Saving Private Property

Mr. DeMille, you win.

Rewrite the astronomy books. Redraw the sky charts. The Earth no longer revolves around the sun; it revolves around The Star--the movie firmament, the TV heavens.

Once I’d heard what happened to Stephen E. Ambrose, I could deny the truth no longer. Ambrose had been badly injured in a fall, and the radio report made his newsworthiness clear this way: He was “historical advisor to Steven Spielberg on ‘Saving Private Ryan.’ Now, the weather . . . “

Stephen Ambrose, historian of D-Day, chronicler of Lewis and Clark, scholarly biographer of Nixon and Eisenhower--a mere name on a movie credit?

What next, some passing reference to Lincoln as the man who ended John Wilkes Booth’s promising acting career?

The morning TV “news” shows help us to navigate our way in a daunting world by interviewing actors and comics. A movie star who played a president dates a Washington columnist who covers one. Another movie star who played a president meets the real thing, and guess who comes away star-struck. With Ronald Reagan we achieved the perfect chimera mutation: a movie star who is a president.

It used to make me angry, this up-ending of priorities. Yet once I surrendered to it, once I unclenched my fingers from unlovely reality and unpleasant fact, things became serene, the future untroubled and unobstructed. I’ve even rewritten the epitaph to read, “As Seen on TV.”

Movies always save the world in the last reel. Why not let them start by saving downtown Los Angeles?

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For years, we’ve heard the civic hand-wringing: how to revive downtown? Boutique theaters, coffee bars, shops, bistros, gardens, cheap parking, Green Stamps.

Now I must reach a sinister, even conspiratorial conclusion: Downtown has not been revived because the mighty movie studios do not want downtown revived.

Perhaps a third of all the city’s movie shoots are downtown. It is not in the studios’ interest to have a downtown that is inviting and charming, a lure to strollers and diners. If people actually came downtown nights and weekends, how could film companies shut down streets and blow up cars and stage chases through warehouses and alleys and riverbeds?

No, the film crews need downtown in as-is condition, need that Chicago-y, New Yorky, Philly grunge, that urban look of the 1920s or the 1950s or even the 1900s. It is a testament to our wonderfully hodgepodge architecture that these few square miles can masquerade as anyplace else; it is a peculiar mercy that it hasn’t all been upgraded or gutted or gentrified but remains preserved, a fly in Art Deco or Beaux Arts amber.

Los Angeles’ film office praises the glories of downtown with more fulsomeness than I’ve ever run across in a redevelopment brochure:

Broadway, “the most commonly filmed area in the city,” with its stubby stone offices and sharp-edged high-rises, every angle a different city, a different era. The warehouse and loft districts offer “an industrial setting with brick buildings, warehouses, railroad tracks and loading docks . . . zoned for heavy manufacturing allowing for most activities such as gunfire, explosives and helicopter activity.” Grand Avenue’s hills and plazas “most frequently stand in for such areas as San Francisco.”

And the outdoor clocks and ornate roof lines and dazzling old neon--I suspect downtown L.A. is more familiar to movie and TV fans who have never been here than to Angelenos themselves. The presence of a movie crew represents the biggest concentration of Westsiders in downtown outside of Oscar night.

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How about it, Mr. Spielberg? You’ve saved Private Ryan. How about saving downtown? City Hall has made it obvious that the business of L.A. is the movie business; a movie shoot is one of only two moonlighting jobs where LAPD cops can wear their uniforms.

By bringing your DreamWorks studios downtown, you could also save those perfectly good--well, imperfectly good--wetlands in Playa Vista. And city officials would be so thrilled to have the downtown district rededicated as a back lot, they might even see their way clear to naming it after you, as Wilshire Boulevard was named for Gaylord Wilshire, as Carthay Circle was named after its developer, and as its church bears to this day the name of his mom.

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Patt Morrison’s column appears Wednesdays. Her e-mail address is patt.morrison@latimes.com