The first time I traveled to Los Angeles, I put Griffith Park at the top of my quest-list. As my longtime friend Gloria and I approached the observatory, I uncontrollably blurted out, “That’s where the cops killed Plato!” The death of Sal Mineo’s character in REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE was as real to me as if I had been there in 1955. Instead, I saw that death scene on the screen of the Arcadia Theater in Dallas in 1955. Nonetheless, Plato’s murder was as much a part of my memory as were events in which I had physically participated. With that Griffith Observatory revelation blurring the lines between actual memory and cinematic memory, I became a champion of Los Angeles. My constant defense was: “It’s not plastic. It’s as real as any powerful dream.” That and all subsequent visits have made me fall in love with the place where so many dreams have been realized and preserved on film.
I think longtime Los Angeles resident Thom Andersen has been in love with the city for decades, but he isn’t always pleased with the way the Hollywood film industry looks at its mother. To share that love and displeasure he has made an incredible documentary, LOS ANGELES PLAYS ITSELF, which presents and lyrically analyzes nearly 100 years of cinema depicting Los Angeles. He has grouped his observations into three sections revealing Los Angeles as background, character, and subject in the cinema. This captivating, highly personal documentary is as mesmerizing as its subject.
Andersen obliterates the idea that “movies aren’t about places, they’re about stories.” Instead of focusing on the action and characters in films with Los Angeles as a setting, he examines the backgrounds – like a detective, an archeologist, an analytical thinker. Instead of allowing himself to be swept away by the dialogue, movement, and characters’ faces and bodies, he looks around the frame to see where we are at that moment. What’s visible through the car windows? What can be seen from this hotel room? What buildings are visible in street scenes? He is an experienced miner diligently searching for “documentary revelations in feature films.” And he finds a wealth of material depicting “the most photographed city in the world.” It is impossible to drive around the city any day of the year and not find crew signs pointing to a film location. At times it seems that Los Angeles is one huge studio back lot.
And yet, even with all these movies being made in the streets, what opening shot tells us we are about to watch a film set in Los Angeles? New York has the Empire State Building, the Statue of Liberty, Broadway, the Brooklyn Bridge, and had the World Trade Center for geographic signs. Washington D.C’s government buildings and monuments, San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge, Paris’s Eiffel Tower, Moscow’s Kremlin, Rome’s ancient architecture, London’s Big Ben – all these visual clichés tell us where we might be for the next two hours. But what skyline shot says “Los Angeles”?
Perhaps there are no easily defining shots of Los Angeles because the architectural history keeps being replaced or effaced. Much of the city’s early 20th century history can be found only in historic markers or on street signs. Rather that the city that was lampooned with the phrase “there’s no there there,” even the “there” that was once there is no longer there. Also, what looks real may not be. Not all movie sets are hidden away on backlots. Some are right out in plain view, but closed to the public, such as a prototypical McDonald’s that has never sold a burger but sits on a busy street.
Profoundly examining the city he loves, Andersen poses his main question: “Have movies ever depicted Los Angeles?” His carefully composed film sets out to answer that easy question with lots of complex answers. First he examines how Hollywood has used Los Angeles as a background setting, often with the name of some other city, real or fabricated.
THE CITY AS BACKGROUND
For lots of earlier movie characters Los Angeles was a "destination, not a place, a resort, not a city." Images of streets and buildings meant “this is happening in a city, not in the countryside,” but infrequently did they mean “Los Angeles.” With its varied terrain and eclectic architecture Los Angeles could be almost anywhere and often has been – Chicago in THE PUBLIC ENEMY (1931) and “Center City” in THE STREET WITH NO NAME (1948), which used the real downtown Los Angeles for a skid row. This negative use of the downtown area popped up in quite a few examples of film noir. Sam Fuller’s CRIMSON KIMONO (1959) shows a blonde stripper, long hair flying, running through the street past startled pedestrians in the downtown area, already tawdry in the 40s and headed for further decline into the 60s before being obliterated by skyscrapers with mega-deal business activity by day and empty streets at night.
Hollywood’s vision of postwar downtown L.A. was overrun with burlesque clubs, pool halls, dives, liquor stores, cheap hotels, flophouses, hamburger joints, boxing gyms, and cheap stores – all fertile ground for crime films. In reality, besides all those tawdry places, downtown contained cheap housing and business establishments for mainly poor working-class people, the majority Black and Latino, unlike the [mostly white] movie characters who were always on the make, looking for an easy buck. By the 50s those who could did avoid downtown altogether. The flight to the suburbs had begun after the war as the city jumped over the Hollywood Hills into the San Fernando Valley where the sky (or the ocean) was the limit for rapidly metastasizing housing and commercial developments. But through the 60s downtown Los Angeles remained fertile ground for films needing a seedy setting.
As in so many cities, some architectural treasures remained right in the midst of the grime and crime. The Bradbury Building , erected in 1893, was rediscovered in 1953 and historically preserved as an example of utopian futurist architecture . The movies had already discovered it in 1942 with CHINA GIRL and again in 1943 when it served as a military hospital in London. The classic noir D.O.A (1950) featured a pivotal scene in the Bradbury. INDESTRUCTIBLE MAN (1956) used the building for a scene with Lon Chaney as an electrocuted man with horrible powers. MARLOWE (1969) appropriately followed Raymond Chandler’s private detective into the Bradbury. Even with this cinematic pedigree, it was the British director Ridley Scott who turned the Bradbury Building into an iconic landmark in BLADE RUNNER (1982), which celebrated the forest of iron railings, stairs, and elevator shafts, all stretching upward to the “crystal palace” skylight, flooding the interior with sunlight.
Staying with BLADE RUNNER, Andersen provides another example of Ridley Scott’s
acute eye – his use of the Mayan Revival “Ennis House ” of Frank Lloyd Wright (built in 1924), located in the Los Feliz area between Hollywood and Silver Lake. In the sci-fi film it would serve as police detective Deckard’s apartment (pretty good for a reactivated policeman). Hollywood had already used the architectural masterpiece as early as 1933 when it served as the home of a powerful female owner/manager of an auto factory in FEMALE. There it symbolized wealth and artistry, whereas it fell into mundane uses in William Castle’s HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL (1959), A PASSION TO KILL (psychiatric clinic, 1994), and TIMESTALKERS (house in the future, 1987). Even Ridley Scott returned to the Ennis House with BLACK RAIN (1989), but this time it was the home of a gangster in Osaka, Japan. Frank Lloyd Wright would probably be proud that his amazing house could be used in so many different centuries and locales.
Other Los Angeles landmarks that have appeared in films include Union Station, which served as the principal gateway to Los Angeles in the 40s and 50s before flying became common. But besides being used as a transportation depot, it also served as a site for gangster shootouts, drugs stashed in lockers, political protestors (THE WAY WE WERE), horny aliens (SPECIES), and a police station (BLADE RUNNER). Union Station didn’t even get to play Union Station in its own movie UNION STATION (1950). In fact, it is more often than not the train station for other movie cities. It has even been cinematically used as the Los Angeles airport, since the real LAX “is so bland and boring.” The buildings of Los Angeles simply don’t stay put and can show up in practically any movie, depending on the geographic chutzpah of the producer, director, and set designer.
The rare Los Angeles places that generally get to be themselves are City Hall (the
only tower for many decades), the Griffith Park Planetarium, the concrete channels of the LA river (where giant ants hid in THEM! in 1954), the Beverly Hills Hotel, and Paradise Motel. Otherwise, pick and choose and put them wherever your story needs a train station or an intriguing building.
There is one structure that is entirely sacrosanct and can’t mean anything other than itself -- the Hollywood sign (originally “Hollywoodland,” marking a new middle-class housing development in the hills). Even though Andersen feels it signaled the ascendancy of the film industry over the rest of Los Angeles, he finds the Hollywood sign somehow “reassuring” today. That once 
commercial, now cultural, sign has become the defining landmark that tells us we are about to see a film based in Los Angeles.
Thom Andersen really hates “geographical license” [what Sergei Eisenstein’s disciples would call “creative geography” – a montage of shots from non-contiguous locales in supposedly real time.] This is a complaint that anyone familiar with a city could voice. Movie geography rarely conforms to reality, but anyone unfamiliar with a town would never know that someone drove the real-world equivalent of five miles in just a few frames. Andersen strongly believes that “silly geography makes for silly movies.” One film that adheres most closely to his ideal of geographic reality, and which receives Andersen’s praise, is GONE IN 60 SECONDS (1974), which is “stubbornly literal about space” featuring contiguous locations during a car chase through Los Angeles.
From Andersen’s examples it seems that Hollywood has declared war on fine examples of modern architecture liberally sprinkled throughout the metropolitan area. He feels that creative architecture gets denigrated through association with criminal characters. In THE DAMNED DON’T CRY (1950), the aforementioned Ennis House belongs to a local gangster and in THE NIGHT HOLDS TERROR (1955) provides a playground for young hoods. Even the Lovell Health House (designed and finished in 1929 by Richard Neutra) was used in L.A. CONFIDENTIAL (1997) as the home of
villainous Pierce Patchett, developer and fantasy pimp. Homes and buildings designed by other Los Angeles architects have likewise been disrespected by cinema. One egregious 
example is John Lautner’s stunning sauceroid Chemosphere (1960) being pulled down by Mel Gibson’s character in one of the LETHAL WEAPON films.
In fact, it’s not just houses that get torn down. Hollywood apparently wants to destroy all of Los Angeles. The city is going down in flames in DEMOLITION MAN (1993), turned into an island in ESCAPE FROM L.A. (1996), and obliterated in THE BIG ONE: THE GREAT LOS ANGELES EARTHQUAKE (1990). Perhaps Hollywood has no particular malice toward Los Angeles but simply destroys it cinematically “because it’s there,” at hand, nearby, easy to drive to and blow up, burn down, and shake apart while the cameras roll. Andersen cleverly points out that with these disaster movies Hollywood has perfected the “cinema of conspicuous destruction” – certainly a defining aspect of American movie technology. We are so rich that we can creatively destroy ourselves for entertainment.
THE CITY AS CHARACTER
In some films, Los Angeles is as much a character as a backdrop. James M. Cain and Raymond Chandler loved/hated the city of the angels and made it a co-conspirator in their novels. The crimes their characters committed needed Los Angeles as an accomplice. As Andersen says, their crimes “fit the rootlessness and corruption of the middle class of Southern California,” particularly in wartime and its aftermath. They “helped convince the world that Los Angeles was the world capital of adultery and murder.” Cain’s DOUBLE INDEMNITY, translated to film in 1944, placed its adulterous protagonists into a very real Los Angeles, identified as such in the film, with the Spanish colonial home in the hills, the Glendale train station as part of the murder 
plot, and Jerry’s Market on Melrose Avenue as a place for secret meetings. For many viewers, DOUBLE INDEMNITY defined the allure and danger of mid-40s Los Angeles. It represented both the middle-class life style and comfortable possessions and the rotten core of greedy people who always wanted more, but most audience members would have loved living in that tasteful home in the hills. When Los Angeles plays a character in a movie, it sometimes makes us guilty of collusion through our own greed and lust.
The suburbs of Los Angeles, west of downtown and northward into the San Fernando Valley, were created for folks making good money after The War. With assistance from the G.I. Bill, many returning vets could finally own a home for their wife and two kids. The American dream included a detached house for every family with yards, sidewalks, and streets safe enough for kids on bikes [and, oh, by the way, no people of color]. But all those cute [white] kids chasing the ice cream trucks would soon morph into the troubled, disconnected teens of 50s movies, especially with REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE, in which the suburban dream became a nightmare of alienation. Andersen calls Nick Ray’s 1955 film the “first teen noir.” 
The world of Los Angeles’ sprawling suburbia was examined through teenagers’ eyes and they were certifiably bored and dangerous. The economic success of suburbia depended on cars, freeways, and shopping strips. Once the kids’ bicycles were turned in for automobiles, all hell broke loose. These were not 1930s Andy Hardy and his friends with funny jalopies in an idyllic small town, but teens with some pocket money and lots of time on their hands and little connection with their Depression-era/wartime parents. Even though the locale of REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE was not defined as “Los Angeles,” everyone knew that West Coast teens were defining how the rest of us were or wanted to be in the 50s.
But even in the era of suburban kids with steering wheels in their hands and sex and kicks on their minds, downtown Los Angeles still attracted directors interested in other Angelenos. The Bunker Hill area was particularly appealing. 
Once firmly middle class and right downtown, the area slowly became working class and then plummeted into being a neighborhood of disreputable boarding houses for winos, prostitutes, pimps, low-level thugs, the perennially poor, and the elderly. City fathers decided that the “wrong people [were living] too close to downtown.” Fortunately, the history of Bunker Hill is, as Andersen says, “documented in movies [even through] its destruction and depopulation.” It was also chronicled in novels by John Fante and the drunken-brilliant poetry of Charles Bukowski. However, even as the films were making Bunker Hill a character in film noir classics, its days were numbered.
Angels Flight, a funicular running up Bunker Hill for several blocks, was built in 1901,
ripped up in ‘69, 
and later rebuilt a block away. This sole remnant of the Bunker Hill neighborhood is now a tourist ride, a simulation of what was once public transportation for tired working folk to get up the steep hill.
In his research into cinema’s Los Angeles, Andersen uncovered a real gem: THE EXILES, Kent MacKenzie’s really indie, truly low budget film about reservation Indians exiled to the Bunker Hill area of downtown Los Angeles. This film (shot in 1958 and completed in 1961), more than any other movie, “proves there was once a city here, before it was torn down and replaced by a simulacrum,” says Andersen.
In the process of destroying and recreating downtown Los Angeles, the city planners gave filmmakers a perfect locale for futuristic scenes of devastation haunted by zombies and mutants (OMEGA MAN, 1971).
Thom Andersen feels an almost aching nostalgia for what is gone: “Images of things gone mean a lot to those of us who live there.” One of the many buildings gone is the art-moderne Pan Pacific Auditorium, which ended its days as a “roller disco” in XANADU (1980) before burning down (further proof that the gods hated disco). 
It is intriguing how outsiders (directors visiting, not living in, Los Angeles) have depicted the city. Have they transferred their hatred and distrust of the Hollywood film industry to its surrounding city? We aren’t surprised that such a staunch New Yorker as Woody Allen expressed his dislike of L.A. in ANNIE HALL (1977), but that gives Andersen the opportunity to define the neurotic comic as, not an auteurist, but a “low tourist” director. Nonetheless the documentary filmmaker would apparently love to trade Henry Jaglom for Woody. The British-born actor/director moved to Los Angeles in the late 50s and began making insufferable movies in the early 70s, films which embody what Andersen defines as solipsistic (nothing outside my own mind can be proven to exist). At least Woody used to be funny while being self-deprecating, whereas Jaglom is simply self-obsessed and humorless.
Other tourist directors, many of whom are also British, have been mesmerized by Los Angeles. Tony Richardson used the Hansel and Gretel House in THE LOVED ONE (1965) and was drawn to the “accidental surrealism” of studio back lots, a giant mash-up of architectural styles. However, Andersen particularly detests John Boorman for making the city bland and insidious” in POINT BLANK (1967). “People who hate Los Angeles love POINT BLANK.”
On the other hand, American “tourist auteurs have loved Los Angeles. Experimental filmmaker Maya Deren (transplanted to the US from the Soviet Union at the age of 5) found a “private Eden above Sunset Strip” in MESHES OF THE AFTERNOON (1943). Andy Warhol, whose first “legitimate” art exhibit took place in L.A., not NYC, loved the city and used it for TARZAN AND JANE REGAINED…SORT OF (1964), which included shots of the art naïf Watts Towers. 
And where else but L.A. would early gay porn be born? Fred Halsted’s culture-shifting L.A. PLAYS ITSELF (1972) moves from idyllic sexual encounters in nature to rougher sex in urban scenes, a metaphor for Los Angeles as a former paradise and unfortunate foreshadowing of one path gay culture would take.
Continuing his riff on tourist auteurs, Andersen finds some “high tourists,” usually from parts of Europe other than Great Britain. The “America” that Europeans think of is more often West Coast than East. In Los Angeles they can explore that America – a city of “parking lots, motels, bus stations, coffee shops, and strip bars.” Andersen is delighted that some of the high tourists even enjoy Sunset Strip. Jacques Deray’s THE OUTSIDE MAN (Un homme est mort, 1972) provides what Andersen calls a “concise portrait of the city in 1973 as I remember it.” However, Antonioni’s ZABRISKIE POINT (1970) was disappointing, partly because the Italian minimalist was more interested in the California desert than in the city of Los Angeles.
The City as Subject
Besides serving as background or character, Los Angeles by the 70s was deemed worthy of being the subject of a feature film. What lay beneath the surface glitter became intriguing to a new Hollywood whose studio system had collapsed in the 60s, making way for new auteurs with their own ideas about good subjects for films. High tourist Roman Polanski bought a home in Los Angeles, married a starlet (subsequently killed by the Manson gang), and somehow settled down despite losing his wife. It was no surprise that he would make CHINATOWN (1974) which featured Los Angeles as its subject.
Andersen believes that on the heels of the Watts riots [rebellion] of 1965, Los Angeles became self-conscious. The dominant question among Angelenos was, “How did we go wrong?” It took an outsider such as Polanski to try to answer that question. Although his film was saturated with nostalgia for an earlier period in the city’s history, the rotten core of historical corruption was laid bare. Even though CHINATOWN’s historical accuracy was muddled – the real aqueduct was built in the early 1900s rather than in the film’s 1938 – the sheer power of the script, direction, acting, and cinematography allowed 
CHINATOWN to get to the worm-eaten heart of the creation of the metropolis. The facts may have been wrong, but the truth about the creation of Los Angeles wasn’t inaccurate. Anyone who read newspapers or engaged in barber shop debates already knew, even at the beginning of the 20th century, that Los Angeles needed water and land to grow. Those natural resources would be secured one way or another.
The Hearst newspapers of the first decade of the 20th century covered the deeper meaning of the bond issue for building the aqueduct which would require a large land-grab from area farmers and would make desert what was already blooming outside of the city. However, without the aqueduct Los Angeles would not have been able to grow much larger, becoming instead, as Andersen says, another Santa Barbara.
Andersen makes a very interesting point about how films with Los Angeles as the subject would generally be period films, “replacing public history with a secret history.” L.A. CONFIDENTIAL (1997) did just that by revealing a corrupt police department in
bed with Mickey Cohen’s mob. The documentarian declares that things were actually far worse than that – the LAPD of Chief William R. Parker controlled the city through graft, blackmail, secret files, snitches, surveillance, and common interests with the ruling elite. DRAGNET, the radio and TV series of the 50s and 60s, actually showed one of Parker’s best detectives using strong arm tactics, speaking in a nearly robotic voice, using a computer-like mind, and being disdainful of the ordinary citizens who, so afraid to “get involved,” won’t testify against criminals. In the TV show “it appeared that the LAPD was protecting us from our own timidity.” As Andersen says, Sgt. Joe Friday represented the ideal of the LAPD. As an after-thought the filmmaker wonders why the LAPD motto – “to protect and to serve” – appeared between quotation marks on the sides of police cars – a sense of irony, perhaps, or quite explicable in a city devoted to scripted dialogue.
Movie fever couldn’t help but affect real police officers. Joseph Wambaugh, an LAPD policeman turned novelist and screenwriter, presented alcoholic, neurotic cops in such films as BLACK MARBLE, GLITTER DOME, CHOIR BOYS, and NEW CENTURIONS. Once Hollywood remembered it could present LAPD cops as something other than perfect, the floodgates of imperfections opened: INTERNAL AFFAIRS (homicidal cop), LETHAL WEAPON (suicidal cop), COBRA (dandy cop), and TERMINATOR (a killing machine designed as a motorcycle cop). Andersen discloses that after the Rodney King beating, the portrayal of L.A. police got even weirder. NAILS showed cop Dennis Hopper flaunting all laws to get a drug gang. Steven Segal’s homicide detective spouted new-age rhetoric, while Tim Robbins portrayed a dog-hating motorcycle cop in SHORT CUTS (1993).
Understandably the automobile is an essential element in films which focus on Los Angeles as a subject, especially if it breaks down. Without a car you might as well be dead. Screenwriter Joe Gillis in SUNSET BOULEVARD (1950) can’t use his car for fear of the repo men. If he had been able to keep it, he wouldn’t have ended up being Norma Desmond’s boy-toy corpse floating in her opulent pool (which, emptied, became a playground for the essential trio of youths in REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE). Andersen considers Jake Gittes’ loss of his car in CHINATOWN a symbolic castration. In THE PLAYER even the most expensive car is not a safe place, when the driver is a producer who angers a wannabe screenwriter, who gets revenge by putting a rattle snake on the leather seat of the passenger side. In FALLING DOWN (1993) Michael Douglas as William Foster gets fed up with a traffic jam and abandons his car right on the freeway. His walk across Los Angeles turns him into a fascist vigilante railing against the “loss” of “his” city. Even WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT (1988) uncovers a corporate plot to destroy mass transportation in Los Angeles in 1947.
In fact, General Motors and other auto manufacturers, along with tire and oil companies, bought up the various trolley and street-car concerns in Los Angeles (and elsewhere), put them out of operation, substituted buses, and supported the construction of freeways, the dream of promoters of decentralized, suburban development. Los Angeles preeminently defined the new American city exploding from the center into far-flung suburbs reachable by super-highways. Therein were planted the seeds of sprawl, pollution, over-consumption of fossil fuels, and, as many now say, global warming and its inconvenient consequences.
And what about “the other” Los Angeles? That Los Angeles, home to the combined majority, -- Latinos (44% of Los Angeles County’s population in 2000), African-Americans (nearly 10%), and Asians (nearly 12%) – was rarely observed by Hollywood before the 1970s and 80s. In fact, African-American filmmakers had to take the cameras into their own hands. Young black film students at UCLA met and discussed what they wanted to see of their lives on the screen. Haile Gerima’s BUSH MAMA (1979) depicted police brutality against Blacks. Billy Woodberry’s BLESS THEIR LITTLE HEARTS (1984) looked at South Central L.A. with clear, penetrating eyes while bringing to life a script written by Charles Burnett, who became perhaps the best chronicler of working class Black life in his community. 
In KILLER OF SHEEP, MY BROTHER’S WEDDING, and TO SLEEP WITH ANGER, Burnett ignored the stereotypes of “South Central” being created and disseminated by national news networks. This homegrown African-Angeleno neo-realist film group tried to present fresh, enriched views of their communities, but, unsurprisingly, the films received limited distribution and are still not easily available on DVD. They don’t fit the official history of Los Angeles, even the constantly revised official history.
Los Angeles Mexican-American filmmakers found a voice in the 1980s but generally through the Hollywood studio system. Luis Valdez made ZOOT SUIT (1981) and Edward James Olmos directed AMERICAN ME (1982). Both films had to do with the place of Mexican-Americans within greater Los Angeles. Latinos served in the military in large numbers during World War II. When home on leave they sometimes dressed in their zoot suits, which made them targets for xenophobic Anglo soldiers and sailors. ZOOT SUIT explored the Sleepy Lagoon murder 
trial which saw a dozen or so young Latinos unjustly imprisoned en masse, while AMERICAN ME traces the growth of Mexican-American gangs in and out of prison.
So, how will the future Los Angeles really look? Like the year 2019 of BLADE RUNNER? It’s sobering to realize that is barely a decade away. Andersen actually enjoys some aspects of the multi-cultural look of downtown Los Angeles in that sci-fi film, especially the vibrant street life near the Bradbury Building.
Suburbia is conveniently off-world, but unfortunately the smog has now turned to acid rain. The buildings are quite stunning, when seen from the air. Yes, it is meant to be a dystopia, but Andersen says only a Unibomber could find that city repellant. Many of the forecasts for Los Angeles are rather grim, especially when stated almost wishfully by non-Angelenos -- will it slide into the Pacific, be covered by rising ocean levels, or be swallowed by the San Andreas Fault? What seems more likely to Andersen is that the “future looks brighter, hotter, and blander. Los Angeles will become Death Valley until rising oceans wash it away. There will be much progress, but few of us will be happier or better off for it.”
In the meantime, as the clock is ticking, we can thoroughly enjoy Thom Andersen’s philosophical film essay on Los Angeles and its various permutations in cinema. LOS ANGELES PLAYS ITSELF is such a thought-provoking examination of the dream capital of the world that it serves as a catalyst to (re)watch all the films mentioned and think about them in an entirely new light. Such is the power of a great documentary that can encourage us to view our world differently.
Filmmaker Thom Andersen is a film production and film history professor at CalArts School of Film/Video. He has taught similar classes at SUNY Buffalo and Ohio State University. His earlier films include “Eadweard Muybridge, Zoopraxographer” (a 1975 documentary about the pioneer of sequence photography, a forerunner of the motion picture) and RED HOLLYWOOD (a 1995 feature documentary about the infamous “anti-communist” black list of hundreds of film personnel in Hollywood). His collaborator on the latter was film critic/historian/theorist Noel Burch. Together they also wrote a book on the history of that blacklist and the films written/directed by those thrown out of Hollywood and largely ignored today – Les Communists de Hollywood: Autre chose que des martyrs (The Hollywood Communists: Something Other Than Martyrs, 1994).
-- Chale Nafus, Director of Programming, Austin Film Society
Photo credit: Jack Webb as Sgt. Joe Friday and Ben Alexander as Officer Frank Smith, Dragnet (NBC) 1951-1959. NBC/Photofest © NBC
