Los Angeles and the commodification of falseness

Los Angeles is a city shrouded by a reputation of falseness. With a great deal of its early growth being the result of the film industry’s move to Hollywood at the start of the 20th century, it is now known as a host to many who come to reinvent themselves for the screen (Sklar 1975). However as my History M155 class has illustrated, this reputation has far preceded the introduction of film to Los Angeles. In fact it dates back to the city’s very earliest days.

Founded in 1781 as ‘El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora de los Angeles de Porciuncula’, or ‘the town of Our Lady of the Angels of Porciuncula’, Los Angeles’ history is marked with conflict, violence and racism (Pool 2005). Though the Spanish colonisation of California was more peaceful than some of their previous conquests, the Manifest Destiny of the Americans - the belief that the United States should stretch from coast to coast - brought with it great violence and the massacring of many indigenous communities (Stephanson 1995; Villa 2002). This peaked during the 1846-48 American-Mexican war whereby the wholesale destruction of many towns was an everyday occurrence. The 1847 razing of Tongva Village was a prime example. While Mexicans and indigenous communities were at the centre of such conflict, other ethnic groups also suffered severe violence. The 1871 Chinese massacre in Calle de los Negros was perhaps the most scarring case (Zesch 2012). In addition to violence, the gerrymandering of the city’s districts gave political power to the wealthy Anglo-American elite, leaving little for Los Angeles’ non-white residents (Sonenshein 1993).

However this history has been largely ignored. It was the belief of several of Los Angeles’ early American colonisers, such as Henry E. Huntington and General Harrison Gray Otis, that Los Angeles was destined to become the most important city in the country, if not the world (Friedricks 1992). These early ‘boosters’ of the city guided others in creating an image of Los Angeles that would attract people from across the nation to move West and help the city grow. In a similar manner to the screenwriters who would later occupy Hollywood, boosters essentially created a new narrative of Los Angeles. This was done by promoting a variety of positive aspects of Southern California including its climate, the year-round citrus trade, and perhaps most controversially, its ‘Spanish fantasy past’ (Zimmerman 2008).

Spanish fantasy past is an early example of Los Angeles creating a false image of itself. Rather than focus on the city's bloody history, boosters appropriated and commodified Mexican culture for the consumption of tourists and eventual immigrants. This marketing campaign focussed heavily on the built environment and Los Angeles soon became decorated by Spanish Mission Revival architecture, much of which still characterises the city to this day (Weitze 1984). Similarly, bells were placed along the El Camino Real - which straddles much of Highway 101 - to trace and commemorate the journey taken by the Mission padres from San Diego to San Francisco (Kurillo and Tuttle 2000).

Travel poster advertising Los Angeles' sunny climate and Mission style architecture

Poster advertising Los Angeles through its citrus trade

UCLA's Beta Theta Pi fraternity chapter influenced by Mission style architecture

Bell decorating the El Camino Real

This romanticisation of Los Angeles’ past was extremely successful. Between 1850-1930 the city’s population grew from 1,610 to 1,238,048 allowing it to quickly become a regional economic powerhouse (USCB 1853; USCB 1931). However this was done by covering up the savage destruction of the region’s preceding communities and, to add insult to injury, using their cultures to sell an altered version of history. Following a previous article I wrote regarding the commodification of place names, it is interesting to consider that I am currently living in a city which is itself the commodification of an entire culture pulled from beneath its feet. It thus seems appropriate that Los Angeles, whose ‘history’ is an inaccurate and romanticised facade used to disguise its brutal past, should be regarded by many as home to the fake and superficial.

References

Pool, B. (2005) ‘City of Angels' First Name Still Bedevils Historians’ (WWW), Los Angeles: Los Angeles Times, (http://articles.latimes.com/2005/mar/26/local/me-name26; 26 January 2016).

Friedricks, W.B. (1992) Henry E. Huntington and the Creation of Southern California, Columbus: Ohio State University

Kurillo, M. and E. Tuttle (2000) California's El Camino Real and Its Historic Bells, San Diego: Sunbelt.

Sklar, R. (1975) Movie-made America, New York: Random House.

Sonenshein, R. (1993) Politics in Black and White, New Jersey: Princeton University.

Stephanson, A. (1995) Manifest Destiny: American Expansion and the Empire of Right, New York: Hill and Wang.

USCB (1853) The Seventh Census of the United States: 1850, Washington: United States Census Bureau.

USCB (1931) Fifteenth Census of the United States: 1930, Washington: United States Census Bureau.

Villa, R.R. (2002) Barrio Logos: Place and Space in Urban Chicano Culture and Literature, Austin: Texas: University of Texas.

Walker, D.L. (1999) Bear Flag Rising: The Conquest of California 1846, New York: Macmillan.

Weitze, K.J. (1984) California's Mission Revival, Los Angeles: Hennessy & Ingalls.

Zesch, S. (2012) The Chinatown War: Chinese Los Angeles and the Massacre of 1871, New York: Oxford University.

Zimmerman, T. (2008) Paradise Promoted: The Booster Campaign That Created Los Angeles, 1870-1930, Santa Monica: Angel City.

Visually mapping Los Angeles

My last post suggested that poor public transport connections and the dominance of the car in Los Angeles have given residents a poor sense of what exists around them, myself being no exception to this.

In an attempt to challenge this I plan to improve my understanding of what is around me by mapping nearby areas, sites and buildings onto photos of Los Angeles. With UCLA's dorms, which are located on the uppermost section of the bowl shaped campus, offer fantastic vantage points to do this. However in order to gain a further understanding of what makes up this enormous city I have also attempted to map locales onto a photo of Los Angeles taken from the Griffith Park Observatory.

South facing view of Los Angeles from the Griffith Park Observatory

East facing view of UCLA with some of Los Angeles in the background from my dorm in Sproul Hall

South-west facing view of Westwood with Los Angeles and the West Coast in the background from De Neve Holly Hall

Map of Los Angeles showing the points and directions (blue arrows) at which photos were taken

Geography meets Film History: Urban economics in the early Hollywood era

I recently wrote about how the multidisciplinary nature of Geography encourages an exploration of other fields of study and the building of synoptic links between them. One such example is Film History. While film can itself be a method of geographical investigation, the film industry is also a particularly fascinating topic of study within the field of urban economics. This is something I have looked at in a recent piece of coursework.

In this paper I argued that vertical integration and localisation economies of scale, which characterised the Hollywood studio system, enabled much faster and more widely adopted innovations in the film industry than when it was centred in New York. This was done through a comparison of the swift and widespread incorporation of sound into cinema during the Hollywood era - in the space of a year, films went from being almost all silent to entirely spoken - with the more disparate and localised advancements that occurred on the East Coast.

Hanssen’s (2010) defines vertical integration as the process by which a business manages its entire supply chain. The Hollywood studio system clearly demonstrated vertical integration from its earliest days. This dates back to 1915 when Adolph Zukor merged the distribution company Famous Players with the Laksy Company and Paramount Theatres and moved to Los Angeles. The business born out of this would manage all three key stages of the film industry: production, distribution and exhibition*.

Localisation economies of scale, as defined by Storper (2013), occur when clustered companies of the same industry experience greater productivity and innovation. Scott and Soja (1996) explain why Hollywood is seen as the archetypal localisation economy of scale. Here companies are able to hire talented and short-term employees from a large labour pool, something of particular benefit in the project orientated film industry. Additionally, companies are able to learn from one another through ‘knowledge spillovers’ which is of particular significance when considering why innovations spread so quickly in Hollywood (Glaeser et al. 1992).

The rapid adoption of sound by the film industry is a perfect example of vertical integration and localisation economies of scale at work. While the technology for sound had been around since the 19th century, a previous inhibitor of this incorporation was the potential magnitude and cost of wiring studios and theatres for sound synchronisation and amplification. Without a guarantee of theatres that could play your films or a steady supply of talking pictures for your theatre, nobody wanted to take the first step (Sklar 1975). However once they owned both the theatres and studios, film companies were finally able to facilitate the transition at both the production and exhibition end. In addition to this, an ability to learn from surrounding companies through localisation economies of scale played a key role in the transition. A salient example of this is the boom microphone, first used to capture Clara Bow’s voice in The Wild Party (1929). This was swiftly adopted by other companies who quickly learned about the technology either through observation, spying or labour transfers (Mayne 1995). Thus, without these processes it is unlikely that the adoption of sound into cinema would have occurred in such a rapid and widespread manner.

To demonstrate this further, I examined the film industry when it was spread around the state of New York. During this time there were advancements in film, prominent examples being increased film lengths, large format film and panning camera shots (Sklar 1975). These innovations do however differ in their nature. Without vertical integration or economies of scale, such advancements were disparate and more locally fixed within the confines of the company that had pioneered them instead of being spread across the entire film industry.

Thus the film industry creates an interesting backdrop to examine the role of urban economics in the creation and growth of businesses in a certain time and space. This further demonstrates the interconnectivity of Geography as a field of study that expands into many others, in this case Film History.

*This ended in 1948 when the US Supreme Court’s anti-trust rule broke down the Hollywood oligopoly.

References

Hanssen, F. (2010) ‘Vertical Integration during the Hollywood Studio Era’, Journal of Law and Economics, 53, 3, 519-543.

Glaeser, E., H. Kallal, J. Scheinkman and A. Shleifer (1992) ‘Growth in Cities’, Journal of Political Economy, 100, 6, 1126-1152.

Mayne, J. (1994) Directed by Dorothy Arzner, Bloomington: Indiana University.

Scott, A.J and E.W. Soja (1996) The City: Los Angeles and Urban Theory at the End of the Twentieth Century, Berkeley: University of California Press.

Sklar, R. (1975) Movie-made America, New York: Random House.

Storper, M. (2013) Keys to the City: How Economics, Institutions, Social Interaction, and Politics Shape Development, New Jersey: University of Princeton.