I had heard about the somewhat notorious film “Los Angeles Plays Itself” for some time now. It explores how our fair city has been depicted on film, using movie clips from said films. However, the movie was never released because…
A really cool sculpture is on display at LACMA that presents one possible future of Los Angeles. It features moving cars and everything! If you can’t make it down to the museum, here is a video of it:
There has been a lot of buzz recently in the Los Angeles blogging world about Allison Martino’s excellent “Lost” Angeles Time Table website, which features tons of old pictures of L.A., focusing on Googie and mid-century signs and buildings. She…
Reyner Banham’s 1971 book “Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies” should be required reading for all residents of our fair city. I will write about him at length soon, but in brief, Banham was a Brit who first visited…
I’ve written before about Johnie’s, the Googie masterpiece on the corner of Wilshire and Fairfax. It is one of the few mid-century coffee shops in Los Angeles that has avoided the wrecking ball. It closed its doors to diners in 2000…
Every wonder about the history of the Hollywood sign? Well, wonder no more:
In this video, some actor whose name may or may not be Richard Kaufman, and who for some reason has custody of two children for the weekend, takes them and us on a tour of Los Angeles in the 1940s. It’s…
Some cool old film of Los Angeles in the 1940s, including “The Brown Derby” and shots of Hollywood Boulevard. Skip the Communist stuff at the end.
Electric street cars criss-crossed Los Angeles for decades until 1963 when the last line was retired. That ushered in an era of gridlock that exists to this day. Here is some great video of the final years of the street…
In addition to being a great time-waster, YouTube is a treasure trove of old videos about Los Angeles. I will be featuring them from time to time. This one is a World War II era film called “Our Town Today,” highlighting…