeles harbor thirty miles away?

, 00:39:19:00 , Why shouldn't the exit from a skating rink in Westwood

, 00:39:23:00 , open directly onto Fletcher Bowron Square in downtown Los Angeles,

, 00:39:25:00 , fifteen miles east?

, 00:39:31:00 , But one fiction is not always as good as another,

, 00:39:40:13 , and like dramatic license,

, 00:39:44:00 , geographic license is usually an alibi for laziness.

, 00:39:48:00 , Silly geography makes for silly movies.

, 00:39:52:00 , "I warned you I'd kill her."

, 00:40:03:00 , And the best Los Angeles car chase movie

, 00:40:04:13 , is stubbornly,

, 00:40:06:13 , even perversely literalist

, 00:40:08:13 , "Attention, all units. ...

, 00:40:12:00 , ... Roadblock being set up at Torrance Mazda agency, ...

, 00:40:14:00 , One-Nine-O street and Hawthorne Boulevard.

, 00:40:15:13 , Use caution."

, 00:40:38:13 , Director Toby Halicki realized Dziga Vertov's dream:

, 00:40:42:13 , an anti-humanist cinema of bodies and machines in motion.

, 00:40:50:00 , His materialist masterpiece was the first manifesto

, 00:40:53:00 , for a cinema of conspicuous destruction.

, 00:41:03:00 , centered in the South Bay,

, 00:41:07:00 , the unglamorous southern coastal region of the Los Angeles basin

, 00:41:09:13 , stretching from Long Beach to El Segundo

, 00:41:14:00 , that would later become the domain of William Friedkin...

, 00:41:19:00 , Quentin Tarantino...

, 00:41:21:00 , and Michael Mann,

, 00:41:24:13 , who would accidentally rename the most familiar icon of South Bay movies,

, 00:41:28:00 , the Vincent Thomas Bridge.

, 00:41:33:00 , "Saint Vincent Thomas Bridge, that's escape route number one."

, 00:41:38:00 , Vincent Thomas was San Pedro's representative in the state assembly for many years,

, 00:41:41:00 , but he hasn't been canonized yet,

, 00:41:44:00 , not even in Pedro.

, 00:41:48:13 , Accidents happen,

, 00:41:50:13 , but some lies are malignant.

, 00:41:54:13 , They cheapen or trivialize the real city.

, 00:42:01:00 , One of the glories of Los Angeles is its modernist residential architecture,

, 00:42:07:00 , but Hollywood movies have almost systematically denigrated this heritage

, 00:42:09:00 , by casting many of these houses

, 00:42:11:06 , as the residences of movie villains.

, 00:42:17:00 , It begins with The Damned Don't Cry in 1950.

, 00:42:20:00 , Frank Sinatra's Palm Springs retreat,

, 00:42:23:00 , designed by Stewart Williams,

, 00:42:26:00 , plays the home of a local gangster boss.

, 00:42:31:16 , Then in 1955,

, 00:42:35:00 , a band of psycho kidnappers led by John Cassavetes

, 00:42:39:00 , holes up in a prototypically mid-century modern house

, 00:42:41:00 , in the Hollywood Hills.

, 00:43:00:13 , And there has usually been something sinister about the Ennis house.

, 00:43:06:00 , Its most frequent role is the mansion of some gangster chieftain,

, 00:43:09:00 , often a representative of the yellow peril.

, 00:43:20:00 , The most celebrated episode in Hollywood's war against modern architecture

, 00:43:22:00 , is L.A. Confidential.

, 00:43:26:00 , Richard Neutra's Lovell house,

, 00:43:31:00 , the first great manifestation of the International Style in southern California,

, 00:43:33:00 , plays the home of Pierce Patchett,

, 00:43:35:00 , pornographer,

, 00:43:36:00 , pimp,

, 00:43:38:00 , prince of the shadow city

, 00:43:40:13 , where whatever you desire is for sale.

, 00:43:46:00 , Actually director Curtis Hanson greatly admires the Lovell house.

, 00:43:49:13 , He even gives it a special credit at the end of the film,

, 00:43:53:13 , according it the honorific title favored by its original owner:

, 00:43:56:00 , the Lovell Health House.

, 00:43:58:00 , Is it just a convention then?

, 00:44:00:00 , The architectural trophy house

, 00:44:04:00 , is the modern equivalent of the black hat|or the mustache.

, 00:44:06:00 , It's nothing to take seriously.

, 00:44:11:00 , Well, the architecture critic of the Los Angeles Times took it seriously.

, 00:44:16:00 , He cited L.A. Confidential as some kind of proof

, 00:44:20:13 , that the utopian aspirations of modernist architecture were bogus

, 00:44:25:00 , He wrote,

, 00:44:30:00 , "The house's slick, meticulous forms seem the perfect frame for that kind of power...

, 00:44:34:00 , Neutra's glass walls open up to expose the dark side of our lives

, 00:44:39:00 , they suggest the erotic, the broken, the psychologically impure."

, 00:44:43:13 , So now we know.

, 00:44:45:00 , As the movies have shown,

, 00:44:49:00 , these pure modern machines for better living were dens of vice.

, 00:44:51:13 , In fact,

, 00:44:56:00 , this fiction is contradicted not only by the original spirit of the Lovell house,

, 00:44:58:00 , but by its entire history.

, 00:45:02:13 , It was designed as a kind of manifesto for natural living,

, 00:45:06:13 , and it became a center for radical left-wing political meetings in the thirties.

, 00:45:15:00 , There is one modernist architect Hollywood lets off lightly:

, 00:45:17:00 , Pierre Koenig.

, 00:45:21:00 , Perhaps it's because he had a knack for turning steel-and-glass cubes

, 00:45:24:00 , into Hollywood Regency style mini-mansions.

, 00:45:27:00 , His Stahl house is an icon of modern architecture

, 00:45:30:00 , and lately a movie star.

, 00:45:34:00 , In The Marrying Man,

, 00:45:38:13 , it plays the Hollywood pied-à-terre of a multimillionaire playboy,

, 00:45:42:13 , although the film is set twelve years before it was built.

, 00:45:45:00 , In The First Power,

, 00:45:47:13 , it plays the home of a police psychic,

, 00:45:52:00 , and in Why Do Fools Fall in Love?

, 00:45:55:00 , it is the west coast base of Zola Taylor,

, 00:45:57:00 , the female vocalist in the Platters.

, 00:46:04:00 , We feel bad when Frankie Lymon trashes it.

, 00:46:11:00 , On the other hand,

, 00:46:15:00 , the architect Hollywood most loves to hate is John Lautner.

, 00:46:17:20 , In Twilight,

, 00:46:21:00 , a Lautner house overlooking the San Fernando Valley

, 00:46:24:00 , is a crooked cop's reward for his corruption.

, 00:46:31:00 , "Nice place you got here...

, 00:46:33:18 , ... It sure beats Los Feliz"

, 00:46:37:00 , "You're up above the smog."

, 00:46:40:05 , "Quite a pad you got here, man."

, 00:46:43:00 , A more elaborate Lautner house in the hills of Beverly

, 00:46:46:00 , plays the Malibu beach house of porn king Jackie Treehorn

, 00:46:48:00 , in The Big Lebowski.

, 00:46:50:13 , "How's the smut business, Jackie?"

, 00:46:54:13 , "I wouldn't know, dude. I deal in publishing."

, 00:46:58:00 , Lautner's most famous house is the Chemosphere,

, 00:47:01:00 , a hexagon of wood, steel, and glass,

, 00:47:06:00 , raised above its hillside lot on a single concrete column.

, 00:47:09:13 , It appears in Body Double

, 00:47:12:13 , as the bachelor pad of a lunatic driller killer.

, 00:47:17:13 , Lautner's interiors may be sometimes vulgar,

, 00:47:20:00 , or excessively ostentatious,

, 00:47:22:00 , but he can't be blamed for this one,

, 00:47:27:00 , a bit of excessive art direction designed to parody eighties excesses.

, 00:47:37:00 , The ultimate insult to Lautner's work came in Lethal Weapon 2.

, 00:47:40:00 , The Garcia house on Mulholland

, 00:47:45:00 , is the home office of a drug ring organized by the South African consulate.

, 00:47:47:14 , Enraged by their diplomatic immunity,

, 00:47:51:13 , Mel Gibson pulls down their house with his pickup truck.

, 00:47:56:13 , Not only is Lautner slick and superficial,

, 00:47:59:00 , he's incompetent.

, 00:48:04:00 , Lethal Weapon 2 is also the work of a modern architecture fan.

, 00:48:09:13 , Producer Joel Silver is famous for his tasteful restoration of a Frank Lloyd Wright house in Hollywood

, 00:48:13:13 , and a Wright-designed plantation in South Carolina.

, 00:48:18:00 , Even though Lautner was Wright's disciple,

, 00:48:22:13 , Hollywood's conventional ideology once again trumped personal conviction.

, 00:48:42:00 , At least Silver has also trashed post-modernist architecture.

, 00:48:47:13 , The thirty-four-story Fox Plaza in Century City

, 00:48:50:00 , co-starred with Bruce Willis in Die Hard.

, 00:48:57:13 , When a gang of high-stakes robbers

, 00:49:02:00 , posing as terrorists take over the building and capture thirty plus hostages,

, 00:49:05:00 , the FBI would sacrifice a good number of the hostages

, 00:49:07:00 , in order to save the building.

, 00:49:09:13 , "What you figure the breakage?"

, 00:49:12:00 , "I figure we take out the terrorists,...

, 00:49:15:00 , ... lose twenty, twenty-five per cent of the hostages. Tops."

, 00:49:17:00 , "I can live with that."

, 00:49:22:00 , But the rogue cop inside has other ideas.

, 00:49:28:13 , Among all the authority figures on the scene,

, 00:49:30:13 , he alone places people above property.

, 00:49:33:00 , "Get down, get the fuck down!"

, 00:49:35:13 , "Nail that sucker."

, 00:49:58:00 , The Fox Plaza played the Nakatomi Plaza,

, 00:50:01:00 , the Los Angeles branch office of a Japanese multinational.

, 00:50:04:00 , In the late eighties,

, 00:50:07:13 , Japanese corporations did own many of the local office towers.

, 00:50:13:00 , In the movies, they owned them all.

, 00:50:30:00 , "Jesus, if an elevator's gonna talk, it should speak in American."

, 00:50:36:13 , There are a few Los Angeles landmarks that almost always play themselves:

, 00:50:39:00 , City Hall...

, 00:50:41:13 , Grauman's Chinese Theatre...

, 00:50:45:00 , Griffith Planetarium...

, 00:50:48:00 , the four-level freeway interchange...

, 00:50:52:00 , the concrete channel of the Los Angeles River...

, 00:51:01:00 , the Eastern Columbia Building at Eighth and Broadway...

, 00:51:09:00 , the Bonaventure Hotel at Fifth and Figueroa...

, 00:51:14:00 , the Beverly Hills Hotel at Sunset and Rodeo,

, 00:51:18:00 , the Paradise Motel at Sunset and Beaudry...

, 00:51:23:00 , Clayton Plumbers at Westwood and LaGrange...

, 00:51:32:00 , Circus Liquor at Burbank and Vineland...

, 00:51:38:00 , Pink's Hot Dogs at La Brea and Melrose...

, 00:51:45:00 , the Memorial Coliseum in Exposition Park.

, 00:51:57:00 , With hard wooden seats for all,

, 00:52:00:13 , the Coliseum is the most democratic American stadium

, 00:52:03:13 , and the last of its kind to survive.

, 00:52:07:00 , As a place where thousands of people congregate,

, 00:52:17:00 , like the enigmatic sniper in Two-Minute Warning

, 00:52:19:13 , with a perfect aim for aging movie stars,

, 00:52:41:13 , or the ?invisible invaders" in Edward L. Cahn's 1959 film

, 00:52:45:13 , who utilize a zombie to commandeer the public-address system

, 00:52:48:13 , and deliver one of their laconic ultimatums.

, 00:52:53:00 , "People of earth, ...

, 00:52:56:00 , ... this is your last warning.

, 00:53:02:13 , Unless the nations of your planet surrender immediately,

, 00:53:05:00 , ...all human lives will be destroyed."

, 00:53:20:00 , And, of course, there's the Hollywood sign.

, 00:53:27:13 , Since it marks quite literally the ascendancy of Hollywood over the rest of Los Angeles,

, 00:53:30:13 , I should despise it,

, 00:53:33:00 , as I despise the Hollywood Walk of Fame,

, 00:53:37:00 , where the stars cost the honorees or their sponsors $15,000,

, 00:53:40:00 , where the Hollywood Blacklist still lives.

, 00:53:44:00 , There are stars for the enforcers

, 00:53:47:00 , and the informers,

, 00:53:52:00 , but none for those they informed on.

, 00:53:56:00 , It should be called the Hollywood Walk of Shame.

, 00:54:07:00 , Maybe I find it poignant that a decayed advertisement for a real estate development

, 00:54:09:13 , could become a civic landmark.

, 00:54:13:00 , Or maybe it's just that we have to love it

, 00:54:16:00 , because it's such a fat target for outsiders.

, 00:54:19:00 , Like that expatriate Englishman David Thomson,

, 00:54:22:00 , who loves everything about America

, 00:54:24:00 , except what's worth loving.

, 00:54:27:23 , He loves Hollywood, but not the Hollywood sign.

, 00:54:30:13 , He once wrote:

, 00:54:34:00 , "That HOLLYWOOD sign is so endlessly funny, and dreadful, ...

, 00:54:36:00 , and L.A. is proud of it."

, 00:54:45:00 , These are the landmarks that are destroyed in disaster movies.

, 00:55:33:00 , Whenever the legitimacy of authority comes into question,

, 00:55:36:00 , Hollywood responds with disaster movies.

, 00:55:39:13 , And whenever there's a disaster movie,

, 00:55:41:00 , there's George Kennedy.

, 00:55:42:13 , "Rosa, let's go."

, 00:55:44:00 , "Better not,"

, 00:55:57:13 , "Come on, Rosa. Come on, settle down will ya?"

, 00:56:01:00 , "Earthquakes bring out the worst in some guys, that's all."

, 00:56:08:00 , Disaster movies remind us how foolish and helpless we really are

, 00:56:12:00 , and thus demonstrate our need for professionals

, 00:56:14:00 , and experts to save us from ourselves.

, 00:56:19:00 , They define the sources of legitimate authority.

, 00:56:33:00 , We must depend on specialists,

, 00:56:35:00 , but which ones can we trust?

, 00:56:38:00 , "I got through. ...

, 00:56:41:05 , ...Can you get me a jack hammer and a bolt cutter?"

, 00:56:44:00 , "Use a jack hammer and then the roof will fall in."

, 00:56:46:00 , "Look, I think there are some people alive in there ...

, 00:56:47:13 , ...and I'm gonna try and get them out."

, 00:56:50:00 , "Well, nobody else is and you can't do it all alone."

, 00:56:52:00 , "I won't be alone, ...

, 00:56:54:00 , ...he's coming with me."

, 00:57:04:00 , A priest can be useful.

, 00:57:07:00 , "We're gonna crash, we're gonna be killed, I know we're all gonna be..."

, 00:57:11:00 , But not a politician.

, 00:57:13:00 , "Like the mighty fist of God, ...

, 00:57:16:00 , ...Armageddon will descend upon the city of Los Angeles,...

, 00:57:20:00 , ... the city of sin, the city of Gomorroh, the city of Sodom.

, 00:57:24:13 , ... And waters will arise and separate this sinful, sinful city ...

, 00:57:27:00 , ... from our country."

, 00:57:38:00 , Mike Davis has claimed that Hollywood takes a special pleasure in destroying Los Angeles,

, 00:57:41:00 , a guilty pleasure shared by most of its audience.

, 00:57:47:00 , The entire world seems to be rooting for Los Angeles to slide into the Pacific

, 00:57:49:13 , or be swallowed by the San Andreas fault.

, 00:57:58:13 , In Independence Day,

, 00:58:01:00 , who could identify with the caricatured mob...

, 00:58:05:00 , dancing in idiot ecstasy...to greet the extraterrestrials?

, 00:58:08:13 , There is a comic undertone of 'good riddance'

, 00:58:13:00 , when kooks like these are vaporized by the earth's latest ill-mannered guests.

, 00:58:47:00 , But to me the casual sacrifice of Paris in Armageddon

, 00:58:49:00 , seems even crasser.

, 00:58:53:13 , Are the French being singled out for punishment because they admire Jerry Lewis too much?

, 00:58:58:00 , Or because they have resisted Hollywood's cultural imperialism too fervently?

, 00:59:14:00 , In a sense, Hollywood's frequent destruction of Los Angeles is just as crass,

, 00:59:20:00 , but it's more often a case of economic expediency than of ideology.

, 00:59:24:00 , Hollywood destroys Los Angeles because it's there.

, 00:59:29:13 , Our film-makers don't really believe the Los Angeles City Hall is

, 00:59:33:00 , a more resonant civic symbol than the Empire State Building.

, 00:59:35:13 , But they are well aware that it's closer.

, 00:59:54:13 , "This used to be a hell of a town, officer."

, 00:59:58:00 , "Yeah."

, 01:00:05:00 , In disaster movies,

, 01:00:08:00 , at least Los Angeles is finally there as a character,

, 01:00:22:13 , The City as Character

, 01:00:28:13 , James M. Cain and Raymond Chandler

, 01:00:31:13 , had made Los Angeles a character in their novels,

, 01:00:34:00 , and it became a character for the movies

, 01:00:36:20 , when Chandler and Billy Wilder adapted Cain's novel,

, 01:00:39:00 , Double Indemnity.

, 01:00:45:00 , The sense of place was so precise that Richard Schickel would later claim,

, 01:00:49:13 , "You could charge L.A. as a co-conspirator in the crimes this movie relates."

, 01:00:56:00 , Departing from Cain's text,

, 01:00:59:00 , Chandler and Wilder created a protagonist-narrator

, 01:01:03:00 , who has ideas or at least opinions about the city around him,

, 01:01:08:13 , and his voice-over commentary is addressed to an esteemed colleague whose opinion he cares about

, 01:01:11:13 , and whose intelligence he tries to emulate.

, 01:01:17:00 , "Office memorandum. ...

, 01:01:21:00 , ... Walter Neff to Barton Keyes, claims manager. ...

, 01:01:24:13 , ...Los Angeles. July 16, 1938.

, 01:01:28:00 , Dear Keyes.

, 01:01:32:00 , I suppose you'll call this a confession when you hear it.

, 01:01:35:00 , Well, I don't like the word "confession".

, 01:01:39:13 , I just want to set you straight about something you couldn't see because it was smack up against your nose.

, 01:01:41:13 , It all began last May.

, 01:01:43:00 , Around the end of May it was.

, 01:01:46:00 , I remembered this auto renewal near Los Feliz Boulevard.

, 01:01:48:00 , So I drove over there.

, 01:01:52:00 , It was one of those California Spanish houses everyone was nuts about ten or fifteen years ago.

, 01:01:56:00 , This one must of cost somebody about 30,000 bucks,

, 01:01:59:13 , that is, if he ever finished paying for it."

, 01:02:02:13 , "I'm Walter Neff, Pacific All-Risk."

, 01:02:04:00 , Like Chandler and Wilder,

, 01:02:06:00 , Walter Neff is a smart aleck and a snob.

, 01:02:09:00 , "Is there anything I can do?"

, 01:02:10:13 , "The insurance ran out on the fifteenth."

, 01:02:13:13 , I'd hate to think of your having a smashed fender or something while you're not...

, 01:02:16:13 , ... fully covered."

, 01:02:19:00 , "Perhaps I know what you mean, Mr. Neff. ...

, 01:02:21:00 , ...I was just taking a sun bath."

, 01:02:23:00 , "No pigeons around, I hope."

, 01:02:24:13 , And a bit of an asshole,

, 01:02:26:13 , although less of one than the man he murders.

, 01:02:30:00 , "Next thing you'll tell me I need earthquake insurance,

, 01:02:32:00 , ...and lightning insurance, and hail insurance..."

, 01:02:36:13 , "If we bought all the insurance they could think up, we'd stay broke paying for it, wouldn't we, honey?"

, 01:02:40:00 , "What keeps us broke is your going out and buying five hats at a crack."

, 01:02:42:13 , "Who needs a hat in California?"

, 01:02:47:00 , And less of a monster than his partner in crime.

, 01:02:56:13 , "Ok. This has got to be fast. ...

, 01:03:00:00 , ...Here, take his hat. ...|Pick up his crutches back on the tracks.

, 01:03:04:00 , The murder that inspired Cain's novel had occurred fifteen years earlier

, 01:03:06:00 , in Queen's Village, New York,

, 01:03:13:13 , but the crime seemed to fit the rootlessness and moral corruption of the southern California middle class.

, 01:03:20:00 , Double Indemnity and the Cain adaptations that followed it

, 01:03:25:00 , convinced everyone that Los Angeles is the world capital of adultery and murder.

, 01:03:27:13 , "Okay, baby,that's it."

, 01:03:30:13 , "What's the matter, aren't you going to kiss me?"

, 01:03:37:13 , "It's straight down the line, isn't it?"

, 01:03:44:00 , "I love you, Walter."

, 01:03:47:00 , "I love you, baby."

, 01:03:53:00 , Nowhere else is evil so banal.

, 01:04:01:00 , Double Indemnity evokes Los Angeles without much location shooting,

, 01:04:03:00 , but each location is memorable:

, 01:04:06:13 , the Glendale train station at night,

, 01:04:13:00 , a street corner identified as Vermont and Franklin

, 01:04:17:00 , (although actually it's Hollywood and Western),

, 01:04:21:13 , the exterior of Jerry's Market on Melrose,

, 01:04:36:00 , and the Spanish Colonial Revival house that plays the residence of Phyllis Dietrichson,

, 01:04:39:00 , her husband, and her step-daughter.

, 01:04:43:00 , Neff's voice-over places this house in the hills of Los Feliz,

, 01:04:46:00 , and that location seems right,

, 01:04:50:13 , although the actual house is a few miles to the west,

, 01:04:53:00 , just above the north end of Vine Street,

, 01:04:56:00 , close to Hollywoodland where Cain had placed it.

, 01:05:03:00 , They must have searched for a house that matched this description as closely as possible:

, 01:05:05:13 , It was built cock-eyed.

, 01:05:09:00 , The garage was under the house,

, 01:05:13:13 , the first floor was over that,

, 01:05:20:00 , and the rest of it was spilled up the hill anyway they could get it in.

, 01:05:28:00 , Although all the interiors were filmed on studio sets,

, 01:05:31:00 , Wilder stuck close to reality here,

, 01:05:36:00 , taking his inspiration from the dramatic entry hall staircase.

, 01:05:42:00 , He simply moved the living room from the left side of the entry hall to the right side.

, 01:05:51:00 , For Wilder, a consistent modernist,

, 01:05:55:00 , the phony historicism of the architecture and interior decor

, 01:05:59:00 , reflects the dishonesty of the lives contained within.

, 01:06:04:13 , But tastes have changed.

, 01:06:09:00 , Now we all love those red-tile roofs and that wrought iron grillwork

, 01:06:11:00 , and would do anything to preserve them.

, 01:06:18:00 , So just as modernist architecture connotes epicene villainy,

, 01:06:23:00 , the Spanish Colonial Revival suggests petty bourgeois good taste.

, 01:06:33:00 , It's the ideal home for a good-bad call girl ripe for reform

, 01:06:45:00 , or a vigilante hero out for revenge

, 01:06:53:00 , Genteel respectability is the message in Mildred Pierce,

, 01:06:56:00 , Hollywood's second version of a James M. Cain novel,

, 01:06:59:00 , in which the suburbs of Los Angeles have a bit part.

, 01:07:05:00 , "We lived on Corvallis Street, where all the houses looked alike.

, 01:07:07:00 , Ours was number eleven-forty-three.

, 01:07:10:00 , It's an odd observation

, 01:07:13:00 , since the houses we see don't all look alike,

, 01:07:16:00 , but a typical criticism of Los Angeles.

, 01:07:19:00 , If you don't like one thing,

, 01:07:21:13 , complain about its opposite as well.

, 01:07:24:13 , The architecture is too eclectic,

, 01:07:26:13 , but it's also too uniform.

, 01:07:36:00 , Once again, the drama ends in murder.

, 01:07:55:00 , And so it will in The Postman Always Rings Twice,

, 01:07:58:00 , the last novel in Cain's southern California trilogy.

, 01:08:02:00 , Hollywood filmed it twice,

, 01:08:05:00 , in 1946 and again in 1981.

, 01:08:15:13 , Cain's novels were written in the thirties,

, 01:08:18:00 , and they reflect the fears of a lower middle class

, 01:08:20:13 , hit especially hard by the Depression.

, 01:08:24:00 , Explicitly or implicitly,

, 01:08:28:00 , the mid-forties movie adaptations are period films.

, 01:08:33:13 , The contemporary postwar world looked brighter.

, 01:08:37:13 , "Daddy says, southern California is the coming part of the country. ...

, 01:08:41:00 , ...Dad dy says, six out of every ten veterans will settle here after the war. ...

, 01:08:42:00 , ... Daddy says..."

, 01:08:45:00 , "Never mind about your daddy. Don't you have any ideas of your own?"

, 01:08:49:00 , "Well, for a returning Marine, I've got some super ideas."

, 01:08:57:00 , A new suburbia was created for the vets back from the war.

, 01:09:02:13 , They could look forward to a good job in the booming aircraft industry,

, 01:09:06:13 , a detached house for every family,

, 01:09:12:13 , a trash incinerator in every backyard,

, 01:09:16:13 , and plenty of bathrooms without toilets

, 01:09:19:00 , at least for movie characters.

, 01:09:31:00 , In movies, there were many harbingers of a baby boom,

, 01:09:35:13 , yet these excessively cute kids would become, in just a few years,

, 01:09:40:00 , the excessively troubled teenagers of Rebel Without a Cause,

, 01:09:42:00 , the first teen noir.

, 01:09:45:00 , "That's a fine way to behave."

, 01:09:47:00 , "Well, you know who he takes after."

, 01:09:49:00 , "You're tearing me apart!"

, 01:09:55:13 , Director Nicholas Ray photographed real locations around Los Angeles

, 01:09:58:13 , to look like sets in a studio musical.

, 01:10:03:13 , Musicals establish alternate worlds,

, 01:10:06:13 , and that is precisely Ray's achievement.

, 01:10:15:00 , The teenagers live in a world that is parallel to the adult world of normality and stability,

, 01:10:17:13 , in a world they have created for themselves

, 01:10:20:00 , and that is almost a parody of film noir.

, 01:10:27:13 , Their world is more dangerous than that of their parents

, 01:10:30:13 , and more attractive.

, 01:10:33:00 , "Hit your lights!"

, 01:10:38:00 , It is also privileged in the film.

, 01:10:42:00 , We see the adult world through their eyes.

, 01:10:45:00 , But we have no other perspective on theirs.

, 01:10:51:13 , The teenagers are able to create their own separate world

, 01:10:54:13 , only because of their easy access to automobiles.

, 01:11:01:00 , They were the first teenagers with cars,

, 01:11:03:00 , at least in the movies,

, 01:11:08:00 , and maybe that's why Rebel Without a Cause seems so prophetic

, 01:11:10:13 , and so evocative of Los Angeles.

, 01:11:22:13 , More conventional noir films only fitfully revealed the look of the city.

, 01:11:35:00 , Those streets dark with something more than night

, 01:11:39:00 , were still more often than not located on studio back lots.

, 01:11:46:00 , Film noir generally shunned the mean streets for the meaner sewers.

, 01:12:15:00 , The real streets appear in Kiss Me Deadly,

, 01:12:17:13 , although this urban road movie

, 01:12:20:13 , didn't announce itself as a portrait of Los Angeles.

, 01:12:27:13 , It's a private eye movie,

, 01:12:30:00 , a revisionist version of Mickey Spillane

, 01:12:33:13 , that tries to reverse his hyperfascist version of McCarthyism

, 01:12:36:13 , by giving Mike Hammer enough rope to hang himself.

, 01:12:43:13 , "My dear sir."

, 01:12:48:13 , "Now tell me about the key."

, 01:12:50:13 , "Just a minute, sir."

, 01:12:58:00 , It's close to definitive as a portrait of the city in the mid-fifties.

, 01:13:02:13 , Kiss Me Deadly is a literalist film.

, 01:13:06:00 , Mike Hammer has a real address:

, 01:13:08:13 , 10401 Wilshire Boulevard.

, 01:13:14:00 , And when he pulls away from his apartment building in his new Corvette,

, 01:13:17:13 , what we see is what was really there.

, 01:13:25:00 , "My mustache, my father's mustache. ...

, 01:13:26:18 , ... Let's go to the freeway. ...

, 01:13:29:00 , I want to see how this little bird flies."

, 01:13:32:00 , Mike Hammer's journeys,

, 01:13:33:18 , all shot on location,

, 01:13:35:18 , reveal a city divided.

, 01:13:38:13 , The rich...

, 01:13:40:00 , and the poor.

, 01:13:45:13 , The old...

, 01:13:47:00 , and the new.

, 01:13:50:00 , What was new then is still with us.

, 01:14:03:00 , "This is Crestview five-four-one-two-four...

, 01:14:07:00 , Mr. Hammer, whom you are calling, is not available at present. ...

, 01:14:09:00 , If you wish to leave a record of your call,

, 01:14:12:00 , ... please state your message at the sound of the tone."

, 01:14:16:05 , "Hello, Mike, just checking to see if you got home...

, 01:14:18:05 , Please call me when you..."

, 01:14:19:05 , "Velda."

, 01:14:24:00 , What was old has been destroyed.

, 01:14:27:13 , Images of things that aren't there any more

, 01:14:30:00 , mean a lot to those of us who live in Los Angeles,

, 01:14:33:14 , and practically nothing to everyone else,

, 01:14:39:13 , except perhaps when they represent things that have disappeared from urban centers everywhere,

, 01:14:42:13 , like drive-in restaurants

, 01:14:47:00 , or drive-in movies.

, 01:15:39:00 , Of course, there are certain types of buildings that aren't designed to last.

, 01:15:45:13 , They must be rebuilt every five or ten years

, 01:15:48:13 , so they can adapt to changing patterns of consumption.

, 01:15:57:00 , So the image of an obsolete gas station

, 01:15:58:05 , or grocery store

, 01:16:03:13 , can evoke the same kind of nostalgia we feel for any commodity whose day has passed.

, 01:16:08:00 , Old movies allow us to rediscover these icons,

, 01:16:11:13 , even to construct a documenary history of their evolution.

, 01:16:14:00 , "Tell this character we want to go..."

, 01:16:15:13 , "Can I help you, sir?"

, 01:16:17:13 , "Oh, yeah. Give me five gallons of regular."

, 01:16:18:13 , "Regular."

, 01:16:20:13 , "I thought you said we were going to dancing.."

, 01:16:23:00 , "Come here, homes. Come here, I wnt to talk to you."

, 01:16:26:00 , "Wo Puld you check under the hood, too, please?"

, 01:16:27:00 , "Sure."

, 01:16:46:00 , "Hello, there. Fill'er up?"

, 01:16:49:00 , "Two dollars, no knock!"

, 01:16:52:00 , "Yes, sir."

, 01:19:33:00 , "There goes Williams. He slides. He's in there, safe."

, 01:19:36:13 , But who cares about our old minor league baseball parks,

, 01:19:39:00 , Wrigley Field, home of the Angels,

, 01:19:43:00 , and Gilmore Field, home of the Hollywood Stars,

, 01:19:47:00 , or the Twinks, as our local sportswriters liked to call them?

, 01:19:54:00 , "Cushions a dime. Ten cents only. Be comfortable for a dime. Get your cushions here."

, 01:20:02:00 , Who remembers Steve Bilko and Bobby Bragan and Carlos Bernier?

, 01:20:33:13 , The crowd scenes in The Atomic City feature real baseball fans,

, 01:20:35:13 , not professional extras,

, 01:20:37:05 , who were then still cast

, 01:20:41:00 , according to the requirements of a production code that prohibited

, 01:20:45:00 , any scenes showing the social intermingling of white and colored people.

, 01:20:54:00 , They suggest that Los Angeles may have been more comfortably integrated in 1952

, 01:20:56:13 , than it is today.

, 01:21:01:13 , And who mourns the Pan Pacific Auditorium,

, 01:21:05:00 , our Streamline Moderne palace,

, 01:21:07:00 , once the city's most famous landmark,

, 01:21:11:00 , where the college basketball teams played their games,

, 01:21:15:00 , where Robert Frank photographed the Motorama in 1956.

, 01:21:19:13 , It played a dog racing track in Johnny Eager

, 01:21:25:13 , and an arena for ice skating shows in Suspense.

, 01:21:31:00 , In 1980, after the Pan Pacific had been abandoned,

, 01:21:34:00 , Lawrence Gordon produced an ill-fated fantasy

, 01:21:37:13 , of what the preservationists call adaptive reuse.

, 01:21:43:13 , A muse inspires a young artist to convince an aging clarinetist

, 01:21:48:00 , that it is the ideal locale for the nightclub he wants to open.

, 01:21:52:13 , "You really think this could work out for Danny?"

, 01:21:56:00 , "I think this place could be anything you want it to be."

, 01:21:58:13 , "Yeah, but what the hell to call it?"

, 01:22:06:13 , "In Xanadu did Kublah Khan a stately pleasure dome decree."

, 01:22:09:15 , Alas, their dream turns out to be...

, 01:22:14:00 , a roller disco.

, 01:22:17:00 , The film failed,

, 01:22:21:00 , and what was left of the Pan Pacific burned down nine years later.

, 01:22:24:00 , It deserved better,

, 01:22:26:13 , both in the movies and in reality.

, 01:22:33:00 , "A place where nobody dared to go ...

, 01:22:38:00 , ...A love that we came to know ...

, 01:22:41:00 , ... They call it Xanadu."

, 01:22:47:00 , So did the Richfield Building,

, 01:22:49:00 , which had to make way for taller,

, 01:22:51:00 , uglier skyscrapers.

, 01:22:54:00 , There are many photographs,

, 01:22:56:00 , but only a few movie shots.

, 01:22:59:00 , Thanks to Antonioni.

, 01:23:05:00 , What about Ship's Westwood,

, 01:23:07:00 , a coffee shop that was open all night?

, 01:23:11:00 , It was an institution,

, 01:23:16:00 , but it didn't stand a chance when someone realized you could put a skyscraper in the same space.

, 01:23:29:13 , "Thanks, Amy."

, 01:23:32:00 , At least the Far East Café is still there.

, 01:23:36:13 , It closed down after the 1994 earthquake,

, 01:23:39:13 , but it is supposed to reopen soon.

, 01:23:44:00 , And so is the Angel's Flight.

, 01:23:46:00 , Our beloved funicular,

, 01:23:48:00 , "the shortest railway in the world"

, 01:23:51:00 , built in 1901,

, 01:23:55:13 , ripped up in 1969 by the Community Redevelopment Agency,

, 01:23:58:13 , reconstructed in 1996,

, 01:24:01:00 , a block south of its original location,

, 01:24:06:00 , closed after a crash in February 2001,

, 01:24:08:13 , just a few days after I filmed it.

, 01:24:11:13 , But it's still there...

, 01:24:13:00 , sort of.

, 01:24:17:00 , The reconstructed Angel's Flight was a tourist ride,

, 01:24:19:00 , a simulation,

, 01:24:21:13 , because it had lost its original purpose.

, 01:24:25:00 , Bunker Hill,

, 01:24:28:13 , the residential neighborhood at the top of the Angel's Flight,

, 01:24:31:00 , had vanished.

, 01:24:40:00 , The movies loved Bunker Hill.

, 01:24:43:13 , The lords of the city hated it.

, 01:24:49:13 , Rents were low, so it put the wrong kind of people too close to downtown.

, 01:24:56:00 , Bunker Hill became a target for slum clearance or urban renewal.

, 01:25:03:13 , They had to destroy it in order to save it.

, 01:25:09:13 , And destroy it they did,

, 01:25:12:00 , although it took more than ten years.

, 01:25:18:00 , Bunker Hill was the most photographed district in Los Angeles,

, 01:25:24:00 , so the movies unwittingly documented its destruction and depopulation.

, 01:25:27:00 , In the late forties,

, 01:25:30:00 , it could represent a solid working-class neighborhood,

, 01:25:41:13 , a place where a guy could take his girl home to meet his mother.

, 01:25:45:13 , "Ah, buena sera, mamma mia."

, 01:25:47:00 , "Buena sera."

, 01:25:55:14 , It was film noir territory,

, 01:25:59:00 , but it was a refuge from the meaner streets of the city.

, 01:26:03:13 , By the mid-fifties,

, 01:26:06:00 , it had become a neighborhood of rooming houses

, 01:26:09:00 , where a man who knows too much might hole up or hide out.

, 01:26:18:00 , Hollywood had come to accept Raymond Chandler's vision of Bunker Hill

, 01:26:22:00 , As old town, wop town, crook town, arty town...

, 01:26:24:00 , where you could find anything

, 01:26:28:00 , from crooks on the lam to ladies of anybody's evening

, 01:26:31:00 , to County Relief clients brawling with haggard landladies

, 01:26:34:00 , in grand old houses with scrolled porches...

, 01:26:37:00 , "A guy could get a heart attack walking up here."

, 01:26:39:00 , "Who invited you?"

, 01:26:41:00 , "Carmen Trivago, what room?"

, 01:26:42:00 , "Follow your ear."

, 01:26:45:00 , The best Bunker Hill movie is The Exiles,

, 01:26:49:00 , an independent low-budget film by Kent MacKenzie,

, 01:26:53:00 , about Indians from Arizona exiled in Los Angeles,

, 01:26:56:00 , shot in 1958,

, 01:26:58:00 , completed in 1961.

, 01:27:06:13 , It reveals the city as a place where reality is opaque,

, 01:27:09:00 , where different social orders

, 01:27:11:00 , coexist in the same space

, 01:27:13:00 , without touching each other.

, 01:27:39:00 , Better than any other movie,

, 01:27:42:00 , it proves that there once was a city here,

, 01:27:46:00 , before they tore it down and built a simulacrum.

, 01:27:55:13 , The end of Bunker Hill is visible in The Omega Man.

, 01:27:57:13 , By 1971

, 01:28:01:13 , it made a good location for a post-apocalyptic fantasy.

, 01:28:06:00 , Charlton Heston plays an urban survivalist in a cityscape

, 01:28:08:00 , depopulated by biological warfare.

, 01:28:14:13 , He has learned to become totally self-reliant.

, 01:28:19:13 , If he wants to see a movie,

, 01:28:21:13 , he has to project it himself.

, 01:28:25:13 , "This is really beautiful , man....

, 01:28:28:13 , ... If we can't all live together and be happy? ...

, 01:28:31:00 , ... If you have to be afraid to walk out in the street,

, 01:28:34:13 , if you have to be afraid to smile at somebody, right?

, 01:28:38:00 , What kind of a way is that to go through this life?"

, 01:28:41:13 , All his movie shows are matinees,

, 01:28:46:00 , because at night he must fight off a gang of Luddite hippie vampires,

, 01:28:49:00 , his only companions in the city.

, 01:29:02:13 , Thirteen years later,

, 01:29:05:00 , the same plot and the same location

, 01:29:07:13 , reappear in Night of the Comet.

, 01:29:10:13 , In the wake of a disaster

, 01:29:12:13 , apparently brought on by comet dust,

, 01:29:15:00 , a small band of human survivors

, 01:29:17:00 , again battle zombie-like mutants,

, 01:29:29:13 , but the center of the action,

, 01:29:31:00 , Bunker Hill,

, 01:29:33:00 , has been totally transformed.

, 01:29:41:00 , The new Bunker Hill looks like a simulated city,

, 01:29:43:00 , and it played one in Virtuosity.

, 01:30:03:00 , But the directors who did the most to make Los Angeles a character in movies

, 01:30:04:00 , and then a subject

, 01:30:07:00 , were outsiders, like Wilder, or tourists.

, 01:30:12:00 , They weren't interested in what made Los Angeles like a city;

, 01:30:17:00 , they were interested in what made Los Angeles unlike the cities they knew.

, 01:30:22:00 , Just as there are highbrows and lowbrows,

, 01:30:25:00 , there are high tourists and low tourists.

, 01:30:30:00 , Just as there are highbrow directors and lowbrow directors,

, 01:30:34:00 , there are high tourist directors and low tourist directors.

, 01:30:37:00 , Low tourist directors

, 01:30:39:13 , generally disdain Los Angeles.

, 01:30:43:13 , They prefer San Francisco and the coastline of northern California.

, 01:30:46:13 , More picturesque.

, 01:30:55:00 , The greatest low tourist director is, of course,

, 01:30:57:00 , Alfred Hitchcock,

, 01:31:02:13 , and he set four memorable films around the San Francisco Bay Area.

, 01:31:16:00 , But only one of his thirty American films

, 01:31:19:00 , is set even partially in Los Angeles.

, 01:31:22:00 , The first ten minutes of Saboteur

, 01:31:25:00 , are located in or around Los Angeles,

, 01:31:27:00 , but it could be anywhere in America

, 01:31:29:00 , where there is an aircraft factory.

, 01:31:32:00 , The scenes were shot in the studio,

, 01:31:35:00 , and there is nothing distinctive to the region in the sets.

, 01:31:43:13 , Hitchcock even had Marion Crane bypass Los Angeles

, 01:31:48:00 , on her fateful journey from Phoenix to the Bates Motel in northern California.

, 01:31:55:00 , But he never had an unkind word for his adopted home town,

, 01:31:57:00 , at least in his movies.

, 01:32:04:00 , Another low tourist director,

, 01:32:05:13 , Woody Allen,

, 01:32:09:13 , plainly expressed his disdain for Los Angeles in his most popular movie

, 01:32:11:13 , "No, I cannot... You keep bringing it up, ...

, 01:32:13:00 , but I don't wanna live in a city

, 01:32:17:00 , where the only cultural advantage is that you can make a right turn on a red light."

, 01:32:22:00 , As the cinematic chronicler of New York's middle-brow middle class,

, 01:32:25:13 , the people who believe what they read in the New York Times,

, 01:32:28:13 , Allen rarely strays from his native milieu.

, 01:32:33:00 , But his best friend does move to Los Angeles,

, 01:32:34:13 , and Woody follows

, 01:32:37:00 , although only for a visit.

, 01:32:40:13 , "You know, I can't believe that this is really Beverly Hills."

, 01:32:43:00 , "The architecture is really consistent isn't it, ...

, 01:32:46:00 , ... French next to Spanish, next to Tudor, next to Japanese."

, 01:32:48:13 , "God, it's so clean out here."

, 01:32:51:00 , "It's because they don't throw their garbage away, ...

, 01:32:53:00 , ... they make it into television shows."

, 01:33:00:00 , His tale of two cities becomes a tale of two marquees.

, 01:33:09:00 , In fact, The Sorrow and the Pity did play in Los Angeles

, 01:33:11:00 , I saw it here

, 01:33:13:00 , and, for all I know,

, 01:33:17:00 , The House of Exorcism and Messiah of Evil played in New York.

, 01:33:23:00 , But if New York has Woody Allen to live down,

, 01:33:25:00 , we can't feel superior.

, 01:33:27:00 , We have Henry Jaglom,

, 01:33:29:00 , who is even balder,

, 01:33:31:00 , even more narcissistic,

, 01:33:33:00 , even more solipsistic.

, 01:33:35:00 , "I've learned that risks are the best thing...

, 01:33:38:00 , ... Everything that happens good and exciting, that happens in film and in life ...

, 01:33:40:00 , ...comes as a result of risk...

, 01:33:42:00 , Risk is my middle name."

, 01:33:48:06 , While New Yorkers are generally hostile,

, 01:33:51:13 , the British are often fascinated.

, 01:33:53:00 , In The Loved One,

, 01:33:55:13 , Tony Richardson acknowledges his ambivalence.

, 01:33:56:00 , Tony Richardson acknowledges his ambivalence.

, 01:33:59:00 , The local architecture is kitsch,

, 01:34:01:13 , but it is transcendent kitsch.

, 01:34:16:00 , A movie studio is a cruel court

, 01:34:20:00 , where everyone is subject to the most wayward whim of its mogul,

, 01:34:25:00 , but the back lot is an enchanted village of accidental surrealism.

, 01:34:28:00 , "The climate here suits me admirably. ...

, 01:34:30:00 , And the people here are so kind and generous.

, 01:34:32:00 , They talk entirely for their own pleasure,

, 01:34:34:00 , and they never expect you to listen."

, 01:34:37:13 , People who hate Los Angeles

, 01:34:39:13 , love Point Blank.

, 01:35:06:00 , British director John Boorman

, 01:35:09:00 , managed to make the city look both bland and insidious,

, 01:35:13:13 , like the gangster organization Lee Marvin smashes,

, 01:35:17:13 , which goes by the name Multiplex Products Company.

, 01:35:34:13 , For me

, 01:35:36:00 , the highlight of the film

, 01:35:40:00 , is the astonishing tableau of grotesque interior decoration schemes.

, 01:35:45:00 , It's enough to make you believe the seventies began in the mid-sixties.

, 01:36:17:00 , Is an LSD movie low tourist or high tourist?

, 01:36:20:13 , Roger Corman, the director of The Trip,

, 01:36:22:13 , is no tourist in Los Angeles,

, 01:36:27:00 , but he probably needed a guidebookto open the doors of perception.

, 01:36:31:00 , Luckily he had Jack Nicholson to write the script,

, 01:36:34:00 , Peter Fonda and Bruce Dern as traveling companions,

, 01:36:38:00 , and Dennis Jakob to create the montage sequences.

, 01:37:11:00 , Experimental high tourist film-makers like Corman,

, 01:37:12:13 , Maya Deren,

, 01:37:14:00 , Andy Warhol,

, 01:37:15:13 , and Fred Halsted

, 01:37:19:00 , discovered a pastoral arcadia near the heart of Los Angeles.

, 01:37:31:00 , Deren and her collaborator Alexander Hammid

, 01:37:33:00 , could find a private Eden

, 01:37:37:00 , just by gazing out the window of their Spanish Colonial Revival duplex

, 01:37:39:00 , above the Sunset Strip.

, 01:37:47:13 , For Warhol,

, 01:37:52:13 , Hollywood formulas represented an innocence that could be regained only "sort of"

, 01:37:59:00 , but Sam Rodia's towers in Watts

, 01:38:01:00 , were a bit of paradise not yet lost.

, 01:38:22:00 , In the early sixties,

, 01:38:25:00 , the Watts Towers were the first world's most accessible,

, 01:38:28:00 , most user-friendly civic monument.

, 01:38:55:00 , Fred Halsted's gay porn masterpiece

, 01:38:57:00 , recapitulates the loss of Eden,

, 01:39:00:00 , moving from the idyllic rural canyons

, 01:39:03:00 , to the already mean streets of Hollywood.

, 01:39:19:12 , As the landscape becomes more urban,

, 01:39:22:00 , the sex gets rougher.

, 01:39:36:00 , Continental European directors

, 01:39:39:13 , so they appreciate Los Angeles,

, 01:39:42:00 , even the tacky stuff we hate,

, 01:39:44:00 , like the Sunset Strip.

, 01:39:49:15 , In The Outside Man by Jacques Deray,

, 01:39:53:00 , a Parisian hit man stranded in Los Angeles

, 01:39:55:00 , discovers a city of parking lots,

, 01:39:58:00 , motels,

, 01:40:00:13 , bus stations,

, 01:40:05:13 , coffee shops,

, 01:40:13:00 , strip bars,

, 01:40:19:00 , and real estate opportunities.

, 01:40:24:00 , It's all quite ugly, I suppose,

, 01:40:29:00 , but it adds up to a precise portrait of the city in 1973,

, 01:40:31:00 , just as I remember it.

, 01:40:41:00 , Like most Europeans in southern California,

, 01:40:45:00 , Antonioni was more interested in the desert than in the city.

, 01:40:49:00 , If you should ever find yourself in Death Valley in August,

, 01:40:52:00 , you will hear more German spoken than English.

, 01:40:55:13 , But before heading for Zabriskie Point,

, 01:41:00:00 , Antonioni took his protagonist on a high tourist spin around Los Angeles,

, 01:41:05:13 , starting with the now-famous murals at the Farmer John's meat packing plant in Vernon,

, 01:41:09:00 , later featured in Brian De Palma's Carrie

, 01:41:11:00 , and Jon Jost's Angel City.

, 01:42:20:00 , His tour of industrial Los Angeles ended abruptly and improbably

, 01:42:22:00 , at Sunset and Rodeo.

, 01:42:48:00 , Jacques Demy loved Los Angeles as only a tourist can.

, 01:42:50:00 , Or maybe I should say,

, 01:42:52:00 , as only a French tourist can.

, 01:42:56:00 , I resented Model Shop when it came out

, 01:42:58:13 , because it was a westside movie.

, 01:43:00:00 , Its vision of the city

, 01:43:02:00 , didn't extend east of Vine Street.

, 01:43:04:13 , But now I can appreciate

, 01:43:08:00 , an early poignant attempt to defend Los Angeles as a city.

, 01:43:11:00 , It's totally incoherent,

, 01:43:14:00 , but if you live here, you have to be moved.

, 01:43:17:00 , "I was driving down Sunset, ...

, 01:43:20:00 , ... and I turned on one of those roads that lead up into the hills, ...

, 01:43:22:00 , ... and I stopped at this place that overlooks the whole city.

, 01:43:24:00 , ... It was fantastic. ...

, 01:43:26:00 , I suddenly felt exhilarated.

, 01:43:29:00 , I was really moved by the geometry of the place,

, 01:43:31:13 , its conception, its baroque harmony.

, 01:43:34:00 , It's a fabulous city.

, 01:43:39:00 , To think some people claim it's an ugly city when it's really pure poetry,

, 01:43:41:00 , it just kills me.

, 01:43:43:03 , I wanted to build something right then,

, 01:43:44:13 , create something.

, 01:43:46:00 , Do you know what I mean?"

, 01:43:48:00 , "Yeah, I do. I understand."

, 01:43:57:00 , The opinion expressed by Raquel Welch in Flareup is more typical.

, 01:44:01:00 , "It's better from up here than down close."

, 01:44:09:00 , Roman Polanski later stole her line

, 01:44:11:00 , and improved upon it:

, 01:44:14:00 , "There's no more beautiful city in the world...

, 01:44:18:13 , provided it's seen by night and from a distance."