There's been plenty of drama at the Los Angeles Times the last couple of years — and now there's a documentary. "Inventing Los Angeles: The Chandlers and their Times" hits the screen for the first time later this month in Santa Barbara. Here's an excerpt from the email by Harry Chandler, son of Otis and a former Times executive:

When the news of the present is discouraging, it is often comforting to look back to the good old days....

Now is your chance to do just that in connection with the Los Angeles Times.

Over the last three years, a team of accomplished documentary filmmakers, led by Peter Jones, has been putting together a two hour film on the history of the Times, my ancestors who ran it, and the city that grew up with the newspaper. "Inventing Los Angeles: The Chandlers and their Times" premiers on January 24th at the Santa Barbara film festival. So if you happen to be in the area, or are looking for a good excuse to to head north for the weekend, this is it.

After the movie, Peter Jones, Tom Johnson and I will do some Q&A, then we will adjourn nearby for some socializing. If you can't make it for the screening, the film will be coming to PBS in late summer.

The film is organized into four parts, with a segment on each of the Otis and Chandler family publishers. Jones at the California Council of the Humanities website: “One remarkable story at a time, the film chronicles the ambitious, ruthless, ingenious and often self-serving methods by which each man employed the newspaper to help turn a town of 12,000 residents into a suburban sprawl of 4 million people — and in the process make the Chandlers among the largest landowners in California and the richest families in America." Jones' IMDb page

2008 year in review: Signs of the (L.A.) Times