STRANGER THAN FICTION : No Matter How Much Art Imitates Life, the Movies Couldn’t Care Less About the Real L.A.

Sometimes a sentence shoots out of a news story like a Patriot missile, an explosion of meaning in a sea of words. That’s what happened with a recent report about the management intrigue at Columbia--sorry, Sony Pictures.

The story involved nothing more interesting than one management genius maneuvering to be paid a gazillion dollars to clear out his desk so that another management genius could be paid a gazillion more dollars to move from Burbank to Culver City. In the exploding sentence, the current president bragged about the movies that had been green-lighted during his tenure. He was particularly proud, he told a reporter, of “Boyz N The Hood.” He described it, presumably with pride, as an “odd picture.”

What was odd about it, I figured out after seeing the film, was that it displayed some of the real Los Angeles: police helicopters hovering above South Central, blockbusting in Compton, black teen-agers cruising on Crenshaw and, less realistically, a USC football recruiter expressing interest in a potential player’s SAT score. But there were also the flatland streets of small, detached houses and mile-high palm trees, and the hazy, blazing non-blue of the mid-day sky. It was a Los Angeles that somebody who grew up here could recognize. That was clearly against the Hollywood rules.

Fictional depiction of this city has been stylized beyond recognition by a generation of newcomers from New York and England. They saw this place as empty and unformed, the perfect container for their sci-fi or noir agendas. Lost in all these fevered super-realisms have been the piquant surrealisms that are the real L.A.

No matter where it was held, the recent Sammy Davis Jr. auction would have been bizarre and sad--his lucrative lifetime in show business followed by his most personal stuff being sold off in cartons. It assumed the shape of a Los Angeles event when two Sammy look-alikes showed up at the auction house. One doppleganger would have been in bad taste, suggesting disturbingly that the man wasn’t really dead, that the sale was some sort of Andy Kaufmanesque stunt. Two Sammys though, was pure overkill, essential excess, especially since each look-alike looked like a different Sammy--each representing a different era of the Davis persona. A screenwriter might have imagined one of these guys showing up at the Sammy auction. Only the real L.A. would have come up with two.

The natural surrealism of this city became clear to me on the nights I spent on West Pico during college. UCLA’s newspaper was produced at a small print shop just west of the Fox lot, and the only way a student journalist could earn reliable pocket change was to “put the paper to bed”--stay at the print shop all night and supervise the setting into type of football results and handouts promoting the sophomore dance.

This was before the computer revolution. “Printing” still meant noisy Linotype machines casting hot lead. For some reason, maybe the noise, the percentage of print-shop employees who were deaf and mute far exceeded the national norm. These guys loved playing a joke on the night editors, the same joke over and over again: They’d wheel heavy tables full of what looked like the type for tomorrow’s paper behind the kid, then suddenly push the frames containing the lead pages onto the floor. The editor would first jump two feet in the air from the noise and then have a teen-age heart attack as he contemplated all the work that would now have to be redone. The printers would crack up with their strange, silent laugh, until the kid eventually realized that what was on the floor was last week’s California Jewish Press.

The paper finally locked in lead, I would venture out onto Pico just in time to see a line of houses slowly moving east. Single-family houses, some duplexes, red bulbs attached to their corners like jet-wing lights, creeping along past Rancho Park in a long, eerie, noiselass parade. If this was being done to make way for some development, the tract must have been the size of Inglewood because the houses went by for years. Was there word on some national closed circuit: “Want to move a house? Use Pico!”? I don’t know. But between the madcap printers inside and the rolling homes outside, the nights were plenty vivid for me, and I didn’t drink. For the other editors, who sucked beer as if it were air, the nights on West Pico must have been like Halloween in Vegas.

Fantasies are fine, and Hollywood should make a copious supply of them. But the executive who thought that a picture that captured something of the real L.A. was “odd” also thought “Return to the Blue Lagoon” was normal. He’s worth a gazillion, at least.