Los Angeles Plays Itself

THE NARRATOR OF Thom Andersen's new movie has a chip the size of Los Angeles on his shoulder. Make no mistake: I mean Los Angeles, not L.A. During a brief, potent passage that browses the title credits of movies that have opted for common shorthand – from William Friedkin's To Live and Die in L.A. and Steve Martin's L.A. Story to little-known cheapies such as L.A. Crackdown and Fashionably L.A. – the gruff voice-over of Andersen's Los Angeles Plays Itself cringes at the practice of reducing a mammoth urban sprawl to a mere pair of initials. "Only a city with an inferiority complex would allow it," the doc's surly commentator (fellow filmmaker Encke King) grumbles.

There's more at play here than the difference between 2 letters and 10, and play is the operative word. Ironically, Andersen's nearly three-hour documentary – an epic yet personal attempt to visually rebuild a city that's been endlessly reduced and destroyed by Hollywood – takes its title from another film that favors the diminutive term for Los Angeles, Fred Halsted's L.A. Plays Itself. In fact, Halsted's is a rare L.A. movie that Andersen likes; deeming it a "gay porn masterpiece," Andersen's narrator links it to non-hardcore experimental works and traces Halsted's lost-Eden sexual panorama, which spans from idyllic couplings among water bugs to rougher stuff in ghetto terrain.

"It is striking that there's this pastoral tradition that links Maya Deren and Warhol and Fred Halsted," Andersen – whose own delivery is marked by long, dramatic pauses – says during a recent interview. "Halsted's movie is more interesting than what I show. It's a semi-documentary that has interviews and testaments from hustlers that are quite touching." In contrast, the testimonial given by Los Angeles Plays Itself's narrator is a call to arms: it lands blows against Hollywood's historical and geographical mythmaking while celebrating those lesser-known filmmakers (such as Halsted) who have faithfully surveyed Los Angeles's landscape and inhabitants.

As idiosyncratic as it is encyclopedic, Los Angeles Plays Itself picks fights with canonical classics (Chinatown, Double Indemnity) while praising cheap obscurities (1973's Messiah of Evil, for example). Its narration is stubbornly literalist, berating car-chase scenes that leap neighborhoods with a single edit, and applauding films that obey maps, such as Kiss Me Deadly and H.B. Halicki's original Gone in 60 Seconds. Reviewing L.A.-set noirs, action blockbusters, and science fiction dystopias, Andersen's film strips away their decaying fictions to foreground the architectural and socioeconomic histories of the settings being exploited. This practice, it suggests, should be adopted by filmmakers and -watchers alike.

"I guess I was liberated by the idea of the fake documentary," Andersen says, when asked about his approach. "I was influenced by the voice-over of I Stand Alone by Gaspar Noe – this guy ranting about what he hated. His rant is insane, but it implicates you in its worldview somehow. I imagined an over-the-top tone, but in the end it wound up containing thoughts I'd stand behind."

Reversible

Los Angeles Plays Itself doesn't stand alone among Andersen's works in taking on the film industry; 1995's Red Hollywood examines the McCarthy-era Communist witch-hunts (a topic he can't resist returning to in his new movie, renaming the Hollywood Walk of Fame the "Walk of Shame" as the camera looks down upon informer Elia Kazan's star). The idea for his latest project stems from a lecture on Curtis Hanson's L.A. Confidential he gave to a class at California Institute of the Arts. Later, when a number of programmers – including San Francisco Cinematheque's former executive director Steve Anker – expressed interest in hosting a presentation about Los Angeles films, Andersen decided on the doc format.

The critical intent and persnickety spirit of the resulting opus bears some likeness to Mark Rappaport's imagined autobiographies of Jean Seberg and Rock Hudson, but whereas Rappaport strips away celebrity machinery to expose a person's hidden facets, Andersen hopes to reveal an entire city. He divides this gargantuan undertaking into three sections (with an intermission after the second) that examine Hollywood's use of Los Angeles as a background, as a character, and, finally, as a subject.

If buildings were credited like cast members, the first third of Los Angeles Plays Itself could provide valuable source material for the Internet Movie Database. Editor Yoo Seung-Hyun's flip-book approach showcases the myriad roles certain structures – the Bradbury Building, Frank Lloyd Wright's Ennis House – play in Oscar winners and straight-to-video stinkers. Viewed through Andersen's peevish eye, frequent drug den and pimp palace typecasting provides proof Hollywood has a grudge against modernist innovators such as Richard Neutra and John Lautner (a replica of Lautner's Garcia House was built for, and destroyed in, Lethal Weapon 2).

The legacies behind this typecasting are explored in Los Angeles Plays Itself's midsection, which sets up an East Coast versus West Coast turf war. "[James] Sanders's book Celluloid Skyline makes it clear that a lot of writers of Hollywood movies came from New York, and for them, New York is the City, and Los Angeles is a kind of tabula rasa," Andersen explains, adding that "what Sanders has to say about Los Angeles is ignorant and offensive." Meticulous in its critique of New York-to-Los Angeles and truth-to-pulp-fiction transpositions, Andersen's movie is equally barbed in its assessment of European directors who view Los Angeles from the privileged confines of Hollywood's studio system. "High tourist" works such as Antonioni's Zabriskie Point, Jacques Demy's Model Shop, and Jacques Deray's Outside Man fare better; Vertigo devotees may be dismayed when Los Angeles Plays Itself's narrator deems Alfred Hitchcock a "low tourist" for the crime of preferring San Francisco.

Adopting a sniperlike discursive perspective on Hollywood, Andersen's doc doesn't rigorously follow its own structural guidelines, sometimes straying into overfamiliar alleys (James Dean's legend, for example). Yet many of its highlights stem from this digressive urge. A sociopolitical passage about disaster movies turns into a comic portrait of George Kennedy's can-do smirk. More pointedly, Los Angeles Plays Itself notes the crippling effect automotive breakdown has on the protagonists of Chinatown and Sunset Boulevard. Once Jake Gittes loses his car, he remains "one or two steps behind the action," but even that symbolic castration is preferable to the fate of sound-alike predecessor Joe Gillis, whose blowout strands him in the mansion where he will die.

Andersen's urban portrait takes time to spank fellow encylopedist and locally based British expat David Thomson not once but twice, mocking a Thomson quote about the Hollywood sign and sarcastically reciting his fiction-as-fact take on Chinatown's dirty water. Because Los Angeles Plays Itself is so relentlessly, expansively quarrelsome, it's odd that few voices have angrily answered back. Asked if he's heard from Hollywood, the doc maker says Brian DePalma is reputed to have enjoyed Los Angeles Plays Itself, and Universal president Ron Meyer requested a tape. "He called me later," Andersen remarks, "and said he really appreciated the movie, being a native of Los Angeles."

The sole public exception thus far might be bicoastal novelist Gary Indiana, who recently contributed a patronizing assessment in Artforum. Indiana's essay collection, Let It Bleed, contains a piece on the LAPD Four, titled "L.A. Plays Itself," that opens with a sardonic description of downtown Los Angeles's postmodern institutional monoliths; his Artforum review pointedly spells out New York's name while using initials for Los Angeles. There's a rich irony to his face value-irritated interpretation of Andersen's narrative tone, considering his own writing is frequently even more scathing and cantankerous. "As for the movies that [Indiana] says get Los Angeles right," Andersen remarks, "I would say what unites them would be their misanthropic quality."

Because Los Angeles Plays Itself's narration is almost as sprawling as the cityscape it pays tribute to, one can't help but wonder what Andersen was forced to leave out. "I wanted to comment on movies about the film industry," he says, in reference to one abandoned section. "Basically, I was going to say that film-industry movies are like war movies in what they purport to be. War movies always call themselves antiwar movies when in fact they always glamorize war, and so it is with industry movies – they claim to critique Hollywood but in actuality do the reverse. In The Player, the writers and creative rebels are ridiculous fools, and the agent played by Tim Robbins is intelligent – he's the center of identification. In Sunset Boulevard, Gloria Swanson is demented, and when she goes to the studio, [producer-director] Cecil B. Demille is quite considerate and courteous."

The exiles

In correcting Hollywood's distorted visions of Los Angeles landmarks, Andersen is also forced to face changes wrought by a breed of moneymaker even more ruthless than the studio executive: the real estate developer. This predicament might seem like grounds for nostalgia ("a feeling I mistrust," Andersen asserts, mid-interview) and yet more complaint, but in fact it generates Los Angeles Plays Itself's strongest positive element: stirring endorsements of obscure films that recover stages in the lives of the city and its people. One such example is Kent McKenzie's haunting Exiles, an improv-based portrait of Native Americans living in the now-demolished Bunker Hill neighborhood.

The Sundance Institute's programs haven't produced a look at urban Indian existence that approaches the wounded moodiness of McKenzie's movie, which hops drunkenly to the Ritz Cafe and then despondently to a movie house before climaxing in a hilltop ceremonial gathering that devolves into violence. Made in 1958 and released in 1961, The Exiles should be considered the West Coast counterpart to John Cassavetes's trailblazing Shadows. (Also, the influence of Robert Frank's The Americans is evident in its portraiture.)

The Exiles is one of 30-some movies the Pacific Film Archive is showing along with Andersen's documentary in June. Los Angeles Plays Itself is nothing if not an archival work, so it's fitting the PFA has organized a monthlong series complete with program notes that sometimes match Andersen's narration in terms of pithy commentary. Their selections allow viewers to linger at length over quirky delights Andersen's doc only has time to skim past, such as 1959's cinema verité forerunner The Savage Eye, a waking bad dream that allowed then-nascent cinematographer Haskell Wexler (with help from Helen Levitt) to render Los Angeles's gambling halls, wrestling rings, and squalid motels with the same morbid glee that Weegee brought to New York crime terrain. Hyperbolic and howler-laden, The Savage Eye's script consists of voice-over exchanges between a despairing, dying divorcée and a pitiless urban god. "I've got a sin that won't wash off – the sin of loveless love," the divorcée cries. "Masturbation by proxy!" the city god answers.

The neorealism of The Exiles and, to a lesser degree, The Savage Eye returned with greater intensity in the late '70s and early '80s, thanks to a trio of undersung filmmakers – Haile Gerima, Billy Woodberry, and Charles Burnett – whose renaissance works provide the material for Los Angeles Plays Itself's impassioned final stretch. A clip from Woodberry's Bless Their Little Hearts (1983), pairing Little Esther's honeyed whiskey blues with images of a closed-down tire factory, distills an era's racial and economic turmoil. But it is Gerima's blistering 1975 Bush Mama – which filters the city through one woman's growing radical consciousness – that provokes the doc's fiercest appreciation. "Who knows the city? Those who walk and ride the buses," the narrator declares, directing his wrath at Joan Didion's rich-white-person assertion that nobody walks in Los Angeles.

Andersen attended UCLA's film school before Woodberry, but he remembers Burnett as "very quiet and self-effacing. He used to wear these overalls, and I remember thinking of him as this hick from Mississippi." Another fellow pupil, however, was clearer in intent – it's safe to say that his actions as a student provided an example for the work as a teacher Andersen is doing today. "I was particularly conscious of Haile Gerima," the man behind Los Angeles Plays Itself's angry vision says. "He was older than most of the students and had strong ideas. He was militant. He would often come to programs that featured visiting Hollywood artists" – he pauses – "and denounce them."

'Los Angeles Plays Itself' screens Thurs/3, 7 p.m., and Sun/13, 5:30 p.m., Pacific Film Archive, 2575 Bancroft Way, Berk. $4-$8. (510) 642-1124. Also Fri/4, 7 p.m., Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Screening Room, 701 Mission, S.F. $4-$7. (415) 978-2787. Thom Andersen introduces the Thurs/3 and Fri/4 screenings.

'Los Angeles Plays Itself' film series runs June 6-29 at PFA. Andersen introduces screenings of The Savage Eye (Thurs/3, 5:30 p.m.) and Joseph Losey's M (Sat/5, 4:50 and 9:30 p.m.).