Code 818
There's more to L.A. movies than the 213, 310, 323 ...
By Andy Klein
How many articles have been written about the "best Los Angeles movies"? Or the "best Hollywood movies"? Hell, how many of those articles have I written?
Answers: Many. Many. More than a few.
Which is why this year we're going to ignore the usual suspects - which do not, by the way, include The Usual Suspects. So right away let's rule out: Double Indemnity (1944), The Big Sleep (1946), D.O.A. (1950), Sunset Blvd. (1950), Kiss Me Deadly (1955), Rebel Without a Cause (1955), The Loved One (1965), Point Blank (1967), The Long Goodbye (1973), Blade Runner (1982), L.A. Story (1991), L.A. Confidential (1997), and, most of all, Chinatown (1974). I love them all - they really are the best Los Angeles movies - but screw it, let's get some new (or some more obscure) blood in here.
As all denizens know, Los Angeles is more than 310, 323, and (the greatgranddaddy of local area codes) 213, within whose bounds most of the above films take place. There are also 818, 626, and 562; soon there will be the confusing 424, which will break down the notion of area codes being associated with an actual, you know, area.
So this year, let us think "Valley," as in San Fernando Valley, as in 818. This lovely region is at the center of the plot of Chinatown, even if most of the action is south of the hills. But its real cinema fame began with Manis's first great hit, Every Which Way But Loose (1978), popularly (and mistakenly) considered a Clint Eastwood film, even though Eastwood is essentially the hirsute Manis's straight man. It's fun, but it's not one of the great 818 films.
The climactic encounter in Peter Bogdanovich's barely released first feature, Targets (1968), was the Sepulveda Drive-In in Van Nuys; and much of the rest of the movie took place in Valley locations. The locale was implicated in the actions of its antagonist, an all-American boy (Tim O'Kelly) who becomes a random sniper, picking people off from behind the drive-in's screen. It was an emblem of sheer banality.
The concept of "The Valley" went national in the wake of Frank Zappa's fluke hit single, "Valley Girl," featuring his daughter Moon Unit as the voice of the title character. Immediately, Amy Heckerling's Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982) - which is one of the greats - exploited the Sherman Oaks Galleria as a location. On its heels - and in the same league - came Martha Coolidge's Valley Girl (1983), which also had the distinction of being Nicolas Cage's first leading role.
In both The Player (1992) and Short Cuts (1993), Robert Altman ventured all over the place, including 818, and, in Pulp Fiction (1994), Quentin Tarantino popularized the idea of referring to the region simply by the area code. ("If Jimmie's ass ain't home, I don't know what the fuck we're going to do, man. 'Cause I ain't got no other partners in 8-1-8.")
But it's Paul Thomas Anderson who has made the Valley his personal turf in Boogie Nights (1997), Magnolia (1999), and Punch-Drunk Love (2002). In the first of these, the subject matter determined the location, the Valley being the nation's pornography center. But Magnolia was Anderson's wide-ranging homage to his birthplace, making its Altman-like multi-character narrative center around the titular street. It's weird and daring and filled with brilliant stuff and unbelievably dense patterns, but also exhausting. Anderson seemed to be experimenting by shooting every moment for the first two hours as though it's the climax to the whole film; then, right when normally a movie would be cranking up the pace, two-thirds through, he slowed things down. Still, it's absolutely one of a kind.
It's impossible to overlook John Herzfeld's 1996 2 Days in the Valley, the best film in a career that has been, to put it politely, "spotty." In fact, 2 Days in the Valley is funny and altogether entertaining - with a plot so complicated it can't be described; like Anderson, Herzfeld intercuts four or five separate story threads, each following a different group of characters. Even though we can be pretty sure that everyone will eventually converge, some of the connections still come as surprises. The fabulous ensemble cast includes Danny Aiello as a washed-up hit man; James Spader as, big surprise, a loathsome yuppie; Teri Hatcher as an Olympic athlete; Gregg Cruttwell as a snotty art dealer; Eric Stoltz and Jeff Daniels as cops; Paul Mazursky as a Hollywood hasbeen; and Charlize Theron, getting her first screen credit, as a butt-kicking babe.
Mulholland Drive may be the meeting place of Valley and City, but it's Lost Highway (1998) in which David Lynch uses the Valley in a meaningful way. With typically Lynchean oddness, the plot centers on a jazz musician (Bill Pullman), who lives in the Hollywood Hills and who, after maybe/maybe not murdering his wife (Patricia Arquette), simply transforms, without any real explanation, into a Gen-X auto mechanic (Balthazar Getty) from Van Nuys. The film plays with the ways in which these two worlds are similar, even as they are culturally much further apart than their literal distance. In real life, they may be connected by the 405 and the 101, but in Lynch's world, the highway that links them is lost from human view.
For an examination of the iconography of the city, the definitive work to date is Thom Andersen's impossible-to-rent documentary, Los Angeles Plays Itself (2004) - as provocative a movie as I've seen in the last couple years. It forces you to reconsider all your assumptions about Hollywood, film, Los Angeles, and L.A.
Andersen's movie is most aptly characterized as a "film essay." With the exception of some inserts of still photos and newspaper headlines, the visuals are almost entirely clips from commercial fiction films - somewhere in the vicinity of 200 different titles, including (I think) almost every movie mentioned herein.
Among these is writer-director Steve de Jarnatt's apocalyptic suspense film Miracle Mile. On its 1989 release, it struck me as a maddeningly frustrating combination of intelligent, stylish filmmaking and incoherent plotting. Nearly two decades later, though, its dreamlike images are still with me; the style has outlived the plot problems. Anthony Edwards plays a musician visiting L.A., who falls in love in the afternoon, then finds out that the world is about to end. He spends the wee hours of the morning trying to gather up his new girlfriend, go to the heliport atop a nearby building, and make it to the airport, in hopes of flying to a less likely nuclear target than Los Angeles. The inside joke for Angelenos who know the turf is that, not only does he fail to leave town, but he never gets more than a block or two from where he started. The La Brea Tar Pits are used as an apt metaphor - the film is like a nightmare that keeps sucking us down, no matter how much we struggle to wake up.
I realize that Miracle Mile, by definition, never comes close to the Valley, but I wanted to stray here for a personal reason. In the film, the heliport is supposed to be atop the very building in which CityBeat is located ... but not for very much longer. Edwards may not have escaped, but we're going to.
Published: 08/03/2006
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