“Hollywood is loneliness by a swimming pool,” declared the Norwegian movie star Liv Ullman in one of the more brutal judgments of the California dream factory.
And it’s a place with a lot of pools.
Almost a decade has passed since two postgraduate students, obsessed by the preponderance of aquamarine water jewels in private residences in Los Angeles, undertook the daft and wonderful compilation of a comprehensive atlas of the city’s swimming pools. They counted some 43,000 private outdoor pools in the LA basin alone. Of those, 1,500 were in the hidden, discreet palaces of the Hollywood Hills, where movie and music royalty old and new shy away from prying eyes having secured the fame they desperately sought.
In addition to causing an astronomical dollar amount of damage to the ruined communities in Altadena and the Palisades, the recent fires have also dealt another blow to the prism through which Los Angeles is viewed by the world: old Hollywood, and its films, and its stubborn insistence that, in a world obsessed with the 6x3 inch thrills of the smartphone, there is still a place for the 20th century allure of the big screen.
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Film LA reported that 2024 was a historically poor year for the city’s industry, with the second-lowest output of production on record. The industry was trying to recover some momentum after last year’s lengthy strikes but the fires ground that to an abrupt halt. Temporary shutdowns were forced upon Universal, Warner and Disney, meaning further periods of enforced lay-offs for the tens of thousands of freelance workers involved in the industry.
Los Angeles’ entertainment industry brings an estimated $110 billion to the regional economy annually and almost 700,000 jobs are connected to its film and television production. A significant number of those workers must have lost homes in both communities and like many other displaced people face an extraordinarily tough journey just to reclaim a secure foothold in the city.
One of the bleak statistics to emerge was that just two films in production were interrupted by the fires. That’s because none of Universal or MGM or Warner or Paramount or Lionsgate – or even Netflix and Amazon – had any films or shows shooting in LA when the fires raged. The studio lots were silent. More and more Hollywood production takes place far away from the storied parent studios, in states – and countries – that offer tax incentives and less expensive labour and filming costs. It’s a pattern that has caused many to wonder about whether Tinseltown’s future is behind it.
The social response to the fires suggested that despite its gargantuan urban sprawl, LA is tied to a fierce sense of community. On Thursday night, so many of the city’s music new and enduring touchstones returned, including Stevie Nicks. Stephen Stills and Graham Nash, and the 80-year-old Joni Mitchell descended from the heavens, for a one-off benefit concert, FireAid, in which the famous and the unknown spoke on stage of what the lost neighbourhoods meant to them. It was a startling, unique coalition of Los Angeles’ creative tradition.
Quentin Tarantino has recently taken to buying and restoring gorgeous 1920s LA film theatres. It’s a great idea. But he can’t buy them all
If you drive down to Melrose Avenue, a wonderful mishmash of independent enterprises, you’ll eventually arrive at one of the most famous Hollywood landmarks. It looks like nothing special, with its big yellow buildings calling to mind some steadfast mid-Ulster creamery. Behind it lies the Hollywood Forever cemetery. But then you pass the double arch and see the magisterial name in the famous slanted hand – Paramount Pictures – and its hard for anyone who grew up with cinema not to salute. The place will celebrate a century of films in three years’ time. Among its classics are Chinatown, The Godfather series and Ordinary People.
Quentin Tarantino, a cineaste as well as one of the great film-makers, has recently taken to buying and restoring gorgeous 1920s LA film theatres such as the New Beverley and The Vista, which show films from all eras. It’s a great idea.
But he can’t buy them all. On Hollywood Boulevard alone, stalwarts like the Vine, Fox and the Loews Holly are gone. The Village and the Bruin, both Westwood fixtures since the 1930s, closed last year. If you can’t keep the film houses open in Los Angeles, what hope for the rest of the world?
Even now, in January, the tourists still come, with their cameras and their wonder. They ride the decked-out minibuses giving guided tours of the celebrity houses. They tour the studio lots. They stand outside Grauman’s Chinese Theatre and stare at the humbling deluge of footprints and handprints of the gods of their day and the personalised messages. “To Sid. There are not enough words,” John Wayne scribbled in the wet concrete on January 25th, 1950.
But it’s a grim little strip along the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Los Angeles’ invention of the Movieland, with its epic history of maniacs and geniuses and ruined lives and scandals and its long, long list of genius films and acting talents deserves better.
There is a sense that the dazzling if flawed history of American cinema is hanging on by a thread. And the tourists, the believers who still come, are chasing after just a sense of an authentic past; some proof of whatever weird under-the-skin concoction has enabled Hollywood to endure is still alive.
It’s what the recently celebrated-anew writer and ultimate Hollywood native Eve Babitz bottled perfectly in this way: “That strange mixture that’s always been a major part of Hollywood – self-enchantment mingled with the ever-present fear of total disaster (earthquakes, fires, random murders) – lies beneath the physical reality of Hollywood, which sometimes looks too good to be true, as though we must have sold our souls to the devil for all those swimming pools and orange trees and young hopefuls basking in the sun.”
