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Los Angeles Times
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
We're all living on ‘Sunset Boulevard' now
It had me from the very first frame. Fade into the words 'SUNSET BLVD.' stenciled boldly in municipal font. Then, the camera reverses back and you realize this is not a super-imposed title but the actual gutter of L.A.'s most famous boulevard. I first watched 'Sunset Boulevard' as a surly teenager in the late 1980s, more than ready for its dark, corrupt vision of Los Angeles. This was a formidable time for me, that period when the high of L.A., fueled by decades of record growth, the 1984 Olympics and all that talk of the 'post-racial' city built by Tom Bradley was crumbling into something far less shiny. Film noir had nothing on Mike Davis' 'City of Quartz,' which came out two years later and seemed to crystallize all that was coming: Rodney King, the 1992 uprising, the aerospace bust, Proposition 187. 'Sunset Boulevard' tells the story of Joe Gillis, a down-on-his luck Hollywood screenwriter without a penny to his name, pursued by the repo man and thinking about giving up the dream. Fate sends him to the grand, dilapidated mansion of Norma Desmond, a faded, deluded silent film star unable to confront her has-been status. Joe sees in Norma as a refuge from the bill collectors and some cash flow. Norma sees in Joe a vehicle for her comeback and perhaps much more. With 'Sunset Boulevard' turning 75 this year, I decided to rewatch it. And I am not alone. The milestone has brought a slew of thought pieces, podcast episodes and even a new book (which reveals that the producers could not find a mansion in Bel-Air ramshackle enough to serve as Norma's compound so they had to settle for one in Hancock Park). It does not hurt that Donald Trump is a big fan, leading to the inevitable comparisons between the fictional star who loses the public's eye and the real-life politician who has managed to keep the world's attention despite so much controversy. 'Tending to his own flossy coif with comb, hair dryer, spray and oversize scissors, Trump is the delusional, preening Norma Desmond,' the New York Times noted in its review of former Trump White House Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham's White House memoir. But in my rewatching, I was surprised to find myself much more drawn to Joe than Norma. Joe, after all, represents the striving, hustling, dreaming archetype that is still so much a part of life here, a city that can fulfill your wildest dreams just as easily as it can crush your soul. When we meet Joe, he is essentially homeless, fighting the sinking feeling that his early promise as a writer is vanquished along with his bank account and self-respect. It all comes out in one heartbreaking voiceover: As I drove back towards town, I took inventory of my prospects. They now added up to exactly zero. Apparently, I just didn't have what it takes, and the time had come to wrap up the whole Hollywood deal and go home. Maybe if I hocked all my junk there'd be enough for a bus ticket back to Ohio, back to that thirty-five-dollar-a-week job behind the copy desk of the Dayton Evening Post, if it was still open. Back to the smirking delight of the whole office. All right, you wise guys — why don't you go out and take a crack at Hollywood? How many of us have had some version of that inner monologue as we drive home after a tough day? And how many of us are still here, fighting, trying. Many of us never get our compound on 10086 Sunset Blvd., but maybe we find something better. That resilience is particularly powerful in 2025 L.A.: Thousands figuring out how to rebuild their lives from fires. Showbiz folks navigating a rapidly shrinking industry. Undocumented workers suddenly faced with the reality that going to the job they've held for years could mean a one-way flight to South Sudan. The grand, crazed Norma, unable to cope with age and changing times, got all my attention as a teenager eager for an alternative history of my hometown. But in my latest viewing all these decades later, her grievances about L.A. fell a bit flat. She got the real estate, after all. And the struggling Joe offered a bit of sharp wisdom aimed at Norma but for which I need to take to heart: 'There's nothing tragic about being 50. Not unless you're trying to be 25.' Email us at essentialcalifornia@ and your response might appear in the newsletter this week. Today's great photo is from Times contributor Florence Middleton of the headquarters of OpenAI, the maker of the popular chatbot ChatGPT. Artificial intelligence is transforming San Francisco — from its economy to what you see when you walk down the street. Jim Rainey, staff reporterDiamy Wang, homepage intern Izzy Nunes, audience intern Kevinisha Walker, multiplatform editorAndrew Campa, Sunday writerKarim Doumar, head of newsletters How can we make this newsletter more useful? Send comments to essentialcalifornia@ Check our top stories, topics and the latest articles on
Los Angeles Times
10-08-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
These nonfiction writers looked for the future of L.A. Did they find it?
The Los Angeles we know has long been an irresistible subject for novelists and moviemakers — so much so that they've often tortured reality to make it conform to their imagination. Robert Towne mined the history of the Los Angeles Aqueduct in his screenplay for 'Chinatown' but moved the story ahead up by some two decades, from 1913 to the 1930s, to give his scenario its noir sensibility. Ridley Scott and his filmmaking team depicted a future Los Angeles beset with darkness and a never-ending downpour of rain for 'Blade Runner' — never mind that its source material, Philip K. Dick's novel 'Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,' was set in San Francisco, that provincial burg some 400 miles to the north. But the task of depicting a future Los Angeles hasn't been monopolized by fiction writers. Nonfiction writers have joined them in their obsession. They include the late environmentalist Marc Reisner, author of the indispensable 'Cadillac Desert,' the public policy expert Steven P. Erie of UC San Diego, historians such as Kevin Starr and Carey McWilliams, and polemicists such as Mike Davis. Even most of those whose subject is or has been the L.A. of their own time have taken pains to look ahead. How well have they outlined the future of Los Angeles and Southern California? Let's see. The tone of nonfiction conjectures about the future of Los Angeles generally fall into two categories, elegiac or apocalyptic — and sometimes both: 'utopia or dystopia,' in the words of Davis. Davis was the avatar of the latter approach. The first of his books about Los Angeles, 'City of Quartz' (1990), mostly looked back at the history of the city's development. It was his follow-up, 'Ecology of Fear' (1998), that really attempted to sketch out a future for the city, based on his vision of 'the great unbroken plains of aging bungalows, stucco apartments, and ranch-style homes — as it erodes socially and physically into the twenty-first century.' Davis drew a line from what he saw as 'the current obsession with personal safety and social insulation ... in the face of intractable urban poverty and homelessness, and despite one of the greatest expansions in American business history' in the mid-1990s to explain 'why fear eats the soul of Los Angeles.' He wasn't far wrong. A few years later, I visited the maker of underground nuclear shelters fashioned from corrugated steel at his shop and showroom on the 5 Freeway in Montebello, where he was doing great business for models that started at $78,000 each; 'Yes, paranoia does sell' was how I headlined my column. It still does: Guard dogs, surveillance cameras and sentry-protected neighborhood tracts have proliferated all around the Southland. Davis foresaw the continued development of 'tourist bubbles' — theme park-like 'historical district, entertainment precincts, malls ... partitioned off from the rest of the city' — think developer Rick Caruso's shopping center the Grove, opened in the Fairfax District in 2002, which presents blank or billboarded walls to the outside world, enclosing a Disneyesque landscape of shops and restaurants inconspicuously monitored by security services. ::: As opinion pollsters know, when you ask people what the future will look like, they invariably paint a picture that looks just like the present, only more so: If there's a crime wave when they're being polled, they foretell a world beleaguered by armed gangs; if there's a recession, they expect a world of unrelieved poverty; if it's a period of technological advancement, they foresee a world of flying cars. Writers projecting a future of L.A. tended to fall into the same pattern. The Slovenian transplant Louis Adamic, who had emigrated to the United States in 1913 and settled in the port community of San Pedro, scrutinized Southern California with pitiless objectivity in a 1930 essay titled 'Los Angeles! There she blows!' Adamic mentioned the conviction among Angelenos that their city 'will ultimately — perhaps within the next three or four decades — be the biggest city in the world.' And he acknowledged that 'the place has many great advantages, among the foremost, of course, being Climate, and but a single drawback, which, however, is an extremely serious one — that of water shortage.' Nevertheless, noting that the city's population had doubled over the previous 10 years to nearly 2 million, he confidently predicted that it would number 3 million by 1935. It didn't reach that mark until the 1980s, and it's not the first time, nor the last, that a prediction of the city's future overshot the target. His concern about water, of course, was spot-on. Another writer who extrapolated from what he saw of the Los Angeles of his time was Morrow Mayo, whose 1933 book 'Los Angeles' is quoted elsewhere in The Times' Future of L.A. package. Mayo expressed the opinion that even if 'the territory known as the 'City of Los Angeles'' grew from its then-population of 1.2 million to 4 million or more, he doubted that 'it will ever be permanently the great vibrant, vital, nerve-center of the Pacific coast.' The reason, Mayo wrote, was its climate — 'meant for slow-pulsing life; a climate where man, when he gets adjusted to the environment, takes his siesta in the middle of the day. Go-getterism in this climate does violence to every law of nature.' What kept Los Angeles even marginally vibrant was the steady influx of vigorous immigrants from the East and Midwest. After a few generations under the sun, Mayo concluded, 'it will settle back to normalcy, and become in tune with nature, for man has never yet failed to adjust himself to the climate in which he lives.' Thus did Mayo pioneer the stereotype of the laid-back Angeleno with barely a care in the world. On the other hand, Mayo quoted a fellow prognosticator as finding in the city's industrial districts 'that same peculiarly contented type of workman, the same love of little homes 'across the street from the factory,' the diligence and care for the flowers in the front yard, or the fruit trees and vegetables in the rear, a total lack of the Bohemian spirit, the love of a comfortable, humble existence,' that could be seen in Philadelphia. As a picture of Los Angeles, Mayo wrote, 'I suspect that it is prophetic. 'Los Angeles — the Philadelphia of the West.'' Such miscalculations point to another pitfall facing those who would dare to predict the future of Los Angeles: Change has come so rapidly that any prediction can be confounded within the lifetime of its author. Thus Carey McWilliams, that indefatigable chronicler of the California pageant, wrote in his book 'Southern California Country: An Island on the Land' that the aircraft industry was 'likely to remain in the region and even to expand production.' McWillliams wrote those words in 1946; by 1980, when he died, the industry had crashed in Southern California, entering a long period of retrenchment that ended with Boeing's closing of the region's last commercial aircraft manufacturing plant in 2005. The Long Beach plant's 300 workers were transferred to Boeing's military aircraft assembly line, but that was shut down in 2015, ending an era, as The Times observed, in which the region was. 'once synonymous with the manufacture of aircraft.' The trajectory of the Los Angeles ecology, and by extension that of Southern California and the entire state of California, was the subject of Reisner's 1986 book, 'Cadillac Desert.' He viewed the water politics of the region, quite properly, through the prism of winner-take-all economics. Water was wasted by farmers and urban residents because it was almost free. That was already beginning to change in his time, he observed, but the process would need years, even decades, to play out — if it ever could. 'The West's real crisis is one of inertia, of will, and of myth,' he wrote in the closing pages of 'Cadillac Desert.' Reisner looked ahead, hopefully, to a West that 'might import a lot more meat and dairy products from states where they are raised on rain, rather than dream of importing those states' rain .... A region where people begin to recognize that water left in rivers can be worth a lot more — in revenues, in jobs — than water taken out of the rivers.' 'At some point, perhaps within my lifetime, the American West will go back to the future than forward to the past.' Regrettably, Reisner, who died in 2000, didn't live to see that happen. Whether his hope will ever be fulfilled remains an open question. Perhaps the most penetrating look at the future of Los Angeles and its state came from Peter Schrag, a former editorial page editor at the Sacramento Bee. In his 1998 book 'Paradise Lost,' Schrag sought not simply to foretell the region's future, but to explicate how its future foretold what was in store for the country as a whole. (Its subtitle was 'California's Experience, America's Future.') When he wrote the book, California was in one of its boom phases. It was again 'the driving engine of national economic growth and likely to remain in that position until well into the next century .... Because of foundations laid forty years go ... it is at the forefront of the world's leading-edge technologies and of its creative energy.' (He was right about that, at least up to this moment.) But Schrag also pointed to the state's 'increasingly dysfunctional governmental and fiscal public institutions, the depleted state of its public infrastructure, services, and amenities, the growing gaps between its affluent and its poorer residents, and its pinched social ethos,' which 'hang like dark clouds in the sunny skies.' California had exported to other states the facile low-tax policies of Howard Jarvis and Ronald Reagan's view of government as 'the problem, not the solution.' In addition, Schrag saw that the emergence of social media 'may insure against the power of Big Brother to dominate communications, but they also amplify the power of shared ignorance .... What used to be limited to gossip over the back fence is now spread in milliseconds.' And he foresaw how the changing demographics of California would be replicated nationwide: 'The new kids now crowding into the schools and universities of California — black, brown, Asian — will constitute the majority of the state's workforce, and a good part of the nation's, in the next decade, and forever after,' he wrote. Schrag had his finger on an essential truth about Los Angeles and California that remains true to this day: They're the subject of unending curiosity for readers of history and current affairs no less than for consumers of novels and movies. That has been true since the vision of a land of gold — El Dorado — drew the Spanish conquistadors to these shores. The world wishes to know what L.A. and California are, and where they are headed. Kevin Starr, writing in 1995, understood how that impulse would play out in the decades to come. 'The United States is testing its future through California,' he said in an essay for the website of the California State Library, which he served as state librarian from 1994 to 2004. Establishing California as a 'bellwether state,' he wrote: 'The American people are asking a series of questions which now become the California challenge .... Can the American people turn to positive effect the cultural diversity of a nation in the process of being transformed? ... Can the American people maintain their standards of living and education?' Starr's answer to the questions he posed was a resounding yes! 'In recent times,' he wrote, the American people have turned to California and asked it to create a technology revolution, and California responded .... The American people have turned to California for new models of lifestyle, new ways of enjoying and celebrating the gift of life, and California responded with an outpouring of architecture, landscaping, entertainment, sport and recreation.' The confidence that Starr projected 20 years ago may have faded, and may fade further in the future in Los Angeles and up and down the state. But one thing that probably will remain true is that the region's path into the future will inspire writers to keep peering into their crystal balls, cloudy as they are.
Yahoo
22-02-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Letters to the Editor: A more balanced look at Mike Davis' doomsaying on L.A.
To the editor: Gustavo Arellano's adulatory column on "prophet" Mike Davis is exactly what you'd expect from someone guaranteed to buy into the most dystopian takes on our benighted city. So I doubt that Arellano ever read the blistering takedown of Davis' magnum opus, "City of Quartz," by former Times columnist and critic Christopher Hawthorne back in 2011. Hawthorne derided the book as, among other shortcomings, "overwritten and shamelessly hyperbolic," "in desperate need of ... fact-checking," "sour where it is not curdled" and "densely packed with self-regard." To be fair, it's not an entirely negative review. But it at least has the virtue of balance, something Arellano cannot muster. Jeff Schultz, Los Angeles This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
Los Angeles Times
22-02-2025
- Politics
- Los Angeles Times
Letters to the Editor: A more balanced look at Mike Davis' doomsaying on L.A.
To the editor: Gustavo Arellano's adulatory column on 'prophet' Mike Davis is exactly what you'd expect from someone guaranteed to buy into the most dystopian takes on our benighted city. So I doubt that Arellano ever read the blistering takedown of Davis' magnum opus, 'City of Quartz,' by former Times columnist and critic Christopher Hawthorne back in 2011. Hawthorne derided the book as, among other shortcomings, 'overwritten and shamelessly hyperbolic,' 'in desperate need of ... fact-checking,' 'sour where it is not curdled' and 'densely packed with self-regard.' To be fair, it's not an entirely negative review. But it at least has the virtue of balance, something Arellano cannot muster. Jeff Schultz, Los Angeles
Yahoo
15-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Column: We live in Mike Davis' L.A. — but not the one you think
Hellish wildfires. Whiplash weather. Destructive winds. Debris flows. Torrential rains accenting punishing droughts. Welcome to the Los Angeles Mike Davis predicted. The late urbanist first made waves in the 1990s for forecasting an L.A. that would be one ecological and manmade disaster after another. His work quickly made him controversial among civic boosters, who dismissed him as a negative nabob who didn't want the city to thrive. Today, Davis is one face on the Mt. Rushmore of L.A.'s prophets, alongside Joan Didion, Carey McWilliams and Octavia Butler. His words, more than anyone else's, have been cited by writers and pundits across the world in this annus horribilis where nothing seems to be going right and everything seems to be getting worse. Read more: Mike Davis, 'City of Quartz' author who chronicled the forces that shaped L.A., dies With respect to his fellow titans, none of them ever assailed the poultry industry for bragging about reaping "profit from the influenza-driven restructuring of global chicken production.' That's exactly what Davis wrote in a 2006 book warning about the threat of avian flu, complete with a photo of a menacing white rooster on the cover. Davis is the man of the moment, the person whose work all Angelenos should parse like a secular Talmud — but his premonitions of hellfire and brimstone aren't what we should heed most. The rest of the nation has eagerly waited for Los Angeles to collapse into tribal warfare and anarchy the moment a mega-catastrophe happened. If ever there was a time for that, it would be now, after the Palisades and Eaton fires. While local political leaders have mostly fumbled or squandered the moment, it's regular folks who have risen to the occasion. They have raised hundreds of millions of dollars for recovery efforts via everything from benefit concerts to donation jars at restaurants. Volunteers continue to clean up burn areas and gather supplies, with the promise to fire victims that they will not be abandoned. Welcome to the Los Angeles Mike Davis wanted. As someone who has read most of Davis' work and knew him personally, I can say that his writings were cris de coeur more than lamentations. He was less Jeremiah and more John the Baptist, preparing the way for who would ultimately save L.A.: Us. 'Although I'm famous as a pessimist, I really haven't been pessimistic,' Davis told me in 2022, the last time we saw each other, months before he died of esophageal cancer at 76. 'You know, [my writing has] more been a call to action." To cast him as an apocalyptic wet blanket is a disservice to a writer remembered by friends and family as all heart — a man who had faith that while L.A. would eventually go up in flames, it would emerge from the ashes stronger than ever. 'Mike hated being called a 'prophet of doom,'' said Jon Wiener, a retired UC Irvine history professor who hosts the Nation's weekly podcast and was a co-author of Davis' last book, 'Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties.' 'When he wrote about environmental disasters, he wasn't offering prophecy — he was reporting on the latest in climate science, and considering the human cost of ignoring it.' Even while he was writing "City of Quartz" and "Ecology of Fear," Davis was picking away at 'Set the Night on Fire,' which he invited Wiener to shepherd toward publication. 'He wanted to show that the young people of color of Los Angeles had played a heroic part in fighting for a more equal future for their city' as a way to teach a new generation of activists to not lose hope in even the most dire of times, Wiener said. I asked Wiener what his longtime friend would say about post-fire L.A. 'While hundreds of millions [are] being raised to rebuild big houses in the Palisades and Altadena,' Wiener responded, Davis would remind folks not to forget 'the people who had worked there as gardeners, housekeepers, nannies and day laborers ... [who] are having trouble paying the rent and feeding their kids.' Read more: Advocates gather to demand equitable fire recovery for longtime Altadena residents, immigrants and others Thankfully, Davis wouldn't have had to say that. The National Day Laborer Organizing Network, the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles and others have stepped up to help those affected, even as some of their volunteers have lost jobs and housing. Social media remains packed with fundraisers to buy new equipment for gardeners, patronize food vendors and find jobs for the unemployed. Such efforts bring comfort to Davis' widow, Alessandra Moctezuma, and their son, James Davis. In a phone call from their home in San Diego, the two told me how they've grieved the tragedy in L.A. from afar. Moctezuma attended Palisades High and hiked above Altadena with Davis while he was writing 'Ecology of Fear' in the mid-1990s. On social media, she saw photos of her alma mater in flames, posts from friends who lost everything in Palisades and videos of hills burned beyond recognition. 'He loved it up there,' she said, remembering that they lived in Pasadena, just seven minutes from Eaton Canyon. 'I was already feeling all the emotions from that, and that's when people started sharing Mike's articles.' She and James are grateful that people are citing Davis as a way to cope with the calamities of the past month — but the two urge readers to go beyond his best-known quotes and works. 'The problem is a lot of people misinterpret a lot of my dad's work as schadenfreude, when it's really not,' James said. The 21-year-old feels his father was, above all, trying to warn about the dangers of unchecked development, especially in more recent writings. In the pages of the London Review of Books and the Nation, Davis tracked how California had changed during his lifetime, from a state with a wildfire season centered mostly on wilderness areas to one where the menace of conflagrations is year-round — and everywhere. James recalled a 2021 documentary in which a gaunt, gravelly-voiced Davis told an interviewer, 'Could Los Angeles burn? The urban fabric itself? Absolutely,' over shots of burning suburban tracts that looked eerily like what happened in Altadena and the Palisades. 'He talks about not just the possibility but inevitability about how there could be a giant fire burning down Sunset Boulevard,' James said. 'That's exactly what happened.' With his love for Southern California and its people, Davis would 'be happy to see all the mutual aid happening," James said. "That's the kind of stuff he advocated for.' Moctezuma, an artist and curator, agreed. Her students at Mesa College filled four big U-Hauls with supplies and drove to Pasadena. 'Just seeing everyone sharing, that's one of the things Mike always talked about,' Moctezuma said. 'The kindness of people and importance of organizing — and the next step is organizing ourselves to help ourselves." She recounted one of her late husband's favorite Irish proverbs: Under the shelter of one another, people live. 'I'm sure he'd have a lot of things to say right now,' Moctezuma continued. 'He'd probably start looking into all sorts of things — the response from firefighters and politicians, regular people. Everyone would be interviewing him." Then she got quiet. 'He'd be heartbroken to see everything burnt down. And if his health was good, he'd be up there helping.' Sign up for Essential California for news, features and recommendations from the L.A. Times and beyond in your inbox six days a week. This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
