The Valley

When we first moved to L.A., I wasn’t sure I wanted to live in the San Fernando Valley. Known simply as “the valley” to Angelinos, the moniker is synonymous with middle-class suburbia (remember "Valley Girl" with Nicholas Cage?) and the porn industry. Suffice it to say that the valley has a somewhat déclassé reputation, especially among its neighbors to the south.

I have a feeling that this has always been the case. The valley was scarcely livable before the turn of the 20th century, when a few ruthless businessmen bought up the land, and irrigated it with water from an aqueduct that was unknowingly financed by the residents of Los Angeles. (If this sounds familiar, it’s because the L.A. “water wars” served as a backdrop for the movie “Chinatown.”)

Once the aqueduct was completed (in 1913), the Valley was quickly annexed by the City of Los Angeles – much to the chagrin, one imagines, of city residents. The Valley has been growing ever since, becoming a city in its own right. Beginning in the 1970s, there have been numerous attempts at secession. In the 2002 city elections, supporters argued that Valley residents are paying equal taxes for unequal public services. Opponents to the south blocked the secession... but, despite the technicalities, the Valley and the City of Los Angeles seem to exist independent of each other - two cities, divided by the Santa Monica Mountains.

After a few weeks in L.A., we eventually settled in Studio City on the southern fringe of the valley. Most of our trips in the past few months have taken us south or west, but this weekend we decided to explore the north side of the mountains – following a map of forgotten filming locations.




Suburban Hell (the Brady Bunch house)


The Los Angeles "River"


Forget it, Jake...

We started in Tujunga, on a residential street that hugs the edge of the San Gabriel Mountains in the northwest corner of the valley. This was the location of Elliot’s house in Steven Spielberg’s “E.T. – The Extra Terrestrial” (1982). The forest scenes were filmed in Northern California (hence the redwoods) and the neighborhood bike chase was shot in Northridge, but Tujunga was E.T.’s home away from home – with the mountains out back and a nice view of the valley in front. The early morning fog was a nice touch.



Next, we headed south to Pasadena, to see The Gamble House, a genuine tourist destination that appears on the National Historic Register. Most people visit this oversized 1908 bungalow for its unique architecture… but not me. I visited it because it was Doc Brown’s 1955 house in “Back to the Future.”



From Pasadena, we headed east to North Hollywood, and visited two locations that only a true movie geek could appreciate. First: the 7-11 at the corner of Magnolia and Tujunga. This is where Lloyd Dobler’s first date with Diane Court ended in Cameron Crowe’s directorial debut, “Say Anything.” As they were walking across the parking lot, Lloyd pointed out some glass for Diane to walk around. Later in the movie she says, “I always think of that whenever people say ‘What are you doing with Lloyd Dobler?’”

I remember that because I watched the movie at least 8 million times when I was in high school. Like I said, it takes a true geek... someone who would make his girlfriend accompany him to a sketchy 7-11 in North Hollywood and snap photos while a homeless guy stares at them.



Next stop: The Fox Fire Room cocktail lounge on Magnolia Boulevard. This is where “quiz kid” Donnie Smith met the love of his life (a male bartender with braces), in Paul Thomas Anderson’s opus “Magnolia.”

I can practically hear the jukebox playing old Supertramp hits, while Donnie whines, “I have lots of love to give… I just don’t know where to put it.”

If you continue east to Reseda and go up a few blocks, you can also visit the electronics shop where Donnie absent-mindedly drove his car through the front window. A block away from that is another P.T. Anderson shooting location – La Iglesia Christiana Nuevo Empezar, which doubled as the Hot Traxx disco in “Boogie Nights.”





In the afternoon, we took the 101 to the far western side of the valley, and found that Canoga Park lives up to the cliché that everything in suburbia looks exactly the same.

This is also where we found Brad and Stacy’s house from “Fast Times at Ridgemont High,” written by Cameron Crowe. Scenes set at the school were filmed at two locations in the valley: Canoga Park High and Van Nuys High. The front of Van Nuys is recognizable from the beginning of the movie.

Other nearby locations for this film include the Encino Little League Field (“The Point”), the Sherman Oaks Galleria (unrecognizable from the film, now that it has been converted into an outdoor mall), the Santa Monica Promenade (featured as the front of Ridgemont mall), and a coffee shop in Brentwood that doubled as the “All-American Burger” where Brad worked.





We headed back east, through Reseda, and passed by the apartment building where Daniel Larusso and Mr. Miyagi lived in “The Karate Kid.” It looks pretty dingy these days but, as I recall, it looked pretty dingy in 1984 too. (I suppose the point of this drive-by was not to scout a future place to live, but to celebrate the fact that we are living in the same city where some of my favorite films were shot.)

Another fan has compiled an exhaustive list of filming locations from "The Karate Kid," including Allie's house in nearby Encino.



With a proper amount of nostalgic thoughts, we headed back to our street in Studio City…

… which is currently the shooting location of “Bratz: The Movie,” starring Paula Abdul. Instead of turning on the TV, we just look out the window… and get a casual reminder of just how BORING production can be.

That said, I have no doubt that “Bratz” will be an instant classic, and that we’ll soon have movie geeks trolling through our own neighborhood, snapping photos and saying “This is where…”

Then again, maybe not.

Welcome to the Grindhouse

Yet another reason to live in L.A…


THE LOS ANGELES GRINDHOUSE FESTIVAL 2007 at the New Beverly Theater, hosted by Quentin Tarantino!

The festival – a celebration of exploitation cinema and a hype-machine for Tarantino’s new movie Grindhouse (due out on April 6th) – kicked off last week with a double feature of The Mack and The Chinese Mack. Proudly flaunting its eclecticism, the festival continued with a double feature of Italian crime films (Machine Gun McCain and Wipeout) and a T&A triple feature over the weekend (The Van, Pick-up Summer, and Summer Camp). We made it to the theater yesterday for the premiere of a “southern-fried carnage” double-feature: Rolling Thunder and The Town that Dreaded Sundown. Neither of these films is currently available on DVD, but I had seen them both on video a few years back.

When I was 14 or 15 years old, I found a dusty VHS copy of Rolling Thunder on the shelves at a mom-and-pop video store in Crozet, Virginia. During the summers, my best friend Ben and I used to ride our bikes to the store every Monday, when all rentals were 50 cents, and pick out 7 movies each. As you might imagine, with rental habits like this, we were always searching for something different and, at 50 cents a pop, we were willing to take chances on films we’d never heard of. We picked up a lot of movies based purely on the cover art… and exploitation films of the 1970s undoubtedly had the best cover art. (I still remember the day we discovered The Texas Chainsaw Massacre… not to mention Women’s Penitentiary.) That was my introduction to exploitation cinema – which, for the uninitiated, might be defined as “a genre of films that typically sacrifice the traditional notions of artistic merit for a more sensationalistic display, often featuring excessive sex, violence, and gore” (Wikipedia). Blaxploitation, sexploitation, women in prison, chop-sake, outlaw bikers, zombies, cannibals, Faces of Death, you name it… We watched everything and anything.


I imagine that most members of my generation who became interested in exploitation cinema went through the same process I did. Once I had exhausted the easy access options, I researched books and magazines to find new titles, then scoured other mom-and-pop video stores and searched late-night cable TV listings for the ones I wanted to see. It was always exciting to run across an old gem in some out-of-the-way video store, or in a bargain bin at the local Wal-Mart (where I found The Town that Dreaded Sundown, along with Day of the Triffids). When I found a copy of Herschell Gordon Lewis’s Blood Feast at a video store off of Route 33 in Harrisonburg, Virginia, I wanted to take it up to the clerk and shout: “Do you realize what you have here?!”

USA’s “Up All Night” and (later) TNT’s “MonsterVision” occasionally played a few rarities, though they were always depressingly truncated. But within a few years, these movies disappeared from late night TV, and video stores started drying up as the DVD format took over. For older fans of the grindhouse cinema, it must have seemed like these films were dying a second death. For a few years, things looked bleak – prompting more fan books and magazines, to champion overlooked films. Sleazoid Express remains the definitive grindhouse guide, and there are now countless books on cult cinema, Eurotrash, and filmmakers like David F. Friedman, Herschell Gordon Lewis, Russ Meyer and John Waters. Eventually, DVD distributors like Anchor Bay, Something Weird, and Blue Underground realized that there was a new market for the films. While many fan favorites are now available on DVD, a few of them are still missing in action… except at the New Beverly.

The New Beverly is L.A.’s only 7-day-a-week revival movie house, and it apparently draws a pretty good crowd. Anywhere else, a festival like this might only fill two or three rows. (I still remember feeling slightly embarrassed when John Waters came to my school in 1999 and only a handful of people showed up to hear him speak. I wanted to stand in the middle of campus and shout: “Do you know what we have here?!”) On Sunday, the Beverly was 3/4 full of eager fans, bathed in blood-red light. When the previews started, I suddenly felt more excited to be in a theater than I have in a long time. Rolling Thunder was preceded by glimpses at four upcoming festival films: Chinese Hercules starring Bolo Yeung (you may remember him as the villain in the Jean Claude Van Damme vehicle Bloodsport… or not), the gut-munching giallo film Autopsy (which I confess I haven’t seen… Ben, is it worth it?), Roger Vadim’s Pretty Maids All in a Row (written by “Star Trek” creator Gene Roddenberry), and “the funniest adult cartoon ever” Tarzoon: Shame of the Jungle (featuring the voices of John Belushi, Christopher Guest, and Bill Murray).

The lights came up and went down again, and then the opening verse of the Denny Brooks ballad “San Antone” crackled out of the speakers, announcing the start of the feature presentation. Rolling Thunder is allegedly one of Quentin Tarantino’s all-time favorite revenge movies. He even named his now-defunct distribution company after it. The film was written by Paul Schrader, post-Taxi Driver and pre-Raging Bull, and stars William Devane and Tommy Lee Jones as recently released Vietnam POW’s. It’s a shame that this film isn’t more readily available, because the performances and characterization can easily compete with the best New Hollywood films of the 1970s. Watching that cracked and faded print, it was not hard to imagine the tensions of the time and place in which the film was made - before the country had come to terms with the Vietnam War. At one point, sexpot Linda Haynes asks the icy William Devane, “Why do I get stuck with the crazy men?” Devane replies, flatly, “Because that’s the only kind left.”


The film was followed by vintage previews for several other memorable revenge films: Straw Dogs, Death Wish, Fighting Mad (an early Jonathan Demme film starring Peter Fonda) and Trackdown, starring Jim Calhoun. I haven’t seen Trackdown, but the preview reminded me of another Paul Shrader film, Hardcore, in which George C. Scott goes looking for his daughter in Los Angeles – only to find that she has been kidnapped by ruthless pornographers.

The previews kept coming – for the shockingly lurid serial killer film The Centerfold Girls, the more cautious true crime drama The Boston Strangler (legitimized by the presence of Henry Fonda and Tony Curtis), and a trio of trailers for films by Charles B. Pierce. I can’t claim to know much about Pierce, beyond his infamous horror films The Legend of Boggy Creek and The Town that Dreaded Sundown. It seems he was a pioneer of mockumentaries in multiple genres. We saw previews for Winterhawk, Greyeagle, and The Evictors (with a young Jessica Harper... what ever happened to her?) – all featuring the same monotone narrator who constantly interrupts The Town that Dreaded Sundown, to remind us that we are watching A TRUE STORY.


The Town that Dreaded Sundown is a fictionalized account of the Texarkana Moonlight Murders in the 1940s, and has been cited as a source of inspiration for slasher films like Halloween and Friday the 13th. The killer wears a white sack over his head and uses a wide variety of murder weapons (including a trombone!), and there are constant shots of the killer’s feet – all of which reminded me of early Friday the 13th films. There were also a few serial killer POV shots – a la Halloween. But, stylistically, those films owe more to Mario Bava’s Twitch of the Death Nerve and Bob Clark’s Black Christmas – both of which are easier to sit through than The Town that Dreaded Sundown.

Pierce’s film is tiresomely schizophrenic. Every time it starts to build a little momentum, the narrative falls back into the hands of the obnoxious narrator, which made me feel like I was watching an episode of “The FBI Files.” There are no real attempts at characterization, unless you count the comic relief segments with a goofy patrolman named “Spark Plug” (played by the director himself). These sequences are even more unbearable than the Barney Fife-type sketches in Wes Craven’s Last House on the Left – another film that has more to recommend it.

There were quite a few groans in the audience during the second feature, but it still warranted applause at the end. Exploitation fans, after all, have learned to sit through a lot of uneven movies in their search for something different. When we left the theater, there was a long line of moviegoers waiting for admittance to the next showing. I expect it will be like that all month.


The Los Angeles Grindhouse Festival continues through the end of April. You can view the schedule on the official website for the New Beverly, or on their MySpace page.

Palm Springs Slideshow

As I sat down to blog these photos from our weekend trip to Palm Springs, I started wondering why I take the time to upload so many photos to this blog, and why I take the time to explain where/when the photos were taken.

Then I remembered last summer, when my uncle died and my parents inherited a vast collection of old photo albums, dating back to WWII Europe. As I flipped through those albums, I had no idea where and when many of the photos were taken, and I thought it was a little sad that all the details that could have brought those photos to life had died with my uncle.

This seems like as good a reason as any to keep blogging. I never know who might drop by, and get inspired by one of these random photos. So, without further delay, here comes the latest slideshow...

On the way to Palm Springs, we drove through San Bernadino County, known for its orange groves. A few months ago, I was reading a book on California history, and the author joked that tourists love to stop and pick oranges in SoCal. He added (one imagines, with a sly grin) that they do so at their own peril, and recounted his own first experience of hand-picking an orange on a rural roadside in San Bernadino. No sooner than the orange left the tree, he heard a gunshot and was chased off of the property. California ranchers are notoriously protective of their crop. I guess they have to be. There are a lot of tourists.

This valencia orange grove was right outside the San Bernadino County Museum, so I don't think we would have been shot at. Nevertheless, we played it safe and picked up our souvenir orange from the ground.



On the way through San Bernadino, we also stopped at the Agua Mansa Pioneer Cemetery because.... well, because I'm a weird guy and like visiting old cemeteries. This particular cemetery represents the pioneer communities of Agua Mansa and La Placita, which sat across from each other on the Santa Ana River. They were the first non-native settlements in the San Bernadino Valley and, in the 1840s, the largest settlements between New Mexico and Los Angeles.

According to one of the cemetery overseers, this low-lying region was hit by a massive flood in 1862. Not wanting to suffer the same fate twice, the survivors abandoned the two communities. The cemetery is all that remains.



Some of the tombstones are quite ornate, but unfortunately many of them were vandalized in the 1980s. Today, the cemetery belongs mostly to gophers and rattlesnakes. The last burial was in 1963.



A little further down the road, we stumbled upon Claude Bell's dinosaurs, just off of I-10 in Cabazon. Claude used to run the nearby Wheel Inn. This brontosaurus took him 11 years to complete.



The world's largest dinosaur statues are now under new ownership, and the inside of the brontosaurus has been turned into a museum devoted to... "the science of creationism."

Go figure.



You may remember this T. Rex from his cameo in the Tim Burton film "Pee Wee's Big Adventure." Or (god help you) from the Fred Savage vehicle "The Wizard."



Another distinctive feature along I-10 is this "farm" of wind turbine generators. There are more than 4,000 of them in the San Gorgonio Mountain Pass, which cuts between the San Bernadino Mountains to the north and the San Jacinto Mountains to the south, and is known as one of the windiest places on earth. The windmills provide enough electricity to power Palm Springs and the entire Coachella Valley.



The biggest tourist attraction in Palm Springs is probably the tram ride to the top of the San Jacinto Mountains. I imagine it is also popular with residents in the summer months. On average, the top of the mountain is 30 degrees cooler than the valley below. In the summer, valley temperatures average between 100 and 120 degrees Fahrenheit.

Bring on the snow...



Looking down on the Coachella Valley from the San Jacinto Mountains



On the Desert View trails



Looking south into the San Jacinto Mountains



Looking down from the top of the tram



On Sunday, we visited Indian Canyons, home of the Cahuilla Indians. This photo was taken from the top of the Palm Canyon trail. You can tell the path of the river by following the cluster of Washington fan palm trees (named in honor of George Washington). Quite a contrast to the barren, rocky mountains surrounding them.

















Racing the sun back to L.A.