MOVIES : La-La Land No More : Hollywood used to cast L.A. as a shallow place in the sun but in recent films, it plays the role of a city of diversity--and division

In his 1976 “Annie Hall,” Woody Allen delivered what may be the smuggest and most frequently quoted of all Los Angeles put-downs when his Alvy Singer says, “I don’t want to live in a city where the only cultural advantage is that you can make a right turn on a red light.”

To those of us who lived in Southern California, which is to say those of us who spent half our lives in cars, being able to turn right on red was no small thing.

Beyond that, Alvy was simply wrong. Los Angeles had plenty of ripening culture. The symphony, the theater, museums, galleries, restaurants . . . Los Angeles wasn’t New York or Paris or London, but it was getting pretty good, and living there, as we liked to point out on 80-degree February days, had its compensations.

The larger problem that escaped Allen and other wisecracking out-of-towners (“It’s like paradise with a lobotomy,” wrote Neil Simon of Los Angeles in “California Suite”) was less the lack of culture than the increasing difficulty of getting to it and enjoying it. Southern California, that seemingly endless expanse of orange groves, deserts, mountains and coast that greeted America’s first wave of immigrant filmmakers, had filled to capacity and beyond.

Big-screen images of the highway bringing Dust Bowl refugees to Southern California in “The Grapes of Wrath,” the sunny beaches that became the Sirens’ call to youth in movies ranging from “Gidget” to “Big Wednesday,” the shirt-sleeve lifestyle and carefree car culture that provided backdrops for thousands of pictures shot in Los Angeles did their job. If Hollywood didn’t turn Los Angeles into a boom town, it put up the billboards and directed traffic.

Now that the parking lot is full, it is sending out a completely different message. In films as far back as “Blade Runner” and as current as next week’s “Falling Down,” Hollywood’s advice to the rest of the world: Enter at Your Own Peril.

A lifestyle dependent on the mobility of cars has ground to a halt, these movies say. It is not paradise with a lobotomy, it’s paradise with clogged arteries. For a half-century, the car was a symbol of freedom in horizontal Los Angeles. You could get anywhere, locals said, in 20 minutes. Today, you often don’t move 10 feet in 20 minutes, and cars are more like pressure cookers, prisons or armed transports.

In Joel Schumacher’s “Falling Down,” which opens Friday, the car is all of those things in a story about a despondent and deranged engineer (Michael Douglas) who abandons his sedan in a freeway traffic jam and takes L.A. on foot, a madman loose in a mad world.

Whether the movie’s central metaphor works for you, it represents a perspective of a disintegrating Los Angeles that many people share. And it is just the latest in a string of self-examining or self-flagellating images of Los Angeles being produced by filmmakers who live there.

That such films as “Falling Down,” Lawrence Kasdan’s “Grand Canyon,” Dennis Hopper’s “Colors” and John Singleton’s “Boyz N the Hood” are being made acknowledges that the disagreeable things about urban life have finally invaded the consciousness of the people who write, direct and finance movies in Hollywood. Los Angeles has always had big city problems; only recently have people of power and money there learned they can’t always drive around them.

Kasdan addressed this directly in “Grand Canyon,” during a scene in which a film producer played by Steve Martin is shot in the leg by a Rolex bandit in front of his own studio. It is ironic black humor that a Joel Silver-styled filmmaker would become a victim of the violence he exploits, that he would step out of the Ferrari bought with his cinematic blood money and suffer pain and humiliation unimagined in any of his films.

However, what the scene is really saying is that the rich wearing $25,000 watches can no longer pass the desperate without being inconvenienced occasionally.

“Grand Canyon,” “Boyz N the Hood,” “South Central,” “Falling Down” and half a dozen other gritty L.A. movies coming this year were green-lighted by people wearing $25,000 watches, and it’s personal. They want to know how much trouble they’re in.

To find the answers, the studios are making tough choices. There are scenes in some of these movies, those by white directors, that play off of racial stereotypes and into the urban paranoia of the new white minority. At the same time, those scenes do reflect the confusion, fear and frustration felt by people who, in less than two decades, have seen their hometown turn into something foreign to them.

In “Falling Down,” Schumacher touches on the resentment many longtime residents feel about immigrants taking over small businesses in their neighborhoods, a feeling that is often exacerbated by language problems. In the sizzled mind of Michael Douglas’ character, the thick accent of a Korean market owner is reason enough to trash the man’s property with a baseball bat.

In the opening sequence of “Grand Canyon,” a white businessman (Kevin Kline) makes a wrong turn leaving a Lakers game in Inglewood and is set upon by a gang of black youths after his luxury car breaks down. You can cringe at the racist underpinnings of that scene, but there’s no questioning the fact that Kasdan was enacting a nightmare common to whites traveling uneasily through minority communities.

Singleton’s “Boyz N the Hood” and Steve Anderson’s “South Central” take hard looks at life inside L.A.’s black ghetto, examining the roots of the violence there from the perspectives of fatherless families, peer pressure and drugs. Those films, both made before last spring’s riots in Los Angeles, excuse none of the street behavior we saw on TV and read about, but they make very clear some of the reasons for it.

Although “Boyz” proved to be a sound box-office investment for Columbia, it’s hard to imagine that the studio would have agreed to make it if executives there hadn’t become personally interested in its issues, or perhaps even threatened by them.

Drive-by shootings and gang rivalries have been a reality in Los Angeles for decades, a tragedy of life in minority communities. It took a series of randomly distributed freeway shootings in the late ‘80s (parodied with great panache by Steve Martin in “L.A. Story”) to shake the city’s affluent citizens of the conviction they were out of harm’s way, and that the car culture they enjoyed was now partly a gun culture.

Los Angeles is not quite the urban hellhole forecast by Ridley Scott’s “Blade Runner,” but from the movies we’re seeing now, it seems to lack only the tall buildings and the airborne police cars. Its streets teem with ethnic diversity and divisions, elements that have been simmering for a couple of centuries in New York.

But Los Angeles is a melting-pot city in a microwave age. Its demographics have changed so dramatically so quickly that the people living it can barely keep up with it, let alone appreciate its benefits. Like the character in “Falling Down,” there’s a sense of being out of control, helpless against a current sucking them down the drain.

Movies that exploit social issues provide what playwright Wilson Mizner described as a “trip through the sewer in a glass-bottomed boat,” and there are plenty of them (usually set in New York). Done responsibly, they can cut through anxieties and plunge us into deeper levels of understanding.

It would take a cosmic leap of faith to believe Hollywood is ready to assume a role of leadership in anything, let alone something as thorny and complicated as the urban crises in Los Angeles. It was so much easier when Los Angeles’ image was that of a dim bulb under a bright sun, when movies depicted it as a place for empty-headed bozos dividing their time between the beach, the bed and the barbecue.

“Thought is barred in this City of Dreadful Joy and conversation is unknown,” said Aldous Huxley in 1926, setting the tone for a century of glib L.A.-bashing.

The author of “Brave New World” should have had more vision than that. Los Angeles was an infant in the family of American cities when the intelligentsia first looked down their noses at it. Sure enough, it has grown up and it demands more serious reflection than snappy insults from people working with obsolete stereotypes.

Whatever the reasons for Hollywood’s sudden interest in examining its own environment, the fact that it is coughing up what amounts to research money to study it may be looked back on some day as one of the earliest signs of the city’s maturity, and its respect.