HOLLYWOOD COMMEMORATIVE EDITION
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How our towns image factories rose, prospered and conquered the world — and the big challenges they now face.
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May 21, 2006
HOLLYWOOD | GLAMOUR INC.
The allure of illusion
Is Paris Hilton glamorous? She meets all the criteria. She's young, shiny, obscenely rich and reckless. She does precisely as she likes. She's an heiress. Old money! (Mature, anyway.) She is pure, uncompromised artifice. Noel Coward or Preston Sturges could have made her up — if it weren't for the sex tape. And the hamburger ad. And the album. And her mother.
May 21, 2006
HOLLYWOOD | THE REVIEWS
Judgment days
Criticism and prophecy are two distinct sciences. A selection of Times film reviews, written on tight deadlines, underscores the challenges — and the joys — of the popular form. Read these excerpts and consider which is more pleasurable — a fulsome rave or a wicked pan?
May 21, 2006
HOLLYWOOD | MOVIE MILESTONES
Under their influence
Think of the movie business for a moment not as an entertainment enterprise but as an enormous cargo ship. Turning on a dime is not this vessel's specialty; even attempting to change direction is a herculean task that may take a while to show results.
May 21, 2006
HOLLYWOOD | TV MILESTONES
Stars of the living room
Possibly because less money is spent to produce it, television is still considered film's poor relation. And yet even a badly rated TV show might be seen by an audience bigger than that for a moderately successful independent film. And where hit films may certainly influence what other sorts of movies get made, hit shows, which go on week after week, work into the social fabric and change the way people live, or at least how they schedule their day. TV being the fantastically various medium it is, there is no way to number even a fraction of the shows that have altered its course, but here are 10 of inarguable influence. (I'm not sure what it means that many of them originated from or are set in New York, but the fact that they're almost all comedies is certainly a matter of my own taste.)
May 21, 2006
HOLLYWOOD | THE STUDIOS
A system gone with the wind
Here is your starter question. In the following four trios, explain what the three people have in common, and identify what unifies each of the groupings:
May 21, 2006
HOLLYWOOD | ON THE LOT
Alive with more than history
It's been decades since movie studios had movie stars on contract. And you're as likely to stumble across movie filming on a downtown L.A. street as on the Universal Studios back lot these days. But the studios still have that special feel of a gated village of the privileged, sprinkled with producers' personal parking spaces, dotted with streets named for directors and stars and charged with a frisson of excitement.
May 21, 2006
HOLLYWOOD | MEDIA
They stoked the star-maker machine
WHAT is it about the public's obsession with stars? The media has been enthusiastically covering Hollywood for 100 years, and today's incessant, Internet-fueled celebrity "news" is omnipresent. The distribution methods have been dramatically accelerated, but the focus of the stories hasn't changed much.
May 21, 2006
HOLLYWOOD | AFTER DARK
Those Hollywood nights
When the film industry set up camp in Los Angeles in 1909, migrating actors from the East looked around for nightlife action in Hollywood and found a scene that was largely a big snooze. Downtown, the city's social hub, teemed with burlesque halls, and bars on Main and Spring streets had restaurants offering fare from venison to vegetarian. But "blue" laws forbade dancing and most forms of entertainment on Sundays, and there was heavy lobbying to end all forms of drinking.
May 21, 2006
HOLLYWOOD | THE MOVIES VS. THE CITY
Contempt for the hometown
"Los Angeles … has never recovered from the inferiority complex that its movies nourished," Pauline Kael once wrote. James Sanders uses Kael's quote in "Celluloid Skyline: New York and the Movies," a persuasive demonstration that film artists created a magical New York City on studio lots in Hollywood, Burbank and Culver City, inspired, at least in part, by the disdain and contempt they felt for the city in which they worked and lived. The real Los Angeles was no match for their mythic Manhattan.
May 21, 2006
HOLLYWOOD | IMMIGRANTS
Directors without borders
On May 1, Alejandro González Iñárritu skipped out on the final mix of his film "Babel" to take his family to the immigration rallies in downtown L.A. While his absence might have given heartburn to the production staff hurtling to get the Brad Pitt-Cate Blanchett film ready for the Cannes Film Festival, to González Iñárritu, it was worth it.
May 21, 2006
HOLLYWOOD | COURTHOUSE CONFIDENTIAL
Arrested development
Nothing feeds our schadenfreude more than a good celebrity scandal. To watch the mighty, glamorous and rich stumble is a reality soap opera unparalleled by anything that the studios can dream up. Since Hollywood's birth, the peril of potential pitfalls has added an effervescent thrill to celebrity. After all, early Hollywood megastar Fatty Arbuckle was destroyed by the allegation that he raped a woman at a debauched party. And he was acquitted! Today, the public has shown increasing fickleness about what scandal might actually succeed in alienating its affections.
May 21, 2006
HOLLYWOOD | CREATURES
Where the wild things star
For all its ribbon-wearing , left-leaning tendencies, Hollywood remains a Homo sapiens-centric place. But real talent comes in all shapes, colors, species and spatial dimensions. What would "Alien"' have been without the alien? Or "Black Stallion" without the horse? Even if she never won an Oscar, surely it's time for Lassie to have a listing of her own on IMDB.
May 21, 2006
HOLLYWOOD | POP QUIZ
See if you star at this screen test
Answer all 25 and you're ready for a production deal. Get 20 right, and you're ripe for an agency mailroom. 15? You're personal assistant material.
May 21, 2006
HOLLYWOOD | THE SCIENCE OF MOVIES
A medium in motion
The essence of telling stories with moving pictures has changed little since the earliest days of cinema. But the story of Hollywood is punctuated by technological innovations that opened new paths for directors, actors, writers and audiences. And as Times staff writer Dawn C. Chmielewski explains, change has rarely come easily — or without a fight.
May 21, 2006
HOLLYWOOD | THE ARTISANS
The keepers of the crafts
Quick: What does a gaffer really do? How about an assistant camera person? In a company town where people stay for the credits (and even applaud the names in the fast-rolling small print), you'd think we'd all know. But as often as not, the world behind the scenes is lost in the illusion on screen. So we asked six technical craftspeople to step forward and talk about their jobs with Times staff writer Susan King, while staff photographer Mark Boster brought them into the frame.
May 21, 2006
HOLLYWOOD | NOVEL GAZING
Industry tales of epic despair
I'm a screenwriter by trade, but I came to the novel about Hollywood long before I started writing screenplays. I grew up in Hollywood. My parents were both writers, and "The Day of the Locust" and "What Makes Sammy Run?" took me into my city in other times, into the city in which my parents had worked and met and fallen in love. When Marlowe visited Mavis Weld on the lot in "The Little Sister," I half expected him to run into my father. Just around the corner. Just out of reach.
Copyright © 2009, The Los Angeles Times
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