This is pretty messed up. I’ve been re-reading James Ellroy’s ‘The Black Dahlia’, the first novel in his L.A. Quartet and one that I haven’t revisited in many years. Thus, it’s fair to say that I am fully immersed in the post WW2 L.A. noir of it all. Now, YouTube
My last two posts have shown Los Angeles in the 1970s, a place enshrouded by smog and filled with traffic. Now lets go back thirty years earlier to the late 1940s and take a nice, slow, boring (but fascinating at the same time) drive around Sherman Oaks, in the San
Apropos of Monday’s post featuring some fascinatingly mundane (yes I just jammed those two words together and did so on purpose) footage of L.A. in the 70s, here’s more of the same but with a tourists touch. We get some nice nasty Freeway shots, a little Sunset Strip, a tad
At some point in 1973 the local Los Angeles television station KTLA (channel 5) sent a camera crew out to gather footage for a now forgotten news segment on gas prices. The crew returned with the above four plus minutes of dailies. Was it ever turned into an actual segment?
My family moved from New York City to Los Angeles in 1969 when I was five years old. The house my parents bought was at the top of Laurel Canyon and Mulholland Drive. In terms of public schools this meant that I was able to go to schools either in
Dig this nifty mini-doc (27 packed minutes) that is not about Raymond Chandler per se. It’s about the corrupt doings of Los Angeles in the 1930s and how they inspired and impacted what Chandler wrote about as his mid-life career as a writer was launched (he’d been an executive at
Yesterday I posted about Burton Holmes, travel guru and the inventor of the ‘travelogue’–movies showing the public exotic lands that they could never hope to travel too. The post shows views of Hollywood in the early 1930s, by then Holmes adopted home base. Above is another reel of Hollywood-based Holmes
Nothing transports me back in time to my childhood quite as much as watching old local TV commercials and station I.D.’s. This is clearly the result of spending way too much time staring at the tube as a kid but what the hell–it was back in the days before children
I was surprised to read in Randy Skervedt’s excellent book ‘Laurel & Hardy–The Magic Behind The Movies’ that ‘The Finishing Touch’ (1928) was considered something of a disappointment in its day–Stan Laurel, a notoriously discerning craftsman, apparently felt that it could have been much better. Five years later some of
Today’s tour of Culver City in the 1920s also includes the silent L&H classic ‘Big Business’. Shot in 1929, the classic short gives us charming views of the slow-to-be-built Cheviot Hills/Culver City adjacent area, with many empty lots and a few houses under construction that can be seen in the