Filmmakers Lyn Goldfarb and Alison Sotomayor are taking a new tack in their push to make a feature documentary on the life of the late mayor Tom Bradley. They have sent out a pitch for funds that asks, "If the Hollywood Sign said Tom Bradley, would we allow his story to be forgotten?" The recent deaths of not-yet-interviewed key players from the Bradley years, including LAPD chief Daryl Gates, turned up the urgency of their fundraising pitches. (Max Palevsky too.) Here's the website.

Related: A new book, "Black Los Angeles: American Dreams and Racial Realities" — co-edited by Darnell Hunt, director of UCLA's Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies — explores the African American experience in L.A. "Black Los Angeles is and has always been a space of profound contradictions," Hunt writes.