Los Angeles After the Strike

Before I get into it, I’d like to thank everyone who took the time to read last week’s blog. I was delighted with all the kind messages of support you sent me. I’d like to take this opportunity to thank Madelyn Butts, my girlfriend of five years and a constant supporter of mine, for pushing me to work on my blog and for reminding me, in my moments of insecurity, of my worth. And I’d like to thank Davis Thompson, the brains behind this operation, for encouraging me, for making this website, and for operating the Instagram account. I’m truly fortunate to have such generous and loving people in my corner.

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L.A. After the Strike

Or Fragments from a Broken City

It’s been almost a year since I was last in Los Angeles. The weather is the same—hot. The breeze still carries the brine from the Pacific. Palm trees still line the streets, and people still sweep the courtyards of Spanish-style bungalows. There are the arroyos and the canyons, the hills that rise like lumps of sugar. The air is fragrant with jasmine bushes.

Advertisements for television shows and movies are everywhere. Billboards for House of Dragon, Succession, Mission Impossible, and Indiana Jones stand above the traffic-jammed streets. Benches at bus stops bear advertisements for The Last of Us and Atlanta. Everything looks the same. But it doesn’t feel the same.

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When I think of Los Angeles, I sometimes think of the Doors, Joni Mitchell, Gram Parsons, the Mamas and Papas, the Byrds. I sometimes think of that electric canyon sound that was so revolutionary in the 60s and 70s. I sometimes think of music. But it’s wrong to do so. Los Angeles is first and foremost a city of film. Everything—all of its buildings, houses, skate parks, hospitals, and dispensaries—is founded on film, on a substrate of 35mm cameras, dollies, booms, and layers and layers of scripts. And as a city built upon film, the writer’s strike should be seen as seismic—an event that shakes the city’s very foundations.

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Early on in my trip, I walked up and down Venice Beach and watched sweaty arm-pad clad men and women slamming and scraping their skateboards around the park. Then I drove down Sunset, hunched over the car’s dashboard, my upturned eyes taking in every building I passed. Malibu was an afternoon jaunt. I stood on a nondescript Malibu beach and watched grey waves crashing along the shore. I went into a nondescript Malibu coffee shop and ordered an Americano, then sat in a park and watched a trio of musicians cobble together a discordant jazz song. I did a lot of touristy things. But not every day was an adventure. Some days I spent inside watching movies.

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In a Lonely Place is an overlooked film. I had overlooked it, sort of. When I had watched it years before, I was a sophomore in college and had been drunk, so I didn’t have the clearest memory of it. My memory of the film was of fast-talking men and women, of seedy rooms soaked with shadows. It’s a noir movie. I wasn’t far off.

As luck would have it, I watched, or re-watched, In a Lonely Place during one of those days when the Californian heat was too oppressive, and the need for shelter and dark entertainment far outweighed any desire for adventure.

In the film, Humphrey Bogart stars as a violently capricious screenwriter who’s suspected of murdering a young woman. Gloria Graham, at her sensuous best, plays his neighbor who happens to be an aspiring actress. The two become romantically involved. Their happiness seems complete. But questions over Bogart’s possible role in the murder of the young girl persist. His anger, hair-triggered and savage, make his guilt appear all the more certain. Their relationship, once marked by leisurely bliss, sours.

The film was released through Bogart’s production company, Santana Productions. At the time, big studios were worried about the emergence of such production companies, so much so that Paramount refused to loan Santana Productions Lauren Bacall for the film. This must have stung Bogart. Lauren Bacall was his wife.

In a Lonely Place was shot on location in L.A. There’s a scene early on in the film where Bogart and the young woman who is later murdered discuss a book that Bogart’s supposed to be adapting into a script. The girl says to him, “I used to think that actors made up their own lines.” And that’s just it, that’s the heart of the matter, that’s why the Directors Guild was able to hash out a contract with the studios so quickly while the writers were left squeezing their pens and pencils in impotent anger. People like to imagine that Tom Cruise or Meryl Streep or Margot Robbie are just talking, are just making up their lines as they go. Writers are the unpleasant reality, the fly in the ointment. It’s nicer to conceive of Harrison Ford, a brusque, handsome man whose hobby is flying planes, as the person behind Indiana Jones. Who wants to believe that George Lucas, pale, pudgy, and bespectacled, is behind the great action hero? Nobody not named George Lucas.

While we’re watching a movie, we’re somewhat conscious of the fact that it’s not real. Part of us knows it’s make believe, but we choose to divest ourselves of our more rational frame of mind, we choose to suspend our disbelief. The dark room, the images flashing in rapid sequence on the screen, flashing so rapidly, in fact, that we perceive the discrete images as continuous motion. It’s all an illusion—an illusion that seduces us.

We see the actors. We know that they’re a part of the filmmaking operation. We know deep down that there’s a powerful, shadowy person behind the camera, calling action and cut and that this person is the director. We know that the director is an important figure—an almost omnipotent force on set. And we know, even deeper down, that there is the studio, amorphous and abstract, and that the studio pulls all the strings. But what of the writers—the men and women who first breathe life into these stories. “I used to think that actors made up their own lines.” Aye, there’s the rub.

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On a sultry Thursday afternoon, I made the 95-or-so mile trip out to Santa Barbara in under three hours. The rental car, a small four-cylinder sedan, didn’t have much oomph. But that was fine. It gave me an opportunity to focus on the landscape flashing by outside my window. The Pacific Ocean was magnificent. It glittered beside the road. For five or so minutes, I tried to nail what shade of blue it was before settling on a kind of bruised black-blue color.

Santa Barbara itself was not as interesting as the drive. There were one or two exciting sights—the newspaper’s office, the hotel—but the main street depressed me. You have neat stores there, yes, but you also have your Starbuckses, 7/11s, and Tj Maxxs. And as soon as a Starbucks bellies its way into a main street, it’s all over. As soon as a Starbucks makes inroads on a main street, it’s time for the moms and pops and their mom and pop stores to pack it up. Tj Maxxs and 7/11s will follow. And soon after there will be Domino’s Pizzas and an Arby’s. Starbucks is a corporate banshee. And Starbucks has had its own explosive battle with its labor force, and seeing this Starbucks, its off-white exterior, and green awning on the idyllic Santa Barbara main street reminded me of the writer’s strike.

I bought a coffee in a convenience store, walked around for 30 minutes or so, and then got back in the car. I got back on the road.

On the ride back, I listened to the radio. The BBC station spoke about heat waves and indictments. And the strike, of course. Always the strike. The news anchor spoke in a low and breathy voice. The Pacific Ocean glittered beside me, a kind of bruised black-blue color. It was heaven, almost.

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In this city, people talk about filmmaking with the ardor of people arguing over politics. Impassioned discussions about film and filmmaking are everywhere. Phrases like “blocking,” “anamorphic lenses,” “written on spec” are bandied about. On the pebbly trails that wind up Mount Hollywood to Griffith Observatory, people talk about summer blockbusters. At a restaurant on Montana Avenue, a moleskin-toting man at the table next to me told an older man that he was interested in writing “intelligent” television. And he was so carried away with his theories about intelligent television that he hardly touched his tuna tartare. My Uber driver breathlessly told me that he was a screenwriter, that he wrote action, war, and adventure films. At the Erewhon on Wilshire Boulevard, Madelyn and I stood in line, waiting for a smoothie. Two people next to us discussed favored lighting techniques, how to diffuse light, how to bounce it. In Los Angeles, you could ask a man in a hardhat with a sledgehammer about the comparative virtues of shotgun microphones and lavaliers, and there’s the very real possibility that he would provide you with a very detailed, a very informed answer.

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Restaurants felt different. Restaurants Madelyn and I had enjoyed last year. I ordered the same things, and the food was the same. But there was something decidedly plaintive about my burger this time around. There was something off. Coffee shops were somehow more somber. Even the coffee-shop din of cups rattling on porcelain saucers, of small metal spoons being tapped on the rims of cups—it was less musical than before. There was no harmony. Baristas appeared listless. They didn’t bother making perfunctory remarks on the brutal heat outside. There was something off. Whatever it was, it was in the air. Pretty soon I felt off. Images obtruded themselves on my brain; images that were divorced from their surroundings; images that were stark and indelible. Images like:

Amber afternoon sunlight. Santa Monica’s sun-drenched streets. Fishermen on the pier. Mist-wrapped Santa Monica Mountains. Red-tile roofs in the sun. Ankle-high grass. Blue Buses. Griffith Observatory’s shiny bald head. Murals of Elvis, of Mick Jagger, of The Beatles, of Marilyn Monroe. Murals of Jim Morrison. Downtown flooded with homeless. Tattered clothes. Broken tents. Syringes on the ground.

I tried to make sense of the images, tried to find some narrative through-line in them. But I couldn’t. The images defied organization. They appeared in a choppy rhythm, like when the frame rate of a film drops below 24fps and the motion is no longer smooth, but jerky, and the illusion of continuous motion is shattered.

I needed to reorient myself, get back into a rhythm of sorts. I started going on long walks in the morning. In the morning, it was quiet. Blades of grass were beaded with dew. Lizards warmed themselves in patches of sunlight. There was a chicken coop somewhere near the house, and the chickens flapped their wings and clucked—probably clucked about film and filmmaking.

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One Sunday evening, with not much going on and a few dollars to spare Madelyn and I went to the movies. It was a theater we had visited the year before, and it was built by an aircraft company in 1940. Aptly, the theater is named the Aero, and it’s in Santa Monica. When we went there the year before, we saw a double-feature. The night was a tribute to the on-and-off screen romance of Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. They showed The Big Sleep and To Have and To Have Not. It was a packed house, and to my surprise, the audience was not only old people. It was a solid mix of old people and young people.

Before the movie began, I remember a Howard Hawks biographer spoke to the audience about Hawks’s pioneering direction and his work in the screwball comedy genre. A couple of days prior, the director Peter Bogdanovich had passed. The Hawks biographer told us that Bogdanovich was a patron of the theater’s, that he loved to attend its screenings of Hawks’s films. There was almost a collective sigh of grief from the audience.

This year, on the Sunday in question, Madelyn and I drove over to the theater in Santa Monica to see a movie. They were playing Fellini’s 8 ½, a picture I’m crazy about, one that I’ve seen many times on my T.V. at home, but here was my chance to see it in a theater, to see a glossy 35mm print of it, to see Marcello Mastroianni with his salt-and-pepper hair on the big screen. Here was my chance to re-establish my connection with the city. Even if everything else felt off, the Aero, I was certain, would feel the same.

We were running late, a habit of mine, and parked a few blocks away. I wasn’t too worried about the time. They’d have somebody stand in front of the audience, like last time, and talk about the film, like last time. They would tell the audience about the film’s origins, about Fellini’s creative crisis, his ability to turn his crisis into one of cinema’s greatest tributes to the travails and triumphs of the creative process. They would comment on the film’s title, how 8 ½ represents the number of films Fellini had made up to that point—seven features and two shorts. Montana Ave was before us. We walked toward it, turned the corner, and saw a long line poking out from the theater’s entrance. I couldn’t believe it. I asked a woman toward the back of the line if the line was for 8 ½. “Yes,” she said. “It’s supposed to be the greatest film about film.”

The film was sold out. The theater’s manager, his forehead beaded with sweat, shouted at the line that there were no more seats together. He waved his hands above his head to gather everyone’s attention. Couples, undismayed, split up and went into the theater. The manager went back inside, then came back out. There were no more seats now, he shouted. People could stand if they wanted to. And the line marched forward and into the theater. People were willing to stand for the two-and-a-half-hour film. This is the pulse of movie-going. The urge to see movies remains alive and healthy. Forget all the talk about streaming versus theaters, large screens versus small, and think of only the medium itself—movies. People still want movies. People still love movies. So studios need to ink a deal with the writers. The writers are the very men and women who are responsible for these stories, for the theaters, the premiers, the pomp, and Los Angeles itself. It all began with some lonely soul scribbling away on a piece of paper.

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On one of my early morning walks, I came across two coyotes, snarling and black-eyed, standing in the road. For a moment, I thought they were wolves. And for a moment, that would have Darwin scratching his evolved pate, I didn’t think about survival. I thought about another traveler on a lonesome road who encountered a wolf. Dante in Dante’s Inferno. That’s the power of storytelling. Stories define us. They are fundamental to our existence, so fundamental that we think of them in moments of desperation—like when one is confronted by two slavering coyotes. And so it follows that those who tell the stories are fundamental to our existence, too. They can’t be replaced. Their profession is indispensable, especially indispensable in a town like L.A., where everyone talks about film.

I hope that the writers and the studios are able to resolve their differences. A deal needs to be made. Writers feel like their livelihood is at stake. The studios, likewise, feel threatened, but studios have always felt under siege, and they react by strong-arm tactics like publishing their offer to the WGA, which they did on Tuesday night and which is profoundly at odds with bargaining decorum, or by refusing to loan Bogart his own wife for his film.

67% of Americans support the writer’s strike. I hope for the sake of the writers that an equitable deal is made. I hope for the sake of film and television audiences that a deal is made. And I hope for the sake of the city of Los Angeles that a deal is made. For until a deal is made, Los Angeles remains a beautiful but broken land.