A few weeks ago, I was talking to a friend about growing up during a pivotal time for home entertainment. My childhood memories kick in around 1985 – the year of the updated Atari XE series and the first Nintendo Entertainment System. By then, RCA had discontinued its short-lived CED players, and VHS had won the marketing war against Betamax. My family experimented with all of these systems except for Betamax. Our first Atari game was “Jungle Hunt,” followed by “Frogger,” “Space Invaders,” and “Asteroids.” I still remember the day my father brought the Atari system home. I think he played it more than my younger brother and I did.
Our CED collection was never very impressive. We had maybe ten movies total, so we watched the same ones over and over and over – especially “Alice in Wonderland,” and “Return of the Jedi.” Within a year, we had graduated to VHS, and started recording things on TV at every opportunity. In no time at all, we had our own home video library. My brother and I continued to watch our favorites with fanatical zeal. I remember writing my own “novelization” of “Ghostbusters.” We collected trading cards for “Gremlins” and “The Goonies” (though Garbage Pail Kids were our real passion). I grudgingly admit that I know the words to all the songs in “Labyrinth,” and that I remember the main theme from Disney’s “Flight of the Navigator” (early electronica by Alan Silvestri). For some time, my favorite film was “Back to the Future.”
This weekend, I got to see “The Goonies” and “Back to the Future” on the big screen, at the New Beverly Theater in L.A. (Hey… better late than never.) It got me thinking about how much more likely I am to go see an old movie in the theater than a new one. Maybe it’s because I came of age in the era of VCRs?
My parents didn’t go to the movies much when my brother and I were little. By the time we were in school, they didn’t have to… On weekend nights, we would gather our sleeping bags, plug in the pop corn machine, and camp out on the living room floor in front of the TV. I imagine this might sound sad to those who grew up just a few years before me, and cultivated a greater appreciation for the theatrical experience. It was years before I knew the difference, but I loved those movies just the same.
Until this weekend, I hadn’t seen “Back to the Future” for years. My memory of it was pretty accurate, with a few exceptions… I don’t think I ever realized that Marty was sexually attracted to his mother. I understood that there was some tension there, but in my young mind it was one-sided. I was also surprised to see that the theatrical print did not conclude with the words “to be continued…” That, apparently, was an addition to the video release – one that prompted several years of restless waiting on my part.
I must admit: I still get a slightly giddy watching this film, just like I got slightly giddy a few months ago when I saw the Hill Valley square at Universal Studios. I considered taking a more elaborate tour of filming locations, but settled for a virtual tour instead.
“The Goonies” was sillier and more frenetic than I remembered it being. There were a few scenes that I didn’t recognize (the bit with the underground pipes and the scene where the Goonies take a bathroom break), and I realized that these scenes had been edited out of the TV version that I had watched repeatedly. I also found myself waiting for a scene that never came – where the gang discovers an octopus in the waters beside the pirate ship. It turns out that this was an extra scene shot for the TV version, to fill out the running time after the bawdier moments were excised.
Additional television footage was shot for a number of films in the late 70s / early 80s. I fell in love with “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” based on the TV edit. Granted, it didn’t include the most revealing images of Phoebe Cates and Jennifer Jason Lee, but it did a better job of fleshing out their characters. The TV edit features a scene where Linda (Phoebe Cates) offers frank advice about protected sex to her younger friends, and one where Stacy (Jennifer Jason Lee) emotionally prepares for an abortion. For some reason, the additional footage hasn’t been included on either DVD release of the film… so I say it’s time for an extended 25th anniversary edition.
In the meantime, I’ll have to settle for a big-screen presentation of the theatrical cut. It’s playing next weekend at the New Beverly, on a double bill with “The Last American Virgin." I suppose I'm atoning for the fact that I am a child of the home video revolution.
Now, if only I could go back and play the “Goonies II” Nintendo game…
Sunday, July 29, 2007
Thursday, July 26, 2007
Stephen King, Tobe Hooper and The Mangler
I’m going to do something a little ridiculous: I’m going to try to defend a film that is almost universally regarded as one of the worst horror films in recent memory. I’ll start with a confession: I was one of the twenty or so people who saw Tobe Hooper’s “The Mangler” during its short theatrical run. My best friend and I went to a Sunday matinee in Charlottesville, VA, on opening weekend. Based on our ticket numbers, we quickly realized that we were among only a handful of people in town who saw it during those first few days. The film was pulled from circulation before the following weekend.
The combination of three factors convinced me to buy that ticket – and I suspect the same was true for the other nineteen suckers who attended. First and foremost: Stephen King. I started reading Stephen King novels when I was in middle school, and made my way through his entire catalogue by the time I was a sophomore in high school. Suffice to say that I am a fan of his work, but not the kind of fan who refuses to admit that some of his stories are a little spotty. As for the films: There have always been more failures than successes. I watch them all anyway – because most of them have some redeeming qualities.
The biggest problem with the film adaptations is that they fail to render the characters with as much depth as the novelist. So filmmakers really have the odds stacked against them when they try to adapt a short story into a feature-length film. “The Mangler” is one of the short stories in the author’s “Night Shift” collection, so maybe I should have had lower expectations. But, hell, Tobe Hooper was in the director’s chair…
To this day, Tobe Hooper’s claim to fame is his debut film, “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.” His first follow-up, “Eaten Alive” starring a young Robert Englund, was a pale imitation of that gritty Southern Gothic horror. His next film was “Salem’s Lot,” a TV miniseries based on King’s second novel. Though some of its potential was stripped by the restrictions of the medium, the miniseries was a solid effort that demonstrated the director’s mainstream potential. Throughout the 80s, he continued to turn out respectable films… but the 90s hit Tobe Hooper like a bomb.
For the most part, he survived on television. I remember a 1991 TV pilot called “Haunted Lives” that made a big impression on me… In fact, it was a lot like the Discovery show I worked on. By 1995, the director needed a hit to secure his future as a filmmaker. So he enlisted his buddy Robert Englund – who had recently retired the iconic character of Freddy Krueger (or so he thought) – to star in the latest Stephen King screen adaptation. Promotion was easy: three modern-day masters of horror, one movie. What could go wrong?
The original short story “The Mangler” was first published in Cavalier magazine in 1972, when King was just out of college. The setting came from the author’s own experiences – working in a blue-collar industrial laundry in rural Maine to pay his way through school – and the monster implied in the title is a massive speed-iron that was used in such sweat-shops. The story begins when a kindly old worker named Miss Frawley gets reduced to meat by the machine. Officer John Hunton, a burned-out cop with a guilt complex, investigates the death and discovers a trail of corruption that runs through the idyllic community of Riker’s Valley. It turns out that Miss Frawley is not the first one to be sacrificed to the machine. All of the town’s wealthiest and most influential citizens have sacrificed family members to it. As explained by Bill Gartley, owner of the Blue Ribbon Laundry, that is exactly what makes the community of Riker’s Valley thrive: a little blood to appease the pagan god.
The subtext is as pointed as it could be: American dreamers sacrifice the young and innocent to maintain wealth and power. The social elite build their fortunes on the backs of the disenfranchised working class. These are messages that haunted the young writer: King was raised in a working-class mill town by a single mother who juggled manual labor jobs, and never had much to show for it. King himself worked those same jobs (including one that became the basis for his short story “Graveyard Shift”) while attending college, where he led protests against the war in Vietnam. Like most of his friends and family, he was a member of the disenfranchised working class – meat for the machine – and the resulting rage was the subject of his earliest novels.
As critic Robin Wood has pointed out, the same subtext permeates “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.” On one level, it is a story about what happens when workers at the bottom of America’s capitalist food chain are put out of work. Since the film was made and set in 1973, there can be little doubt that the war in Vietnam was also on the director’s mind. In the recent prequel “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning,” the filmmakers brought the subject of the Vietnam War to the surface of the story – perhaps because many Americans are currently comparing it to the Iraq War. They could have also drawn inspiration from Eric Schlosser’s “Fast Food Nation” – a vivid portrait of the dehumanizing effects of industrialization, and an indictment of contemporary American capitalism.
Considering the similarities to “Chainsaw,” I suspect that Tobe Hooper was trying to get back to his roots with “The Mangler.” There is at least one visual clue about this: He reveals the “mangled” bodies to us in the same cinematic style that he revealed the corpses to us in the opening scene of “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.” The impression is the same: We have no illusion that we are looking at a person. What we are seeing is simply a piece of meat. Alive of dead, that’s all the characters in this film can be.
Perhaps for that reason, most of the factory workers and blue-collar characters in the film are angry – from our crippled, lecherous old villain Gartley (“We all have to make sacrifices”) to our “hero” John Hunton (“Life’s a bitch, then you die.”) Those who aren’t angry are filled with despair – from kindly old Miss Frawley (who pops pain pills like they’re candy) to J.J.J. Pictureman, the town’s crime scene photographer / mortician (who says he’s suffering from some vague terminal illness that is “eating him up inside”). We can hardly blame them. They spend all of their time in a dark, dirty factory on the edge of a town that is allegedly idyllic. They are all simply part of the machine. This reminds me of a line from Scottish poet James’s Thompson’s rant against industrialism, “The City of Dreadful Night”:
The world rolls round for ever like a mill;
It grounds out death and life and good and ill;
It has no purpose, heart or mind or will
But this is too poetic for “The Mangler.” Its characters do not recite poetry. They just bitch and moan and curse. That’s one reason why this movie is so easy to hate – because its characters are so easy to hate. I’ll bet Ted Levine hates himself (or at least his agent) for having to speak some of the ludicrous dialogue in this film. (He uses the phrase “miserable piece of dogf**k” at least twice.)
Perhaps the other big reason that the film is so easy to hate is that it sets us in a spirit-numbingly naturalistic world, then casually drops a supernatural demon into it. This, admittedly, is King’s doing – not Hooper’s. The demon is his way of turning an angry political diatribe into an entertaining horror story. And Hooper has no intention of downplaying the elements of his source material, even if what works on paper is comically surreal onscreen. The film goes for broke in the last act, when one of the most laughable exorcisms in screen history causes the mechanical monster to sprout legs and start chasing Ted Levine while spewing fire. You’ve got to see it to believe it.
So… with its intriguing subtext and its over-the-top ending, does “The Mangler” qualify as one of those “so bad it’s good” movies? Does it deserve this level of analysis? I think so. To me, it’s an interesting idea that doesn't quite work – but I still laughed, gagged, and even wanted to know more about the film’s most interesting character.
J.J.J. Pictureman, played by Jeremy Crutchley, tells Hunton that they “share the same demons.” This implies that both men are haunted by guilt over some tragedy in their past. We know about Hunton’s tragedy, but we never learn anything about Pictureman’s. I like to think that he was one of the town’s wealthy elite at one time. Maybe he’s even Gartley’s brother… that would explain why the two actors are made up to look so much alike. Whatever his reasoning, Pictureman pleads with Hunton to fight – to expose the corruption and evil that is thriving beneath the picture-perfect surface of things. That makes him the real spokesman for King and Hooper’s angry message. Too bad he wasn't the main character.
As an afterthought, I have to add that Hooper and Robert Englund really redeemed themselves with their first-season episode of Showtime’s Masters of Horror, “Dance of the Dead.” This post-apocalyptic short film has all the nihilism of the best horror films of the 1970s, and reminds me of another Stephen King short story called “Night Surf,” which revolves around a group of hopeless teenagers who have seen civilization get wiped out by a deadly plague. The episode doesn’t go down easy, but it stays with you – and that’s what good horror stories are supposed to do.
The combination of three factors convinced me to buy that ticket – and I suspect the same was true for the other nineteen suckers who attended. First and foremost: Stephen King. I started reading Stephen King novels when I was in middle school, and made my way through his entire catalogue by the time I was a sophomore in high school. Suffice to say that I am a fan of his work, but not the kind of fan who refuses to admit that some of his stories are a little spotty. As for the films: There have always been more failures than successes. I watch them all anyway – because most of them have some redeeming qualities.
The biggest problem with the film adaptations is that they fail to render the characters with as much depth as the novelist. So filmmakers really have the odds stacked against them when they try to adapt a short story into a feature-length film. “The Mangler” is one of the short stories in the author’s “Night Shift” collection, so maybe I should have had lower expectations. But, hell, Tobe Hooper was in the director’s chair…
To this day, Tobe Hooper’s claim to fame is his debut film, “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.” His first follow-up, “Eaten Alive” starring a young Robert Englund, was a pale imitation of that gritty Southern Gothic horror. His next film was “Salem’s Lot,” a TV miniseries based on King’s second novel. Though some of its potential was stripped by the restrictions of the medium, the miniseries was a solid effort that demonstrated the director’s mainstream potential. Throughout the 80s, he continued to turn out respectable films… but the 90s hit Tobe Hooper like a bomb.
For the most part, he survived on television. I remember a 1991 TV pilot called “Haunted Lives” that made a big impression on me… In fact, it was a lot like the Discovery show I worked on. By 1995, the director needed a hit to secure his future as a filmmaker. So he enlisted his buddy Robert Englund – who had recently retired the iconic character of Freddy Krueger (or so he thought) – to star in the latest Stephen King screen adaptation. Promotion was easy: three modern-day masters of horror, one movie. What could go wrong?
The original short story “The Mangler” was first published in Cavalier magazine in 1972, when King was just out of college. The setting came from the author’s own experiences – working in a blue-collar industrial laundry in rural Maine to pay his way through school – and the monster implied in the title is a massive speed-iron that was used in such sweat-shops. The story begins when a kindly old worker named Miss Frawley gets reduced to meat by the machine. Officer John Hunton, a burned-out cop with a guilt complex, investigates the death and discovers a trail of corruption that runs through the idyllic community of Riker’s Valley. It turns out that Miss Frawley is not the first one to be sacrificed to the machine. All of the town’s wealthiest and most influential citizens have sacrificed family members to it. As explained by Bill Gartley, owner of the Blue Ribbon Laundry, that is exactly what makes the community of Riker’s Valley thrive: a little blood to appease the pagan god.
The subtext is as pointed as it could be: American dreamers sacrifice the young and innocent to maintain wealth and power. The social elite build their fortunes on the backs of the disenfranchised working class. These are messages that haunted the young writer: King was raised in a working-class mill town by a single mother who juggled manual labor jobs, and never had much to show for it. King himself worked those same jobs (including one that became the basis for his short story “Graveyard Shift”) while attending college, where he led protests against the war in Vietnam. Like most of his friends and family, he was a member of the disenfranchised working class – meat for the machine – and the resulting rage was the subject of his earliest novels.
As critic Robin Wood has pointed out, the same subtext permeates “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.” On one level, it is a story about what happens when workers at the bottom of America’s capitalist food chain are put out of work. Since the film was made and set in 1973, there can be little doubt that the war in Vietnam was also on the director’s mind. In the recent prequel “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning,” the filmmakers brought the subject of the Vietnam War to the surface of the story – perhaps because many Americans are currently comparing it to the Iraq War. They could have also drawn inspiration from Eric Schlosser’s “Fast Food Nation” – a vivid portrait of the dehumanizing effects of industrialization, and an indictment of contemporary American capitalism.
Considering the similarities to “Chainsaw,” I suspect that Tobe Hooper was trying to get back to his roots with “The Mangler.” There is at least one visual clue about this: He reveals the “mangled” bodies to us in the same cinematic style that he revealed the corpses to us in the opening scene of “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.” The impression is the same: We have no illusion that we are looking at a person. What we are seeing is simply a piece of meat. Alive of dead, that’s all the characters in this film can be.
Perhaps for that reason, most of the factory workers and blue-collar characters in the film are angry – from our crippled, lecherous old villain Gartley (“We all have to make sacrifices”) to our “hero” John Hunton (“Life’s a bitch, then you die.”) Those who aren’t angry are filled with despair – from kindly old Miss Frawley (who pops pain pills like they’re candy) to J.J.J. Pictureman, the town’s crime scene photographer / mortician (who says he’s suffering from some vague terminal illness that is “eating him up inside”). We can hardly blame them. They spend all of their time in a dark, dirty factory on the edge of a town that is allegedly idyllic. They are all simply part of the machine. This reminds me of a line from Scottish poet James’s Thompson’s rant against industrialism, “The City of Dreadful Night”:
The world rolls round for ever like a mill;
It grounds out death and life and good and ill;
It has no purpose, heart or mind or will
But this is too poetic for “The Mangler.” Its characters do not recite poetry. They just bitch and moan and curse. That’s one reason why this movie is so easy to hate – because its characters are so easy to hate. I’ll bet Ted Levine hates himself (or at least his agent) for having to speak some of the ludicrous dialogue in this film. (He uses the phrase “miserable piece of dogf**k” at least twice.)
Perhaps the other big reason that the film is so easy to hate is that it sets us in a spirit-numbingly naturalistic world, then casually drops a supernatural demon into it. This, admittedly, is King’s doing – not Hooper’s. The demon is his way of turning an angry political diatribe into an entertaining horror story. And Hooper has no intention of downplaying the elements of his source material, even if what works on paper is comically surreal onscreen. The film goes for broke in the last act, when one of the most laughable exorcisms in screen history causes the mechanical monster to sprout legs and start chasing Ted Levine while spewing fire. You’ve got to see it to believe it.
So… with its intriguing subtext and its over-the-top ending, does “The Mangler” qualify as one of those “so bad it’s good” movies? Does it deserve this level of analysis? I think so. To me, it’s an interesting idea that doesn't quite work – but I still laughed, gagged, and even wanted to know more about the film’s most interesting character.
J.J.J. Pictureman, played by Jeremy Crutchley, tells Hunton that they “share the same demons.” This implies that both men are haunted by guilt over some tragedy in their past. We know about Hunton’s tragedy, but we never learn anything about Pictureman’s. I like to think that he was one of the town’s wealthy elite at one time. Maybe he’s even Gartley’s brother… that would explain why the two actors are made up to look so much alike. Whatever his reasoning, Pictureman pleads with Hunton to fight – to expose the corruption and evil that is thriving beneath the picture-perfect surface of things. That makes him the real spokesman for King and Hooper’s angry message. Too bad he wasn't the main character.
As an afterthought, I have to add that Hooper and Robert Englund really redeemed themselves with their first-season episode of Showtime’s Masters of Horror, “Dance of the Dead.” This post-apocalyptic short film has all the nihilism of the best horror films of the 1970s, and reminds me of another Stephen King short story called “Night Surf,” which revolves around a group of hopeless teenagers who have seen civilization get wiped out by a deadly plague. The episode doesn’t go down easy, but it stays with you – and that’s what good horror stories are supposed to do.
Monday, July 23, 2007
Happy Trails
Someone asked me this week what I’m trying to accomplish with this blog. It started out, a little over a year ago, as a genealogy forum – a way to share photos and information related to my own family history. Within a few months, I had pretty much exhausted that subject. Around the same time, I took a trip to New England to do some genealogy research, and visit sites associated with some of my literary heroes. When I got home, I posted photos from the trip. Since then, this has become mostly a travel-blog, with occasional detours into movie geek ranting. In October, I charted my cross-country move to Los Angeles. I’ve been writing about Southern California ever since. I am continually fascinated by the overlap of fact and fiction in Los Angeles, and I’ll probably keep blogging about it until my site-meter tells me that nobody cares anymore.
This weekend was another reminder of why I love this city. On Saturday morning, we went to Malibu Creek. This state park was one of our first stops when we visited L.A. last August. We made the mistake of starting a hike to the old M*A*S*H shooting location in the heat of the day. On Saturday, we started out a bit earlier and followed a different route to another famous filming location: the Rock Pool.
Along the way, we stopped by the Visitor’s Center, where we found information on hundreds of films that have been shot in the park since 1927. At that time, the land belonged to the Crags Country Club, but 20th Century Fox bought 2,000 acres in 1946 and turned it into a backlot. The studio built a Welsh mining village on a hill near the main parking lot for John Ford’s 1940 Oscar-winner “How Green Was My Valley.” The parking lot didn’t exist at the time. It was created as downtown “Pleasantville” for the 1998 film of the same name. And before it was Pleasantville, it was the ranch in Elvis Presley’s feature film debut, “Love Me Tender.”
Malibu Creek was also home to the original “Planet of the Apes.” Along the main path to the Rock Pool (Crags Road), we passed a climbing wall. In his book Hollywood Escapes, Harry Medved points out that “this is where Charlton Heston, Linda Harrison, and other humans are caged in the first Apes movie. The wall itself is visible in the last Apes movie, where Claude Akins tries to take control of the simian forum.” The Rock Pool appeared in “Planet of the Apes” (when Charlton Heston and his fellow astronauts go skinny dipping), “Battle for the Planet of the Apes” (the final scene), and the feature film “Logan’s Run” (when Logan and Jessica see the “real world” of the 23rd century for the first time). I also remember it from Disney’s “Swiss Family Robinson” – one of the first movies my family owned on videodisc. Further up Crags Road is the original site of the Apes Village – one of the cages is still there. The M*A*S*H site is about a mile beyond that. Sadly, none of the sets survived a 1982 fire that wiped out 42,000 acres in the park. All that remains are the charred husks of a jeep and an ambulance.
After our hike, we decided to take it easy and go to the movies… at Hollywood Forever Cemetery. For six summers now, a group called Cinespia has been screening movies on the wall of a large mausoleum near the graves of Hollywood legends like Douglas Fairbanks, Rudolph Valentino and Cecil B. DeMille. Every week, the event draws about 2,000 people, who arrive with blankets, pillows, and all the essentials for a late-night picnic. When we got to the cemetery – an hour and a half before the film was supposed to start – there were already hundreds of people lined up to see Dario Argento’s “Suspiria.” Personally, I can think of no better way to see this film than on the side of a mausoleum in a dark cemetery. It gave me chills to hear the pulse-pounding Goblin soundtrack echoing off of the tombstones, loud enough to… well, you know.
I could tell by the laughter and the gasps in the audience that quite a few people were seeing the film for the first time, which made me remember the first time I’d seen it. I first ran across the name Dario Argento in Dennis Fischer’s book Horror Film Directors, 1931 – 1990. That volume, more than any other individual work, introduced me to international horror cinema – from the gialli of Mario Bava and Dario Argento to the Euro-horror of Lucio Fulci, Jess Franco and Amando de Ossorio. Though I’d read all about it, that first viewing of “Suspiria” blew me away. Never had I seen a horror film that looked so exotic, or heard a horror film score that was so unrelenting.
A few years ago, I had the same reaction to the first fifteen minutes of Argento’s film “Sleepless.” Unfortunately, the rest of it didn’t live up. The director’s films are, admittedly, hit and miss: they feature some of the horror genre’s most memorable set pieces, as well as some of its most ludicrous plot devices. I haven’t seen his two most recent films (“The Card Player” and “Do You Like Hitchcock?”), but they’re in the Netflix queue… and I’m eager to see the conclusion of the “Three Mothers” trilogy that began with “Suspiria.” It’s supposed to be released in Italy on Halloween.
Last night, we went to another location that’s far too beautiful to avoid Hollywood cameras. The beginning of “Grease” and the end of “True Romance” were shot among the rocks at El Matador State Beach, up the coast of Malibu. We had planned to stay until sunset, but a serious-looking fog bank rolled in. And if there’s one thing John Carpenter has taught me…
Malibu Creek State Park (view from the parking lot)
How Green Was My Valley (not very)
Malibu Creek in the foreground, Rock Pool gap in the distance
Planet of the Apes wall
Rock Pool
M*A*S*H jeep
M*A*S*H ambulance
Century Lake
Hollywood Forever
El Matador
This weekend was another reminder of why I love this city. On Saturday morning, we went to Malibu Creek. This state park was one of our first stops when we visited L.A. last August. We made the mistake of starting a hike to the old M*A*S*H shooting location in the heat of the day. On Saturday, we started out a bit earlier and followed a different route to another famous filming location: the Rock Pool.
Along the way, we stopped by the Visitor’s Center, where we found information on hundreds of films that have been shot in the park since 1927. At that time, the land belonged to the Crags Country Club, but 20th Century Fox bought 2,000 acres in 1946 and turned it into a backlot. The studio built a Welsh mining village on a hill near the main parking lot for John Ford’s 1940 Oscar-winner “How Green Was My Valley.” The parking lot didn’t exist at the time. It was created as downtown “Pleasantville” for the 1998 film of the same name. And before it was Pleasantville, it was the ranch in Elvis Presley’s feature film debut, “Love Me Tender.”
Malibu Creek was also home to the original “Planet of the Apes.” Along the main path to the Rock Pool (Crags Road), we passed a climbing wall. In his book Hollywood Escapes, Harry Medved points out that “this is where Charlton Heston, Linda Harrison, and other humans are caged in the first Apes movie. The wall itself is visible in the last Apes movie, where Claude Akins tries to take control of the simian forum.” The Rock Pool appeared in “Planet of the Apes” (when Charlton Heston and his fellow astronauts go skinny dipping), “Battle for the Planet of the Apes” (the final scene), and the feature film “Logan’s Run” (when Logan and Jessica see the “real world” of the 23rd century for the first time). I also remember it from Disney’s “Swiss Family Robinson” – one of the first movies my family owned on videodisc. Further up Crags Road is the original site of the Apes Village – one of the cages is still there. The M*A*S*H site is about a mile beyond that. Sadly, none of the sets survived a 1982 fire that wiped out 42,000 acres in the park. All that remains are the charred husks of a jeep and an ambulance.
After our hike, we decided to take it easy and go to the movies… at Hollywood Forever Cemetery. For six summers now, a group called Cinespia has been screening movies on the wall of a large mausoleum near the graves of Hollywood legends like Douglas Fairbanks, Rudolph Valentino and Cecil B. DeMille. Every week, the event draws about 2,000 people, who arrive with blankets, pillows, and all the essentials for a late-night picnic. When we got to the cemetery – an hour and a half before the film was supposed to start – there were already hundreds of people lined up to see Dario Argento’s “Suspiria.” Personally, I can think of no better way to see this film than on the side of a mausoleum in a dark cemetery. It gave me chills to hear the pulse-pounding Goblin soundtrack echoing off of the tombstones, loud enough to… well, you know.
I could tell by the laughter and the gasps in the audience that quite a few people were seeing the film for the first time, which made me remember the first time I’d seen it. I first ran across the name Dario Argento in Dennis Fischer’s book Horror Film Directors, 1931 – 1990. That volume, more than any other individual work, introduced me to international horror cinema – from the gialli of Mario Bava and Dario Argento to the Euro-horror of Lucio Fulci, Jess Franco and Amando de Ossorio. Though I’d read all about it, that first viewing of “Suspiria” blew me away. Never had I seen a horror film that looked so exotic, or heard a horror film score that was so unrelenting.
A few years ago, I had the same reaction to the first fifteen minutes of Argento’s film “Sleepless.” Unfortunately, the rest of it didn’t live up. The director’s films are, admittedly, hit and miss: they feature some of the horror genre’s most memorable set pieces, as well as some of its most ludicrous plot devices. I haven’t seen his two most recent films (“The Card Player” and “Do You Like Hitchcock?”), but they’re in the Netflix queue… and I’m eager to see the conclusion of the “Three Mothers” trilogy that began with “Suspiria.” It’s supposed to be released in Italy on Halloween.
Last night, we went to another location that’s far too beautiful to avoid Hollywood cameras. The beginning of “Grease” and the end of “True Romance” were shot among the rocks at El Matador State Beach, up the coast of Malibu. We had planned to stay until sunset, but a serious-looking fog bank rolled in. And if there’s one thing John Carpenter has taught me…
Malibu Creek State Park (view from the parking lot)
How Green Was My Valley (not very)
Malibu Creek in the foreground, Rock Pool gap in the distance
Planet of the Apes wall
Rock Pool
M*A*S*H jeep
M*A*S*H ambulance
Century Lake
Hollywood Forever
El Matador
Wednesday, July 18, 2007
Alton
This morning, I learned of the death of Alton Booker Sr., at age 56. I met Alton a few years ago, when I was working on a documentary called “The Long Black Line” – a multi-generational story of a family in East Texas. Alton was a great grandson of Benjamin Wright, one of the earliest settlers of Jasper County. I know this because he had thoroughly researched his family’s genealogy, and discovered that Benjamin was a common ancestor for most members of the present-day communities of Mount Union and Magnolia Springs. These communities literally grew up around Benjamin’s ranch house, built in the late 1860s, and around the Methodist and Baptist churches that were founded soon after. When Benjamin died in 1899, he was buried on the hill at Magnolia Springs Community Cemetery – a cemetery that Alton helped to maintain.
Alton was determined to preserve and share the history of his family and his community, because he believed that the voices of the past were what truly made a community. He helped his cousin, Herman Wright, make and promote the film “The Long Black Line,” which has found its way into Jasper schools. More recently, he oversaw the restoration of Benjamin’s ranch house, as well as the revitalization of the ranch itself, which is currently thriving. He served as a church pastor, a member of the local school board, and an organizer of annual family reunions. Most importantly, he was a loving husband, father and grandfather.
In an interview for “The Long Black Line,” Alton spoke about growing up in Magnolia Springs: “The people here in our community, my cousins and families that grew up here had a lot of pride in this community. They were good God-fearing people. They set examples for us kids coming up…. I think that still goes on today if you ride around this community and look around. That continues to be a solid fixture here: pride in community, pride in who you are and where you came from. I don’t see it going away any time soon.” He also spoke about his love for the rural piney woods, where his ancestors lived and died: “To experience the country life to me is to experience God’s goodness. Because when He says He provides, you know... there was never a want for anything.”
I read an article recently, which reinforced the idea that death creates communities by continually reminding us that we are merely a link to the past and the future: “The significance of life derives from the presence of the future, while the richness of life derives from the presence of the past. How we live is important only if we see the consequential future flowing toward us - beginning, always, with the fact that we will die and must prepare our children to assume the burdens of culture. How we live is thick and meaningful only if we see the momentous past, the ancient ghosts, dwelling among us - beginning, always, with the fact that our parents have died and left their corpses' care to us. Death is the anchor for every human association, from the family all the way up to the nation-state. It provides a reason for association; it keeps us from drifting by tying us to a temporal reality larger - richer and more significant - than our individual present.”
Alton knew that, like his ancestors, he would live on in his community, even after death. It’s hard for me to imagine that he won’t find peace there.
Alton was determined to preserve and share the history of his family and his community, because he believed that the voices of the past were what truly made a community. He helped his cousin, Herman Wright, make and promote the film “The Long Black Line,” which has found its way into Jasper schools. More recently, he oversaw the restoration of Benjamin’s ranch house, as well as the revitalization of the ranch itself, which is currently thriving. He served as a church pastor, a member of the local school board, and an organizer of annual family reunions. Most importantly, he was a loving husband, father and grandfather.
In an interview for “The Long Black Line,” Alton spoke about growing up in Magnolia Springs: “The people here in our community, my cousins and families that grew up here had a lot of pride in this community. They were good God-fearing people. They set examples for us kids coming up…. I think that still goes on today if you ride around this community and look around. That continues to be a solid fixture here: pride in community, pride in who you are and where you came from. I don’t see it going away any time soon.” He also spoke about his love for the rural piney woods, where his ancestors lived and died: “To experience the country life to me is to experience God’s goodness. Because when He says He provides, you know... there was never a want for anything.”
I read an article recently, which reinforced the idea that death creates communities by continually reminding us that we are merely a link to the past and the future: “The significance of life derives from the presence of the future, while the richness of life derives from the presence of the past. How we live is important only if we see the consequential future flowing toward us - beginning, always, with the fact that we will die and must prepare our children to assume the burdens of culture. How we live is thick and meaningful only if we see the momentous past, the ancient ghosts, dwelling among us - beginning, always, with the fact that our parents have died and left their corpses' care to us. Death is the anchor for every human association, from the family all the way up to the nation-state. It provides a reason for association; it keeps us from drifting by tying us to a temporal reality larger - richer and more significant - than our individual present.”
Alton knew that, like his ancestors, he would live on in his community, even after death. It’s hard for me to imagine that he won’t find peace there.
Monday, July 09, 2007
Bronson Canyon
This weekend, we moved into our new apartment… and still found time to go see “Transformers” at the ArcLight dome in Hollywood, and to explore the Bronson Caves in the nearby hills of Griffith Park. Bronson Canyon is a mecca for cult movie geeks – a man-made canyon where dozens of films and television series have been shot since the days of silent film. In the early 20th century, the canyon was a quarry, where rock was mined for use in the construction of Hollywood roads. According to legend, the caves – or, more accurately, tunnels – were dug into the rock for the 1922 feature “Robin Hood,” with Douglas Fairbanks.
This underground passage is perhaps best known as the Bat-Cave from the 1960’s TV series “Batman.” “Star Trek” fans may also recognize them from the episodes “Friday’s Child” and “Bread and Circuses.” Others will know them from a host of mid-century monster movies: “Robot Monster” (1953), “The Brain from Planet Arous” (1957), “Earth vs. the Spider” (1957), “I Married a Monster from Outer Space” (1958), “Teenagers from Outer Space” (1959), “Eegah!” (1962), and “Invasion of the Star Creatures” (1963).
Roger Corman shot portions of several films here: “The Day the World Ended” (1955), “It Conquered the World” (1956), “Attack of the Crab Monsters” (1957), “Night of the Blood Beast” (1957), “Viking Women…” (1958) and “Teenage Caveman” (1958). More popular films that feature the Bronson Caves include John Ford’s “The Searchers” (the final scene in which John Wayne carries Natalie Wood out into the desert) and “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” (Kevin McCarthy and Dana Wynter take refuge from the pod people in the old cave, only to fall asleep).
I’m a big fan of Don Siegel’s “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” (1956), which has already been remade twice – Philip Kaufman turned the aliens into yuppies in the 1978 remake of the same name, and the writer/director team of Larry Cohen and Abel Ferrara took potshots at the military in 1993’s “Body Snatchers” (which was, at least, half of a really good movie). Each remake has been a substantial re-imagining of the original tale and I’ve often thought of this as a classic series on par with George Romero’s Dead films. The underlying themes are similar: “We’re them and they’re us.” The scene in which McCarthy and Wynter flee an entire town of pod people is one of my favorite moments in screen history… so naturally I had to track down the shooting location: at the nearby intersection of Beachwood Drive and Belden Drive.
Before the screening of “Transformers,” we saw a preview for the latest adaptation of Jack Finney’s novel “The Body Snatchers”… and I’m pretty sure the people sitting near me heard me groan. First complaint: the latest remake is titled “The Invasion”… as if distributors were afraid that target audiences wouldn’t go see a film with the phrase “Body Snatchers” in the title. And maybe they’re right – it depends on the audience they’re targeting. Which leads me to my second complaint (and this is a big one): It looks like “The Invasion” is more of an action-thriller than a sci-fi/horror movie… or at least they’re trying to sell it that way. It seems to me that the filmmakers are alienating a built-in audience: fans of the older films. I, for one, would rather go see a faithful remake of the surprisingly intelligent “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” than the latest action-thriller with Nicole Kidman. But then maybe I’m in the minority…?
on the north side of Bronson Caves
Bronson Caves - south side
Bronson Caves - north side
view from the north side of Bronson Caves
At the corner of Beachwood and Belden
This underground passage is perhaps best known as the Bat-Cave from the 1960’s TV series “Batman.” “Star Trek” fans may also recognize them from the episodes “Friday’s Child” and “Bread and Circuses.” Others will know them from a host of mid-century monster movies: “Robot Monster” (1953), “The Brain from Planet Arous” (1957), “Earth vs. the Spider” (1957), “I Married a Monster from Outer Space” (1958), “Teenagers from Outer Space” (1959), “Eegah!” (1962), and “Invasion of the Star Creatures” (1963).
Roger Corman shot portions of several films here: “The Day the World Ended” (1955), “It Conquered the World” (1956), “Attack of the Crab Monsters” (1957), “Night of the Blood Beast” (1957), “Viking Women…” (1958) and “Teenage Caveman” (1958). More popular films that feature the Bronson Caves include John Ford’s “The Searchers” (the final scene in which John Wayne carries Natalie Wood out into the desert) and “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” (Kevin McCarthy and Dana Wynter take refuge from the pod people in the old cave, only to fall asleep).
I’m a big fan of Don Siegel’s “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” (1956), which has already been remade twice – Philip Kaufman turned the aliens into yuppies in the 1978 remake of the same name, and the writer/director team of Larry Cohen and Abel Ferrara took potshots at the military in 1993’s “Body Snatchers” (which was, at least, half of a really good movie). Each remake has been a substantial re-imagining of the original tale and I’ve often thought of this as a classic series on par with George Romero’s Dead films. The underlying themes are similar: “We’re them and they’re us.” The scene in which McCarthy and Wynter flee an entire town of pod people is one of my favorite moments in screen history… so naturally I had to track down the shooting location: at the nearby intersection of Beachwood Drive and Belden Drive.
Before the screening of “Transformers,” we saw a preview for the latest adaptation of Jack Finney’s novel “The Body Snatchers”… and I’m pretty sure the people sitting near me heard me groan. First complaint: the latest remake is titled “The Invasion”… as if distributors were afraid that target audiences wouldn’t go see a film with the phrase “Body Snatchers” in the title. And maybe they’re right – it depends on the audience they’re targeting. Which leads me to my second complaint (and this is a big one): It looks like “The Invasion” is more of an action-thriller than a sci-fi/horror movie… or at least they’re trying to sell it that way. It seems to me that the filmmakers are alienating a built-in audience: fans of the older films. I, for one, would rather go see a faithful remake of the surprisingly intelligent “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” than the latest action-thriller with Nicole Kidman. But then maybe I’m in the minority…?
on the north side of Bronson Caves
Bronson Caves - south side
Bronson Caves - north side
view from the north side of Bronson Caves
At the corner of Beachwood and Belden
Wednesday, July 04, 2007
Happy 4th!
Everybody has their own way of celebrating the 4th of July. I decided to forego barbecues and ballgames, and seek out the shooting location of the 1982 horror film “Poltergeist.” A few months ago, I wandered through Agoura Hills – where the neighborhood establishers were shot – but couldn’t find the main house. Turns out that the Freeling home didn’t implode… It’s just further north, on the far edge of Simi Valley.
Recently named one of the top ten safest cities in the U.S., Simi Valley is known mostly as the home of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and the setting of the Rodney King trial. It’s also the unofficial home of the old Hollywood gunslinger: hundreds (some say thousands) of westerns were shot in the surrounding hills – many of them on movie ranches near the Santa Susana Pass. After I took photos of the "Poltergeist" house, I decided to head that direction.
My first stop was Corrigan Park, named for Ray “Crash” Corrigan, who purchased approximately 1,900 acres of land here in 1937, and opened it up to Hollywood filmmakers. In the following years, the Poverty Row studios (RKO, Columbia, Republic, Monogram, PRC) made dozens of low-budget westerns on the property, prompting Corrigan to build a mock mining town on the ranch in 1942. A few years later, a small village was built nearby for the 1946 Howard Hughes film “Vendetta.” One year after that, 20th Century Fox built sets for John Ford’s “Fort Apache,” starring John Wayne, Henry Fonda and Shirley Temple.
In the 1950s, the ranch was opened to the public as an amusement park. It remained in business until 1965. By then, fewer westerns were being shot on the premises – both because the popularity of the genre was waning, and because the ranch no longer had the same sweeping vistas. In 1966, the Simi Valley Freeway was built right through the middle of the ranch. That same year, no-budget filmmaker William Beaudine provided two onscreen death gasps: “Billy the Kid vs. Dracula” and “Jesse James Meets Frankenstein’s Daughter.”
Sadly, all of the movie sets that were on the property have since been dismantled or destroyed by fire. Only about 200 acres of the original 1,900 acre ranch are currently accessible to the public… but they include the shooting locations of “Vendetta” and “Fort Apache.”
View from above "Vendetta Village," looking south
View from above "Fort Apache," looking west
Former site of Spahn Ranch, at the corner of Santa Susana Pass and Iverson Road
Further east on the Santa Susana Pass are the sites of two other noteworthy ranches: Spahn Ranch and Iverson Ranch. Spahn Ranch was the setting of only a handful of films – including Al Adamson’s unmemorable “The Female Bunch” – but it gained notoriety as the hideout of the Manson Family. Today, the property belongs to the Church at Rocky Peak… and they are not especially welcoming to morbid curiosity-seekers. Just as 10050 Cielo Drive (the site of the Manson Family murders) was demolished, Spahn Ranch has essentially been wiped off the map.
Iverson Ranch has a much more welcoming reputation. As a filming location, it predates Corrigan Park by more than two decades, and is allegedly “the most photographed location ranch in motion picture history.” Over the years, it played home to Tarzan, The Cisco Kid, The Lone Ranger, Batman, Superman… It was also the site of Roger Corman’s directorial debut, “Five Guns West.”
The ranch was subdivided among subsequent generations of the Iverson family, and much of it was sold to real estate developers. The most recognizable portion of the original movie ranch – known as “The Garden of the Gods” – has been preserved by the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy.
Lower Iverson
Garden of the Gods
Recently named one of the top ten safest cities in the U.S., Simi Valley is known mostly as the home of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and the setting of the Rodney King trial. It’s also the unofficial home of the old Hollywood gunslinger: hundreds (some say thousands) of westerns were shot in the surrounding hills – many of them on movie ranches near the Santa Susana Pass. After I took photos of the "Poltergeist" house, I decided to head that direction.
My first stop was Corrigan Park, named for Ray “Crash” Corrigan, who purchased approximately 1,900 acres of land here in 1937, and opened it up to Hollywood filmmakers. In the following years, the Poverty Row studios (RKO, Columbia, Republic, Monogram, PRC) made dozens of low-budget westerns on the property, prompting Corrigan to build a mock mining town on the ranch in 1942. A few years later, a small village was built nearby for the 1946 Howard Hughes film “Vendetta.” One year after that, 20th Century Fox built sets for John Ford’s “Fort Apache,” starring John Wayne, Henry Fonda and Shirley Temple.
In the 1950s, the ranch was opened to the public as an amusement park. It remained in business until 1965. By then, fewer westerns were being shot on the premises – both because the popularity of the genre was waning, and because the ranch no longer had the same sweeping vistas. In 1966, the Simi Valley Freeway was built right through the middle of the ranch. That same year, no-budget filmmaker William Beaudine provided two onscreen death gasps: “Billy the Kid vs. Dracula” and “Jesse James Meets Frankenstein’s Daughter.”
Sadly, all of the movie sets that were on the property have since been dismantled or destroyed by fire. Only about 200 acres of the original 1,900 acre ranch are currently accessible to the public… but they include the shooting locations of “Vendetta” and “Fort Apache.”
View from above "Vendetta Village," looking south
View from above "Fort Apache," looking west
Former site of Spahn Ranch, at the corner of Santa Susana Pass and Iverson RoadFurther east on the Santa Susana Pass are the sites of two other noteworthy ranches: Spahn Ranch and Iverson Ranch. Spahn Ranch was the setting of only a handful of films – including Al Adamson’s unmemorable “The Female Bunch” – but it gained notoriety as the hideout of the Manson Family. Today, the property belongs to the Church at Rocky Peak… and they are not especially welcoming to morbid curiosity-seekers. Just as 10050 Cielo Drive (the site of the Manson Family murders) was demolished, Spahn Ranch has essentially been wiped off the map.
Iverson Ranch has a much more welcoming reputation. As a filming location, it predates Corrigan Park by more than two decades, and is allegedly “the most photographed location ranch in motion picture history.” Over the years, it played home to Tarzan, The Cisco Kid, The Lone Ranger, Batman, Superman… It was also the site of Roger Corman’s directorial debut, “Five Guns West.”
The ranch was subdivided among subsequent generations of the Iverson family, and much of it was sold to real estate developers. The most recognizable portion of the original movie ranch – known as “The Garden of the Gods” – has been preserved by the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy.
Lower Iverson
Garden of the Gods
Sunday, July 01, 2007
L.A. Destroys Itself
“When Man entered the atomic age, he opened a door into a new world. What he eventually finds in that new world, nobody can predict.”
These are the final ominous lines of the 1954 monster movie Them! – which predicted that man would soon be challenged by giant… mutant… ants. The creatures emerge from the New Mexico desert, and eventually make their way to the underground sewers of Los Angeles. Government officials declare martial law, and bring in lots of flamethrowers… all the while wondering if this is just the beginning. Is L.A. doomed?
Today, I had a rare opportunity to see the film on the big screen, at the new Billy Wilder Theater in Westwood. Them! was presented as part of the 2007 L.A. Film Festival - the fourth entry in a (regrettably short) lineup of films called “L.A. Destroys Itself.” It was preceded by 1984’s Night of the Comet (if you haven’t seen it, think Night of the Living Dead meets Valley Girl), John Carpenter’s cult classic Escape from L.A. (1996), and the campy Chuck Heston disaster film Earthquake (1974), presented in Sensurround. Last on the roster is tonight’s screening of the apocalyptic romance Miracle Mile (1988).
Seeing all of these disaster flicks in such a short period of time makes me wonder: Why do Los Angeles filmmakers have such an obsession with destroying their city? There are plenty of titles that could have been added to the lineup... Mother Nature gave L.A. a pretty good beating in the recent blockbuster The Day After Tomorrow (2004), Martians did the damage in the original War of the Worlds (1953), and terrorists recently nuked the city in TV’s 24. If you want to dig a little deeper, there’s the all-consuming fire at the end of John Schlesinger’s The Day of the Locust (1975). That movie took its cue from the Nathanael West's immortal 1939 novel, which determined the tone of practically all fiction about Los Angeles.
Lured by the impossible promises of the city’s earliest “boosters,” West saw Los Angeles as a failed dream machine – a grotesque un-reality that could only be cured by its complete and utter destruction. He was not the first cynic to voice this opinion, nor was he the first to impose death on Hollywood’s iconic landscape. Raoul Whitfield’s 1931 novel Death in a Bowl had already imagined murder at the newly-built Hollywood Bowl.
Some say that this was the predecessor of the hardboiled detective novel, popularized by L.A. writers like Raymond Chandler and James M. Cain – who also liked to imagine that Angelinos were right on the edge of destruction, poised to crash into the ocean, get crushed by a landslide, burned alive in a brush fire or simply swallowed by the earth.
Perhaps this grim mentality was, to a degree, inevitable. After all, the west coast once represented the final frontier of western civilization… When it was settled, the dream was bound to die.
Except it didn’t.
A few months ago, I read an article by long-time Los Angeles resident Ray Bradbury, who said that people don’t come here for the city itself. They come for the freedom the city gives them – freedom to be who they want to be, and do what they want to do. While the nature-based myth of this final frontier might not be as pure as it once was (the land of eternal sunshine is now the land of eternal smog - a testament to overpopulation), Los Angeles is nevertheless a city of dreamers – people who are always creating new myths.
In fact, maybe that should be a theme for next year’s film festival. There are plenty of great films about life inside the dream machine. Allow me to recommend Sullivan’s Travels (1941), Sunset Boulevard (1950), The Bad and the Beautiful (1952), Grand Canyon (1991) Barton Fink (1991), Mulholland Drive (2001)…
In the meantime, I'm happy to keep watching those lovable mutant ants...
These are the final ominous lines of the 1954 monster movie Them! – which predicted that man would soon be challenged by giant… mutant… ants. The creatures emerge from the New Mexico desert, and eventually make their way to the underground sewers of Los Angeles. Government officials declare martial law, and bring in lots of flamethrowers… all the while wondering if this is just the beginning. Is L.A. doomed?
Today, I had a rare opportunity to see the film on the big screen, at the new Billy Wilder Theater in Westwood. Them! was presented as part of the 2007 L.A. Film Festival - the fourth entry in a (regrettably short) lineup of films called “L.A. Destroys Itself.” It was preceded by 1984’s Night of the Comet (if you haven’t seen it, think Night of the Living Dead meets Valley Girl), John Carpenter’s cult classic Escape from L.A. (1996), and the campy Chuck Heston disaster film Earthquake (1974), presented in Sensurround. Last on the roster is tonight’s screening of the apocalyptic romance Miracle Mile (1988).
Seeing all of these disaster flicks in such a short period of time makes me wonder: Why do Los Angeles filmmakers have such an obsession with destroying their city? There are plenty of titles that could have been added to the lineup... Mother Nature gave L.A. a pretty good beating in the recent blockbuster The Day After Tomorrow (2004), Martians did the damage in the original War of the Worlds (1953), and terrorists recently nuked the city in TV’s 24. If you want to dig a little deeper, there’s the all-consuming fire at the end of John Schlesinger’s The Day of the Locust (1975). That movie took its cue from the Nathanael West's immortal 1939 novel, which determined the tone of practically all fiction about Los Angeles.
Lured by the impossible promises of the city’s earliest “boosters,” West saw Los Angeles as a failed dream machine – a grotesque un-reality that could only be cured by its complete and utter destruction. He was not the first cynic to voice this opinion, nor was he the first to impose death on Hollywood’s iconic landscape. Raoul Whitfield’s 1931 novel Death in a Bowl had already imagined murder at the newly-built Hollywood Bowl.
Some say that this was the predecessor of the hardboiled detective novel, popularized by L.A. writers like Raymond Chandler and James M. Cain – who also liked to imagine that Angelinos were right on the edge of destruction, poised to crash into the ocean, get crushed by a landslide, burned alive in a brush fire or simply swallowed by the earth.
Perhaps this grim mentality was, to a degree, inevitable. After all, the west coast once represented the final frontier of western civilization… When it was settled, the dream was bound to die.
Except it didn’t.
A few months ago, I read an article by long-time Los Angeles resident Ray Bradbury, who said that people don’t come here for the city itself. They come for the freedom the city gives them – freedom to be who they want to be, and do what they want to do. While the nature-based myth of this final frontier might not be as pure as it once was (the land of eternal sunshine is now the land of eternal smog - a testament to overpopulation), Los Angeles is nevertheless a city of dreamers – people who are always creating new myths.
In fact, maybe that should be a theme for next year’s film festival. There are plenty of great films about life inside the dream machine. Allow me to recommend Sullivan’s Travels (1941), Sunset Boulevard (1950), The Bad and the Beautiful (1952), Grand Canyon (1991) Barton Fink (1991), Mulholland Drive (2001)…
In the meantime, I'm happy to keep watching those lovable mutant ants...
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