FILM COMMENT : If L.A. Is the Movie Capital, Why Are L.A. Movies So Bad?

The last two weeks have brought us two new comedies, the Steve Martin jamboree “L.A. Story,” and Paul Mazursky’s “Scenes From a Mall,” set almost entirely in the Beverly Center. The Martin film is often triumphantly fizzy and fun; the Mazursky film flounders between inspirations. Despite their comic trappings, both try to make serious sense out of the L.A. ethos. And both inevitably raise the issue: If Los Angeles is the movie capital of the world, why haven’t there been more good L.A. movies? Is the city’s eerie etherealness so tough to penetrate?

Certainly there have been at least a few terrific movies “about” Los Angeles. The city has always been billed as a city of surfaces, and that makes it a movie natural. In films as diverse as “Shampoo” and “The Long Goodbye” we’ve seen how vibrant those surfaces can be. We’ve even seen how those surfaces were really depths in disguise.

Films about Hollywood filmmaking--a subspecies of the L.A. movie--have often been garishly “inside” jobs. Films like “The Bad and the Beautiful” and “The Big Knife” were marvelously overblown Hollywood exposes that were as fraudulent as they were entertaining; they were morality plays enthralled by movie colony smarminess. And such Hollywood movies as “Singin’ in the Rain” were just as enthralled by movie colony enchantments. They were valentines to Hollywood’s power to re-script life into fairy tale.

Hollywood and Los Angeles are inextricably linked. We tend to think of the city as an emanation of the studios--not just their home but their spiritual home. And, conversely, what better place to locate the dream factories than in a make-believe city? Actually, Los Angeles, with its history of development through swindle, conspiracy and land-grab, was a self-created city long before Hollywood irrigated its deserts. But, if Los Angeles wasn’t exactly created by Hollywood, Hollywood still remains its most perfect metaphor.

It’s a metaphor--the world as extension of show business--that has dominated movie screens almost since the inception of movies. If Hollywood is legendary for its ability to refashion everything it touches into a species of glitz, then this is no more true than in its own depictions of Los Angeles. Most of the world gets its impressions of L.A. from the movies and TV; even Angelenos are constantly pulled in by the Hollywood concoctions that are so often at variance with the day-to-day impressions of their own lives.

You can get away with a lot of suspended disbelief in L.A. movies because the city’s now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t shimmer lends itself to innumerable scenarios. If filmmakers tend to gravitate to small-town middle-America when they want to evoke a cozy permanence, they choose L.A. when they want to summon up an anything-goes impermanence.

As in most American myths, the L.A. myth has its fundament of truth. L.A. is a city where everything seems to be given over to appearances, and the appearances are forever in flux--one perceives the landscape in a series of drive-bys. L.A. may seem to be without a past but it’s populated by people who are fleeing theirs, creating ever new ones. The country ends at the Pacific shore, and it’s as if the ocean were one vast reflecting mirror for all of America’s runaways, sending back images of who we might become.

It’s easier to sustain this pop image of L.A. than it would be in, say, New York. If you make a movie in New York-- any movie--the city becomes the story. In New York movies, ranging from “The French Connection” to “The Bonfire of the Vanities,” the thwack and stench of urban rot rolls off the screen in waves. Los Angeles is often described as “a state of mind.” If New York is a state of mind, it’s a mind in which the brain pan has been dripping its acids into a pool of flame. In Los Angeles, the capital of chimeras, reality takes secondary billing.

L.A.’s never-never-land rep is basic to many of Hollywood’s biggest successes, particularly the comedies. Imagine, for example, if “Pretty Woman” had been set in New York City instead of L.A. As fairy tales go, a romance between a corporate raider with a heart of gold and a happy hooker is already a tough sell. Set it on a 42nd Street and it becomes an impossible sell.

And yet L.A.’s dream-time atmosphere has its frightening side, and some of the most powerful L.A. movies have keyed into the anxiety. L.A.’s sci-fi quality--the sense that the city is forever mutating into the future--shows up to best advantage in a movie such as Ridley Scott’s “Blade Runner.” Scott’s great achievement was that he realized a portion of the movie’s futuristic vision in contemporary locales; he found L.A.’s future in its present. He also found an apocalypse in the present, and that strikes a resonant chord too. After all, what better place to wait out the apocalypse than Los Angeles? Compared to “Blade Runner,” a let’s-trash-L.A. destructo derby like “Earthquake” was a piffle.

A large measure of the power of “Blade Runner” lay in its nightmare rejection of the L.A. sunniness. And it served as a reminder that many of the best L.A. movies have been those mad, sunless thrillers and black comedies from the ‘40s and ‘50s--like “Double Indemnity” and “Sunset Boulevard”--where the dreams of America’s runaways are not just deferred, they’re smashed. A movie like “Chinatown,” for example, or the current “The Grifters,” provides a yellowed road map to where paradise-on-Earth joins with hell-on-Earth.

In New York-based movies, the awfulness seems to snake right out of the landscape; in a San Francisco-based thriller like “Dirty Harry” or, more recently, “Pacific Heights,” the depravity is viewed as a monstrous blight on the city’s supernal beauty. But in a “dark” L.A. movie, the depravity has far greater metaphorical resonance for audiences. Los Angeles is the nation’s repository of pop fantasy. When those fantasies turn lurid and murderous it’s as if all our worst and most sinister suspicions about America were realized.

Where most writers and filmmakers go wrong is in assuming that L.A.’s pop fantasy soul is vulgar and valueless. Or that the vulgar and valueless can’t also be fun. It’s a class snobbery that has its roots in East Coast bloodlines, and it shows up repeatedly in Woody Allen movies, or in works as celebrated as Nathanael West’s “The Day of the Locust,” which is essentially an attack on all those poor enraged rubes who were suckered into believing their own movie-fed fantasies.

Allen’s snobbery, I think, also prevents him from “getting” New York, which always comes across in his movies as a gentrified, Gershwinesque nowheresville. What these L.A. bashers miss out on is the tremendous, crude vitality of pop. It’s what gives L.A., and the best of its movies, much of its vitality. And, in turning up their noses at this vitality, the nay-sayers also miss out on the ways in which many of the best L.A. film artists transform pop into something real and lasting.

Steve Martin’s new “L.A. Story,” for example, may seem on the surface a giddy swipe at Lotus Land. But it has a “Midsummer Night’s Dream” magicality at its core, and an unabashed romanticism. It postulates true love as the best and only way to root yourself in this land of rootless wayfarers.

Paul Mazursky, whose eye and ear for L.A. mores is virtually unmatched in movies like “Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice,” “Alex in Wonderland,” “Blume in Love” and “Down and Out in Beverly Hills,” has a spottier time of it in “Scenes From a Mall,” in which Woody Allen and Bette Midler bust up their marriage in the middle of the Beverly Center. But the film, which Mazursky co-wrote with Roger Simon, is at least an honest juggling act, and it has a great comic metaphor--the L.A. universe as mall.

“Chinatown” is often talked about as the definitive L.A. movie, but I’ve always thought that honor belonged to another Robert Towne-scripted film, “Shampoo.” (Warren Beatty also collaborated on the screenplay.) Like Mazursky, Towne is supremely open to L.A.’s human comedy. He has an artist’s sympathy for the ways in which the apparent openness of the landscape clashes with people’s closed-off lives. “Chinatown” is one of the few Hollywood movies to imply that Los Angeles actually has a past, and a corrupt past at that. (Perhaps that’s why it’s considered definitive.)

But “Shampoo” is about a Beverly Hills hairdresser, Warren Beatty’s George, who darts his way through a bevy of beauties. It’s not the sort of material one would expect any spiritual resonance from, and yet Towne and Beatty get inside the Beverly Hills ethos and bare its yearnings. George starts out as a character in a sex farce and ends up a soulful, used-up dreamer. Despite outward appearances, George is an innocent in the L.A. maelstrom who pines to be transported by love. “Shampoo” is the kind of film L.A. snobs would never get because it assumes that hairdressers have feelings too.

Towne’s ability to spot the substance in fluff is rare, and that rarity may explain why most L.A. movies fall short. It’s easier to be seduced into settling for New Age cliches and beach party shenanigans. But there’s a whole other L.A. that rarely gets displayed in the movies: It’s the melting pot L.A. with its vast immigrant populations; the off-ramp L.A. that never sets foot inside Beverly Hills; the poor L.A. You can catch glimpses of it in such movies as “Straight Time,” “Tales of Ordinary Madness,” “El Norte,” “Repo Man” and “Barfly,” but it’s probably no accident that these movies were all neglected when they came out. An unromanticized Los Angeles is not a highly exportable commodity.

As a result, it appears to the world at large that Los Angeles is a city without slums or any real poverty, a city without any significant ethnic populations, without any culture indigenous or otherwise, without any history. It’s a place where no one works at a regular, mundane job. It’s a place where there are no families--people create dreams in Los Angeles, not children. Sun-spanked, bean-sprouted, aerobicized, L.A. is perceived internationally as the spiritual oasis of the American Dream’s wandering tribes.

It’s understandable that filmmakers, even the best of them, would prefer to step back from L.A.’s ever-changing present and revert to the more easily manageable past or future for their dramas. Many of the best and most interesting L.A. movies are consciously retrospective, even when they’re contemporary. Towne’s fascinating, uneven 1988 “Tequila Sunrise,” “The Grifters,” Robert Benton’s 1977 “The Late Show” all draw on a film noir -flavored past haunted by Raymond Chandler and his pulpier descendants. Even “Shampoo,” released in 1975, was set back to the eve of Nixon’s re-election in 1968.

It’s wonderful that movies like “Down and Out in Beverly Hills” and “L.A. Story” exist, and I don’t wish to take anything away from them. Dramatically, their heart-worn frivolity represents some of the best that can be done with the Los Angeles of the popular imagination. But it’s the Los Angeles of the realistic imagination that’s being skimped. At a time when the L.A. arts community is exploding with new visions, when new novelists are struggling to make sense of the current scene, the L.A. of the movies is still largely a fantasy land. We’ve had a number of past-in-the-present films noir like “The Grifters” but a fresh, unblinkered approach to the city might lead to present-tense thrillers that would really vibrate with the cutting-edge conflicts of today’s L.A.

In the old thrillers, it was usually the marginal and the defeated who resorted to violence. In modern-day L.A., for the first time in our history perhaps, it’s not just those whose dreams have been blasted who are in despair; the despair also reaches up into the echelons of those who have achieved their dreams. The despoiling of the L.A. paradise, even if that paradise was always partly mythic, can be felt across the board. There’s drama in the rage, and hope too, and it should be on our screens. Or is Hollywood only interested in doing public relations for La-La Land?