I’ve lived in Los Angeles for 33 years. My mother birthed me in Santa Monica, and I grew up in the heart of Hollywood on Highland Ave. —just ten minutes driving distance from the Walk of Fame. I went to a private school and rubbed elbows with the children of those involved in the entertainment industry both directly and peripherally. Roald Dahl’s granddaughter refused to kiss me in a game of truth or dare. Rhea Perlman’s niece was the tomboy of our class. I went to parties thrown by Bill Pullman’s son, and I was privy to the well-orchestrated and highly choreographed pick-ups and drop-offs of Robert Downey Jr.’s kid during his very public struggles with cocaine addiction.
These experiences led to a loss of magic in my life—at least in terms of the cinema experience. It’s hard to suspend disbelief when your buddy’s dad is the president in the movie Independence Day, or that guy who always looks so uncomfortable at school functions is the rapist from last week’s Law & Order SVU. Film just somehow lost its potency.
I think this happens for many people who grow up around the Hollywood elite. You receive constant reminders that people operate those cameras, someone wrote that script, and hundreds of people in lighting and makeup set that shot up. Not to mention on-screen locations jump out at you daily. The pool where I swam played host to a monster on the Nickelodeon horror anthology series, Are You Afraid of the Dark? The song “That Thing You Do,” from the picture of the same name, first reverberated among the gym walls where I played basketball.
If you live in Los Angeles, you can’t avoid seeing your city portrayed in narrative media; thus, the novelty wears off for many, including me, for a long time. I never understood why my relatives from Sweden so desired to stroll the Boulevard, take the backlot tour at Universal Studios, and snap photos on the Sunset Strip. For me, Hollywood was not a place of miracles and beautiful illusions, but of drunks screaming at nothing and hookers displaying their wears alongside seedy-looking piercing/tattoo parlors. But they insisted on going to these places. If we ever drove by a film shoot, they implored us to stop so they could watch. To my family, filming just meant annoying street closures and traffic jams. I vividly remember when they made us stand around for an hour because their favorite show, Nip/Tuck, was shooting. Of course, we spent the duration of our stay watching the crew hanging up lights. And yet, they ate it up with a spoon.
Even my trip to the set of Batman and Robin didn’t impress my eight-year-old self. I got to meet George Clooney and get his autograph while my sister stood behind me, trembling with embarrassment due to his status as one of her high school crushes. To me, this person standing in front of me in the bat suit was merely a man playing dress-up. He certainly wasn’t the real Batman. No, that Batman was in the comics or doing battle with the joker in his animated adventures. Is it any wonder why I still can’t enjoy a comic book adaptation? No, not because Batman and Robin might hold the spot as the worst Batman film of all time—though I’d argue Christopher Nolan’s pretentious and philosophically trite drivel deserves that honor. I just can’t seem to identify with a man in tights on the big screen instead of in the panels where he belongs.
When I used to go to Blockbuster for my weekly Friday night flick, I separated the movies not by genre but between animated and real people, further demonstrating my preference for the 2D world. A world that I still didn’t understand, one whose magic I could not decode, one whose mystery and marvels continue to dazzle me in a way that live-action cannot do.
It was only in my teenage years when I realized just how lucky I was to call LaLaland my home. As I grew older, I became more isolated, and friends existed few and far between. Naturally, I needed to fill that gap with something. And sure, I still read comics and sci-fi and fantasy literature, but my appetite craved a substitute for the peer group I did not have. I looked down on television as something for the masses whom I considered myself well above. I resolved to find my own group of similar-minded individuals. I started attending screenings of independent animated fare like the works of Bill Plympton and Ralph Bakshi. That crowd led me to midnight screenings of bizarre and fascinating celluloid creations whose inventiveness and weirdness captured my attention.
It then occurred to me that these cinephiles were just as interested in the filmmakers as they were in their plots and stories. I, too, became engrossed in the process of how someone’s singular artistic vision makes it to the silver screen. For me, filmmaking was now an art; the magic had returned. They say that Los Angeles has no history. I proclaim “they” are wrong. We have history; it is just not our own, but yours, too.If I want to, I can swing by Batman’s secret base of operation in Griffith Park or surf the waves that Spicoli did in Fast Times at Ridgemont High. I can drive the streets that Philip Marlow pounded leather upon, traverse the post-apocalyptic landscape of Night of the Comet, or dream about beautiful replicants while standing outside the Bradbury Building. Los Angeles’ history is that of the zeitgeist, and in living here, we are closer to that beating heart than almost anywhere else in the world. This is where stories are born.