Designing Los Angeles: An Interview with Richard Sylbert

At the same time that Los Angeles was beginning to discover itself as the foremost postwar American city, the Hollywood film industry was discovering contemporary Los Angeles as a major subject. Chief among the institutional practices facilitating the use of Los Angeles was the general increase in shooting on actual locations that accompanied the breakdown of the studio system shortly after the war. Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly (1955), with its numerous L.A. views—a gleaming moderne gas station, a hospital in the late International architecture style ubiquitous in the period, Angel’s Flight in operation, tenements on Bunker Hill, ordinary L.A. commercial streets and residential neighborhoods, a dynamic overhead shot of a traffic-filled six-lane boulevard—is a landmark in this regard. Almost as important was the introduction of improved color film stocks in the early sixties that yielded softer, less saturated colors without loss of resolution, and were considerably less expensive than existing stocks. Between 1967 and 1974 more than a dozen important feature films set in Los Angeles were released (this was the first major wave). All but one were in color and all made extensive use of actual settings. Additionally, they were part and parcel of the new American cinema movement, ¹ which is to say, made under semi-autonomous production arrangements and thematically and stylistically iconoclastic, especially along the lines of the French New Wave.

Most of the films of this first Los Angeles wave were auteurist vehicles that, by and large, played to limited or specialized audiences—Peter Bogdanovich’s Targets (1968); John Cassavetes’s Faces (1968), Minnie and Moskowitz (1971), and A Woman Under the Influence (1974); Paul Mazursky’s Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (1969), Alex in Wonderland (1970), and Blume in Love (1973); and Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye (1973) and California Split (1974). But three additional films had much broader appeal. The Graduate (1967) was, quite simply, a phenomenon, almost of the magnitude of the Star Wars cycle a decade later. It grossed the equivalent of $408 million in 1998 dollars, placing it twenty-second on the list of all-time top domestic grossers and, among Los Angeles films, second only to Beverly Hills Cop (1984). ² It was nominated for seven Academy Awards (Mike Nichols won for Best Director) and, along with Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and Easy Rider (1969), impelled an industry-wide shift toward less restrictive and generally more youthful subject matter and a looser, more contingent visual stylistic. Shampoo (1975) was the number one grosser in Columbia Pictures history up until that time, ³ and Chinatown (1974)—for many still the archetypal film of Los Angeles—was a solid critical and commercial success. Although The Graduate and Shampoo are very dissimilar to Chinatown in their concerns, the three films taken together instantiate a familiar representational dialectic: the bright artificiality and preoccupation with surfaces and appearances of the affluent Anglo Westside, versus the Down-town environ as its dark obverse, a site of violent crime, moral abjection, and ethnic Otherness. The three films have in common a generally cynical view of Los Angeles, and to a great extent are the work of outsiders. Polanski’s explanation of why he took on the Chinatown assignment is typical of the attitude:

Although L.A. was the last place I wanted to be, I did want to do the movie. Not just for the money, which was good, and the profit percentage points, which I’d never been offered before, but because I was eager to try my hand at something entirely different—in this case a potentially first-rate thriller showing how the history and boundaries of L.A. had been fashioned by human greed. ⁴

Outsiders—especially New Yorkers, Midwesterners, and Europeans—are often ambivalent toward Los Angeles in this same way, and the widespread appeal of this particular group of films may be owing in large part to the fact that they so thoroughly indulge while simultaneously being repelled by their subjects.

Only one person was involved in a major creative capacity on all...