Late at night on June 20, 1947, the mobster Benjamin Siegel paid for a lifetime of sordid violence and incurable romance, when a pair of Jack Dragna’s associates shot him to pieces through his own front window. Siegel, like the rest of us, had come to Los Angeles to make his fortune and relieve the boredom of his life in the dreary, tradition-bound Northeast.
From the minute Siegel arrived, he fit right in. Handsome and suave, irresistible to men and women, polite and deferential, yet not afraid to bend the rules of his chosen milieu, he launched his immense creative powers into the warm glow of sunny California—until, like so many Angelenos, he went a little too far…
There’s a story—quite possibly apocryphal—that, as the earliest Spanish Conquistadors trudged up the insufferable Los Angeles Basin to the coastal hamlet of San Pedro, they spotted a native village off in the distant scrub and haze. Yet, as they drew closer, the hamlet swirled into the dust and vanished from sight.
The village, of course, was the native precursor to el Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles de Porciúncula—or what we now call the City of Los Angeles. The vanishing was a dust-laden prelude to the middle decades of the 20th century, when the Santa Ana Devil Winds would dump tons of desert particles into the smog of five million cars, trucks, and motorcycles to make entire mountain ranges disappear.
That first vanishing also foretold a city where reality and fantasy would repeatedly collide, with the outcome by no means certain either way.
The reality being that the Los Angeles Basin was born in an industrial boom of gold and oil. A massive influx of workers followed, to build the tools of victory in World War II and, in the process, invent modern aerospace. The hardscrabble land and raging desert floods they paved and tamed were hardly a paradise, Joni Mitchell, but a wasteland that gave way to thousands of irrigated citrus groves, which in turn sprouted into the vast people-farms of today. And the parking lots they put up serviced another Los Angeles innovation—the runaway car-and-freeway culture that liberated the American wanderer and is still working its way around the globe today.
All that wealth sloshing around naturally gave birth to corruption on an unimaginable scale. City fathers, police chiefs, newspaper publishers, and East Coast Jewish and Italian mobsters all rushed to cash in on the prosperity. Crips, Bloods, Hells Angels, and hundreds of other gangs carved out their niches. If you characterize the resulting eruptions of ethnic violence as "racist", you entirely miss the reality—that everyone in the frontier-style town was out to dog-eat-dog their way to the top of the economic heap. It didn’t much matter who got in the way.
From the beginning, modern Southern California was built on a flimsy bedrock of salesmanship and advertising—pamphlets and real estate offers in East Coast newspapers, Rose Parades and Bowls, grandiose resort hotels, all financed by local entrepreneurs to seduce the rest of America with their glorious surf and sunshine in the depths of winter. Hollywood and the movie industry took this seduction to entirely new levels, with carefully manufactured star systems and a steady flood of news, gossip, and scandal, real or invented. And then, Timothy Leary and the Merry Pranksters found a kink in the local drug laws that had somehow mislaid the substance LSD.
This was where reality and fantasy started to collide—or rather to flow into each other like tributaries in a humungous, muddy Mississippi of fact and legend:
Thousands of shooting locations from hundreds of shows and movies became as familiar to worldwide audiences as their own neighborhoods.
You can still find the entrance of the Bat Cave or the front porch of the “authentic” Animal House within a few miles of the actual spots where Bugsy Siegel, Sal Mineo, the Black Dahlia, and the victims of the Hillside Strangler all met their sorry ends.
With a little effort, you can still find the Spahn Movie Ranch, scene of so many imaginary Western shootouts—and the whereabouts of the tiny cupboard where the Law finally caught up with Charley Manson.
A drive up the gorgeous Laurel Canyon will take you past the birthplace of musical legends like the Mothers of Invention or Crosby, Stills, and Nash to the eerie echos of the Tate and Wonderland Murders.
We arrived in Los Angeles in 1989, and on some days, it feels like entire eras have swept over us since then. Our first summer, we recall "old-timers" telling how—just five years earlier and before the I-405 opened—you could leave one town and drive through a patch of countryside before you came to the next. All of the beach cities in the Beach Boys song "Surfin’ USA" were distinct communities, with their own histories and eccentricities. You could buy milk, bacon, oranges, and melons from farms within the city limits. You could find fashions, furniture, and flowers, all local products, traded at the sprawling, hyperactive markets of downtown. You could hear every accent on earth hidden away in its own LA enclave.
Today, on the other hand, from an aircraft flying into LAX, it all looks like a massive, undifferentiated carpet of industrial-scale housing. Interminable streets lined with barred doors and windows, gated hilltop swirls with swimming pools, all tilted up in a matter of days and waiting for the San Andreas Big One to flatten them and sweep the residue into the sea.
And yet, in some ways, Los Angeles is more fragmented and self-segregated than ever. When we sat with the rich in a Beverly Hills restaurant and watched the last BLM march trickle down Rodeo, hardly anyone glanced up from their Shrimp Étouffée. Big Games at the Coliseum and Rose Bowl—that would bring any other city to a standstill—hardly cause a ripple in the traffic. From all those Hollywood sci-fi movies, you might expect a Martian landing to draw a crowd, but don’t count on it.
Today, in our 34th year of semi-residence, we probably qualify as “old-timers” ourselves. And in pinpointing the moment when we changed from chronic tourists into grumpy locals, we could mention the ten explosive seconds early on January 17, 1994, when we woke up, already cringing in the rolling, shaking corridor between our bedrooms with two screaming children hanging from our fists.
Or maybe it was two years before that Northridge Earthquake—back in 1992—when we went swimming in the roof pool of our Hollywood apartment building with angry fires raging at all points of the compass.
Or maybe it was 26 years after those Rodney King Riots—in 2018—when we sat out in our Latino-Croatian neighborhood of San Pedro and watched the illegal fireworks of a thousand happy families flood the sky.
Or maybe we still haven’t settled in at all. Not really, as in deep, permanent roots and indifferent complacency. After all, there’s still so much left to see and do. And that’s the secret, over-stuffed essence of LA—and the reason we still love it so…
There’s no more fun (as in kinky) place to start exploring the Los Angeles Basin than with a Raymond Chandler novel (The Big Sleep) or a James Ellroy history (The Black Dahlia)—preferably with the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds playing on the gramophone and the cool surf lapping at the sands of your imagination. But given our current dalliance around Tinseltown, we should probably start off with a reel or two of celluloid.
The number of movies set in Los Angeles is endless, although we did find this List of 57 Favorites.
As for our own picks, we doubt these five will send you rushing out for airline tickets. But they do make a good start to pondering the odd, intrepid fantasyland we still call the City of the Angels.
Film Noir and the infamous Southern California water shortage:
Harmless, lighter-than-air fun in the sun:
Corruption comes in all shapes and sizes:
The other LA, no longer quite so forgotten:
And it was either this or “La La Land”. Either way, the locals do love to make movies about themselves: