Chinatown was set in the 1930's, and LA Confidential in the 50'---when Los Angeles was much more "white" and certainly more segregated. So those two pictures are fairly historically accurate. It's the movies and TV shows set in CONTEMPORARY Los Angeles---that show it being white, and everyone in, or trying to get into, the Biz, and living in either Hollywood or at the beach---that bug me.

Chinatown was set in the 1930's, and LA Confidential in the 50'---when Los Angeles was much more "white" and certainly more segregated. So those two pictures are fairly historically accurate. It's the movies and TV shows set in CONTEMPORARY Los Angeles---that show it being white, and everyone in, or trying to get into, the Biz, and living in either Hollywood or at the beach---that bug me.

Doesn't it get awfully uncomfortable for Prof. Anderson, driving around his adopted hometown with that stick up his ass?

What's this "Los Angeles" nonsense? The town is called LA by everybody, one of only two towns in the world universally known by abbreviations. And proudly.

What Cathy said.

I agree that holding period pieces accountable for not portraying a modern day, diverse LA (yeah, I said it - and I was born and bred there, so I have zero problem with it) is rather foolish.

If he wanted to pick on LA Confidential for being wrongly hailed as a new noir jewel when it really bastardized major necessary elements of the genre - that I could support . . . .

What's his take on "Devil in a Blue Dress" . . . .

I suppose this blog needs to be called "Los Angeles Observed".

And Giants fan in San Francisco and Kings fans in Sacramento need to start chanting "Beat Los Angeles"

And I will have to go visit my alma mater, UC Los Angeles, more often.

I couldn’t agree with Thom Anderson more.
“Who Framed Roger Rabbit” was the funniest exposition ever about how cynical business interests and local norms drove out the massively effective trolleys; ushering in the nightmare of freeways crammed with single passenger vehicles we all navigate today.
It used to take 20 minutes on the streetcar from downtown to the beach in Santa Monica. Now you’re lucky if you can make it in an hour.
And despite hundreds of vehicle fatalities on the streets of the Los Angeles region each year, and only a handful from rail systems, it is the latter deaths that get massive, suspicious coverage from the Times and other pubs.

The only thing worse than self-appointed guardians of LA "Kulture" are East Coast ex-pats who rarely venture east of La Brea and then have the temerity to gripe about LA's "plastic culture" of cell-phone toting blowhards...

The old street car system has been romanticized in many ways through the years. Whether it was the perfect way to get around a sprawling region like Los Angeles can be argued either way, but one point of Ted's is easily refuted. The cars didn't speed anybody to Santa Monica in 20 minutes; they didn't speed anywhere. The run from downtown L.A. to Santa Monica took an hour, according to the Electric Railroad Historical Association.

Agree 100% with Cletus' sentiments.

The list of "ethnic" characters in L.A. (excuse me, LOS ANGELES) noir film thrillers is endless and if he would get that stick that Cathy referred to out of his arrogant ass he just might recognize, say, the great performance by Perry Lopez as Mexican-American Lieutenant Escobar in "Chinatown".

It's a lot easier to blame the demise of the Red Cars and Yellow Cars on a consipracy by evil oil and automotive interests instead of the fact that they just weren't very popular and weren't maintained well.

I'm just happy that we have a film that attempts to dispel the outdated myths of El Pueblo de Nuestra Senora La Reina de Los Angeles. My eyes are tired from rolling everytime the subject of El Pueblo de Nuestra Senora La Reina de Los Angeles involves the terms fake, plastic, sprawl, back-stabbing, health-obsessed, or the Hollywood Game.

"The town is called LA by everybody, one of only two towns in the world universally known by abbreviations."

What's the other one?

Uh, I don't know, NYC?

The point with LA based shows is that they are set in places like Santa Monica, or the South Bay beach cities, where you truly are hard pressed to find "persons of color" in large numbers on the beach or in the clubs. 24 did mix it up a little bit, but most TV programs are terrible (Sunset Beach, anyone?)

The other, more pressing problem, is the compression of LA geography by TV. LA is a BIG city spatially, yet people film the town like it's the size of Boston or something.

Ah, Larry, I thought nobody would bite. Jo'burg.

"The run from downtown L.A. to Santa Monica took an hour"

And there were probably fewer places they stopped in the good old days. A modern express train with a couple stops could probably do it in half an hour, but one that stopped at each major street would take a lot of time.

"It's a lot easier to blame the demise of the Red Cars and Yellow Cars on a consipracy by evil oil and automotive interests instead of the fact that they just weren't very popular and weren't maintained well"

Actually, unless the liberal media is lying to us yet again, it was a conspiracy by evil automotive interests.

Specifically: In the 1920's, Los Angeles was possessed of one of the best public transportation systems in the United States. General Motors was found guilty of collusion in a conspiracy to rid the city of the Red Line trains. The public transportation system was disbanded by G.M. and others.

I found another site saying this was just an urban legend, but if there was a suit I'd imagine there was at least a grain of truth in it or a suspicion thereof.

IIRC, based on a liberal-media documentary I saw, GM used a subsidiary to buy up the trains and then put them into disuse, while providing busses through another company or something. Or conspiracies to that effect.

There are a few more sites here.

While I agree that shows are mostly set in SaMo, I don't think they're set in South Bay beach cities - Orange County beach cities, maybe - but I don't remember much in, say, Hermosa or Redondo.

And if they were - some parts of the South Bay are more diverse.

Yes, but Hermosa with the virtually all white AVP Tour ain't Lomita or Lawndale. It isn't even San Pedro.

As for Lonewacko's belief of the streetcar myth, let's just say that I trust articles in peer-reviewed journals than random people with web sites (although it does have the lyrics to Michelle Shocked's paean to the repo man).

If you want to blame anyone for the demise of the Pacific Electric, why not start with the City of Santa Monica? Through operation of the five cent jitneys which became the Big Blue Bus (Santa Monica Municipal Bus Lines), it drove down ridership on the Red Cars to Santa Monica. The bus was more comfortable, more frequent, and cheaper, even with a forced transfer at Rimpau and Pico that still exists today.

There was a gradual changeover of Red Car routes to buses in I believe the 40s, but the people had spoken long before. In 1920 the L.A. Record wrote, "twenty years ago influential people rode in street cars. Today they ride in automobiles."

This was L.A., and people wanted to live as spread out as possible, and drive by themselves to get there. (They still do.) Ridership on the streetcars peaked and fell in the mid 1920s, even though the city's population was exploding. That decade we began to see drive-in markets and restaurants, and distant shopping centers like Miracle Mile and Beverly Hills -- because that's what people wanted.

The streetcars all fed downtown and didn't go many places. And they were slow, and just got slower as the number of automobiles increased. People forget that when the freeways first opened, they cut A LOT of time off drives. Suddenly Pasadena and the Valley became more accessible than they ever were by the single rail lines that went there. Then we let the freeways become hopelessly clogged, but that's another story.

And probably DC. And OC, though maybe not universally.

UPN's "The Parkers" has a mostly black cast that takes place in Santa Monica. Of the shows set in Los Angeles featuring a non-white cast, there is "All of us" also on UPN. PBS shows "American Family" set in east Los Angeles. "Resurrection Blvd" from a few years ago had a Latino cast also set in east Los Angeles.

"The town is called LA by everybody, one of only two towns in the world universally known by abbreviations."

"What's the other one? Uh, I don't know, NYC?"

You can't compare the abbreviations of LA and NY. While both are universally known, no one ever calls New York "NY" (you would never hear anyone say "I'm from NY"). I think a better candidate for the other town known by abbreviations would be San Francisco because people actually say "SF" although not as nearly frequently as "LA".

DC doesn't technically count because it's the abbreviation of the federal district, not the city of Columbia. Same with OC since it's not a town and is known only by the teenybopper set who watch Fox.

Remember when our patchouli-scented cousins to the north started having temper tantrums about how we referred to San Francisco?

Suddenly the word "Frisco" became the linguistic equivalent of a hate crime and the Bay Area gained a well-deserved reputation for humorless dogmatism.

I sure hope LA isn't heading down that same road...

"Peer-reviewed journal" my ass. I wonder how many of those "peers" are on GM's payroll.

While we're all strolling arm in arm down memory lane, remember the Stephen J. Cannell show Riptide? I believe not only was it set in the South Bay, it featured an early appearance by a then-attractive Geena Davis.

Transportation Quarterly is published by the Eno Transportation Foundation.

It's board of directors is listed at http://www.enotrans.com/BOD/bod.html

My nominee for best TV show giving a sense of an older LA is Rockford Files. The spatial dimensions aren't made clear (somehow Rockford manages to get from his Malibu trailer park to the "Hollywood Division" of LAPD in about 15 minutes). But the cast of characters is very evocative and (to a good degree) representative of the city, and the sense of place is excellent.

One of my favorite exchanges from "Rockford"

Gabby (played by Isaac Hayes): Hey Rockfish, you've got to come down to this nice little place in San Pedro.

Rockford: Gabby, there's no such thing as a nice little place in San Pedro.

(Harbor area people forgive me, but this was about 1978.)

As much as I love "Rockford" I have a special fondness for "Harry O". Harry (David Janssen) lived in a rat hole of a house at the beach and his car was always in the shop so he frequently rode the bus. Miss that show. Well-written and Anthony Zerbe was a great foil for Harry.

'Cop Rock', not for capturing the geography but for putting on film the hot, smog-filled sunsets. It was the first time that I saw the L.A. I drive through everyday on film.

Rockford pops on and off of KDOC. Is Harry O available anywhere?