‘History Project’ Examines Los Angeles’ Tense Past : Television: Segments on the Hollywood strikes and Aimee Semple McPherson help PBS series illuminate the present.

In the 1940s, Hollywood’s glamorous movie industry suffered through more than a year of violent strikes that laid the foundation for the witch hunts of the McCarthy era, and for then-actor Ronald Reagan’s conservative ideology and political future.

In the 1930s, Los Angeles’ original Chinatown was leveled to make room for Union Station, forcing the immigrant residents of that persecuted community to move and, without any compensation, start all over again.

You can live your whole life in Los Angeles without any awareness of the city’s rich and not-always-pretty history. KCET Channel 28’s “Los Angeles History Project,” which begins its third season Sunday at 8 p.m. with a documentary about the Hollywood strikes of 1945-46, attempts to remedy that for natives and transplants alike.

“I remember I went to the head of a major foundation to ask for funding for the project, and he asked, ‘Is there anything interesting in the history of Los Angeles?’ ” recalled Stephen Kulczycki, KCET’s station manager. “And I hung onto that for a long time. This is a city that invented itself out of nothing. There is no reason for it to be here. No river, no port. Everything is self made, and there are so many fascinating stories about the struggles and disappointments and triumphs of the people who created this community.”

In addition to “Hollywood Strike,” this season’s four stories include documentaries on the life of famed Los Angeles evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson; the city’s two Chinatowns as seen through the eyes of three men who helped build them; and the turn-of-the-century battle over where to build Los Angeles Harbor.

“We try to pick stories that cover a span of time,” said Arthur Barron, the series producer for the last two years. “In the current series, you have an old story in ‘Harbor Wars’ and a fairly modern story in ‘Strike.’ We try to show history not so much as seen from the outside, but how history has been experienced by ordinary people. We try to see if there is a way of personalizing these stories, of making them interesting and human, rather than dry textbook facts and dates.”

Barron said that he looks for stories, such as the strikes and the battle over the harbor, that are not well known. When the topic is familiar, such as “Sister Aimee,” he tries to tackle it in a new way.

“Most treatments of her had focused on the sexual scandal,” Barron said. “We tried to show what her genuine contribution was to Los Angeles, her compassionate side, a woman who gave lonely immigrants to the city a sense of identity, a balm for their alienation.”

The series also attempts to reflect the city’s ethnic diversity. Last season offered documentaries on the black and Latino experiences in Los Angeles. This season examines the rough and difficult road traveled by the city’s Chinese immigrants.

Perhaps the series’ most compelling trait is that its stories are told through the use of rarely seen archival photographs, films and newsreels that bring the period to life. “Sister Aimee” includes 1920s home movies of the evangelist preaching to thousands in her magnificent Angelus Temple. The Chinatown program shows an old newsreel in which the narrator, over images of Chinese schoolchildren undergoing medical checkups, reveals the rampant bigotry the Chinese faced by casually referring to the children as “the future crop of laundrymen.”

“Hollywood Strike” features old footage of the strike and its violence. It also juxtaposes a vintage Disney cartoon that depicts a strike orchestrated by a bunch of overworked chickens with Walt Disney’s own efforts to break the cartoonists’ union.

“We dig around with a pickax to find things,” said Barron, who sends his staff searching through the National Archives in Washington, D.C., public and private libraries and the personal memorabilia of cooperative private citizens. “The glory of this series is that we turn up so much that has never been seen.”

Sunday’s show strips the glitter off the movie industry, portraying the gritty reality of the struggle for power between the blue-collar craft workers and the moguls who ran the studios. It illustrates how organized crime infiltrated the union and worked in conjunction with the studios to keep pay scales low. It shows how “Commie-bashing” became a common tool in squashing rival unions and labor sympathizers, and it focuses on Reagan’s transformation from a “New Deal Democrat” into an FBI informant and staunch conservative.

“One of the important things to be learned from this, I think, is that there is really nothing about the glamour and tinsel of Hollywood that makes the churning out of pictures any different than the churning out of refrigerators or anything else,” Barron said.

Such lessons, however, do not come cheap. Kulczycki said that producing the four documentaries that will air over the next four Sundays cost close to $1 million, much of that covered by donations from various foundations and the Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Department. But, Kulczycki said, a good deal of the cost must be absorbed against KCET’s own operating budget. At present, the station does not have the money to continue the series.

“I’m not saying it’s over,” Kulczycki said. “We will continue to try to find ways to do it, even if that means making them one at a time”--on an occasional basis.

Barron, who is currently producing a “reality-based” series set in New York’s Bellevue Hospital for ABC, said that it would be a shame if the series died now. In such a sprawling community embracing so many styles, ethnic groups and cultural enclaves, learning of their city’s past, he believes, can be a unifying experience.

“I think the series helps the audience to have a sense of connectedness to their past,” Barron said. “It serves as an antidote to an age of anxiety and rootlessness by revealing and remembering the values that once sustained us. It helps us to discover the other cultures, our neighbors, and that we all do share a common heritage. That’s something to be proud of.”