Los Angeles Documentary and the Production of Public History, 1958–1977 by Joshua Glick (review)

Los Angeles, California, home to Hollywood, would at first glance seem a most unlikely place for a robust alternative documentary film culture. It is almost as if the city has no corporeal existence apart from the world of magic and mirrors created by the Hollywood cinematic dream machine. But “L.A.” is a real place, and in this volume, Joshua Glick shows how during a roughly twenty-year period between the late Fifties and Seventies, a group of loosely affiliated contrarians working in the shadow of the major studios and production companies documented the lives and struggles of the everyday people of Los Angeles that go largely unnoticed by moviegoers and tourists.

Poorly capitalized, under-publicized, and inadequately distributed, these young documentarians worked the city’s off-ramps: Bunker Hill, the downtown noir of run-down rooming houses and derelict bars and pawn shops that Raymond Chandler called “old town, lost town, shabby town, crook town.” East L.A., home to the city’s neglected and shunned Latino population. Watts, a culde-sac of African American poverty and isolation.

Los Angeles’s alternative chroniclers offered a powerful rejoinder to the celebratory portrayals of the city emanating from mainstream Hollywood. Their body of work includes some of the most important films ever made about this most misunderstood and underappreciated city. Kent Mackenzie’s The Exiles (1961), among the two or three greatest films of any kind produced about Los Angeles, depicts Native Americans struggling for their bearings in an alien and alienating Bunker Hill neighborhood, which itself is doomed to fall before the redeveloper’s wrecking ball. Chicano activist Jesus Salvador Trevino’s 1971 America Tropical uses the story of a Great Depression muralist commissioned to paint a stereotypical tropical scene but who instead produced a critique of Anglo-American racism and imperialism to offer a commentary on contemporary issues of ethnic identity and power. Killer of Sheep (1977), from Charles Burnett, a leader of a group of African American filmmakers known as the “L.A. Rebellion,” is a study of quotidian ambivalence over the course of three days in the life of a South Los Angeles slaughterhouse worker.

Glick juxtaposes these and other critical explorations of the city’s social and racial structures with the work of David Wolper, whose Wolper Productions, headquartered in Los Angeles, was for many years the nation’s leading producer of documentaries and docudramas. Glick astutely describes Wolper as the quintessential Cold War liberal filmmaker, whose programming touched on issues relating to politics, foreign policy, and civil rights with an emphasis on consensus and progress and a faith in the ameliorative powers of the American democratic system. To his credit, Glick does not caricature Wolper Productions as a propagandist or apologist. The company was responsible for Wattstax (1973), a groundbreaking documentary on a Watts Summer Festival concert that was widely praised for its honesty and authenticity, and 1977’s Roots, which exposed a huge white viewing audience to the violence and inhumanity of slavery. Wolper dared not go where Mackenzie, Trevino, and Burnett did, however, and by 1984 and the Age of Reagan he was producing the triumphalist opening ceremonies for the Olympics in a neoliberalized Los Angeles that had reinvented itself as a “World City” entrepot for global finance and capital.

Does this mean, however, that Wolper’s filmic vision had won out over its alternatives? Perhaps not. As he brings his story to a close in Reagan’s Eighties, Glick appears to search for a conclusion, like a Hollywood screenwriter unsure of how to wind things up. Glick implies that the decade marked a dead end for activist filmmakers in Los Angeles and elsewhere, as their genre fell before the imperatives of mainstream and profit-generating cinema, television, and new media. But there is still room in our cultural landscape for the kind of transgressive work represented by the likes of The Exiles, Killer of Sheep, or even Wattstax...