Capturing the Central Ave. ‘Easy’ Feeling

For a brief moment it appeared as if the thriving Central Avenue of the ‘40s were alive again. Local nightclubs like the Downbeat and the Last Word were jumping, while Flo’s Waffle Shop and the Lady Ebonee Beauty Center were open and ready for business.

Passersby squinted and wondered if it could be. But it wasn’t deja vu; it was only a movie.

Shot entirely on location in Los Angeles, the detective mystery “Devil in a Blue Dress” posed its own mysteries for Gary Frutkoff, the production designer in charge of creating Easy Rawlins’ Los Angeles circa 1948.

Just like private investigator Rawlins, Frutkoff found himself hunting down clues, trying to piece together a semblance of what post-World War II life was like in the predominantly black neighborhood.

A daunting task to be sure, for while a production designer typically has thousands of documents such as newspapers or magazines, photographs and histories to work from, Frutkoff found that documentation of the area was scanty at best; in fact, he was able to find only one photograph of the street he was asked to bring back to life.

“I have never been so frustrated,” says Frutkoff, whose last movie was Steven Soderbergh’s Depression-period piece “King of the Hill.” “I was never able to find what I was looking for.”

Many personal photo collections, Frutkoff points out, were lost in the riots of both 1965 and 1992, while the newspaper covering the South-Central community, the Sentinel, had unfortunately lost or misplaced most of its photo archives.

The night life of Central Avenue is key to “Devil’s” plot, as Rawlins winds his way through speak-easies and jazz clubs to track down Daphne Monet, the mysterious white woman with a secret.

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Considering the lack of documentation available, it is difficult to envision Central Avenue as it once was. Considered the Harlem of the West Coast, the center of the California jazz scene, Central Avenue has even been credited as the cradle of be-bop. Duke Ellington used to play at the Lincoln Theatre and stay at the Dunbar Hotel there, and Billie Holiday performed at an after-hours club called Brother’s.

Yet a trip down this legendary street today reveals almost nothing of its past. “It’s all knocked down, paved over. Central Avenue is a lost culture,” Frutkoff says.

Nonetheless, the production designer was determined to re-create the street’s aura.

“We exhausted ourselves,” he says. “I went all over the United States, to the Smithsonian and even to museums in New York, to see if there were any collections of Los Angeles that I could use.”

He ended up depending on photographs from other places around the country and on oral history of residents of the area to fill in the details specific to black Los Angeles.

“We spent about eight weeks of extensive research, interviewing ex-musicians and residents, anyone who could give us the real juice of what we were trying to get,” Frutkoff says. “A lot of people got goose bumps from remembering how it was.”

For the commercial area, Frutkoff relied on a 1942-46 directory of black-owned businesses. “For any business we re-created fictionally, we went back and cleared the names,” he says.

The next step was to find locations that could double not only for Rawlins’ evening haunts but for his neighborhood as well. After scouting Oakland and Stockton, both cities Frutkoff thought might have the right look, he decided to stay in Los Angeles, settling for a few downtown blocks to stand in for Central Avenue and a residential block off West Adams Boulevard for Rawlins’ neighborhood.

Co-producer Jesse Beaton says one of her goals was to find a neighborhood that would define why Easy would want to stay to protect his community. “It’s subtle,” she says, “but you need to sense his connection.”

Director Carl Franklin refused to consider shooting on a studio sound stage, Beaton says, because he felt “it wouldn’t breathe in the same way--on a sound stage the shades would be drawn and you wouldn’t be able to look out the windows and see the neighborhood.”

Originally planning to build Easy’s home on a vacant lot, Frutkoff instead found that just what he wanted--a small house built in the late ‘20s that Easy would have moved into just after World War II--already existed. The home, a bit bigger than a bungalow and nestled behind a white picket fence on Harcourt Avenue, near the corner of Hickory Street, happened to have been owned and lived in by the same couple since 1947, who had just celebrated their 60th wedding anniversary. It was a perfect match.

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Armed with photographs from family albums of several private citizens and the Los Angeles Central Library, Frutkoff went to work setting the right tone for the interiors. All that really needed to be done was to wallpaper, re-tile the kitchen, de-modernize the bathroom and dig a back-yard garden where Easy tends his rose bushes. (The couple were paid for the use of their house and plan to move back in after the bathroom is remodernized.)

As for the rest of the working-class neighborhood, the houses and gardens needed only a little retouching--and to have their iron burglar bars removed, in exchange for which residents received a 24-hour security patrol.

And aside from occasional interruptions from barking dogs and helicopters buzzing overhead, the shoot was peaceful.

“This film is about Los Angeles,” Beaton says, and about capturing on film an often-neglected aspect of Los Angeles history.

For his part, Frutkoff acknowledges that “Los Angeles only goes back so far; every hour, every day, we lose history.”

For this reason, he views his work on “Devil in a Blue Dress” as “bigger than motion pictures. I feel like some kind of anthropologist--or even an archeologist.”