To Live in a Dying LA

An elegy for a company town

The new Naked Gun trailer is out, and it’s actually pretty funny.

It also reminded me of something that happened to me in real life. Now, I know you’re probably thinking, “Surely, you can’t be serious!”

But I am serious. And don’t call me Shirley. (That’s my mom’s name.)

New in Town

First, some backstory. I’m from Michigan, my wife is from New Zealand. We met in Maine, as you would probably assume.

After graduating USC, I couldn’t find a job in Hollywood, so I went to work at a summer camp to save up some money. This was a very fancy, expensive camp, and they hired counselors from all over the world, including New Zealand. Kirrily was going to be a teacher, so a summer camp job during the southern hemisphere’s winter was ideal. There, we met and fell in love.

At the end of the summer, she returned to New Zealand. I followed her, and somehow convinced her to come back to the United States and marry me.

Kirrily had visited Los Angeles, but never lived there. I had for four years, three of those years off-campus, so I went ahead to find a place for us to live. She arrived a week later, on a nighttime flight. As I was driving her through downtown, we saw a street lit up bright as day.

“Do you know what that is?” I asked. She didn’t. “It’s a movie shoot. Wanna see?”

She had never seen a real film shoot, so we parked and walked over as close as we could. The road was blocked by barriers, but a crowd was gathering. On the street, two cranes were set up, at least ten stories high. A woman was suspended from wires up high on one, and a camera was dangling near ground level from the other.

Our timing was perfect. Just as we walked up, the AD called over a bullhorn: “One! Two! Three! ACTION!”

The woman suddenly dropped, while the camera shot up in the air, passing each other within what looked like inches.

I noticed a paparazzi snapping pictures with a telephoto lens, so I asked him who that was. He flipped his camera around to show me the screen—Angelina Jolie!

We didn’t know the title at the time, but her first night in LA, Kirrily saw the filming of Mr. and Mrs. Smith.

Playing Los Angeles

As I said, I’d lived in Los Angeles for years by that point, which is why I knew how to recognize film shoots from a distance. Years earlier, I was walking to the bank, and I heard the roar of an large helicopter.

That was surprising enough, because they don’t usually fly between the buildings downtown. So a helicopter flying through the man-made glass and steel canyons would’ve been impressive on its own, but this one was carrying a bus!

What really got me, though, was when I looked around at everyone on the street. No one else so much as glanced up! That’s how jaded Angelenos are about filming.

It was for Swordfish, by the way, a terrible movie mostly remembered for being Hugh Jackman’s first lead role (post X-Men), Halle Berry’s first nude scene,¹ and the first use of bullet time outside of a Matrix movie.

You can also see how crazy filmmakers were going with digital color grading (a new technology at the time), when comparing the film with the actual daytime footage from Los Angeles Plays Itself (currently on Kanopy). If you haven’t seen that movie, you should. It’s one of my favorite documentaries about two of my favorite subjects: movies and the city of Los Angeles.

You Can Always Go Downtown

That wasn’t even the only time I saw Swordfish in production. There was a stretch of blocks around 7th and Wilshire that were frequently blocked off for car chases at nights and on weekends. Once, I caught sight of Colin Farrell standing on a moving motorcycle, and decided to sneak onto set to steal some crafty services. (Hey, I was a broke and hungry college student!) I even got to meet Ben Affleck’s stunt double.

What does all this have to do with The Naked Gun?

The Actual Story

I wasn’t jaded; I still love seeing movies and shows being filmed. Anytime I saw unmarked cube trucks, yellow location signs, and a bunch of people standing around waiting for something cool to happen, I’d get as close as I could to see what was being shot.

Signs like… yeah, like this.

So when some friends and I saw a hubbub around my bank (again), we decided to cut across the street to see what was going on. It looked like a big action scene, with loads of police cars, and cops lining up with guns and stuff. The sun was going down, and giant lights were setup to flood the whole scene.

Someone ran up to us, and I thought maybe we had wandered into the shot, because he shouted, “Get out of here!”

“Oh, sorry, nobody told us you were rolling. What movie is this?”

“Get the fuck out of here, there’s a bank robbery going on in there!”

Then he shoved us out of the way. That’s when I realized, while there was certainly lights and action, there were no cameras. It was like that scene in the second loop of Run, Lola, Run.

By the time we got home, we saw on the news that there was a hostage situation at a downtown bank still in progress. Living here for years, I’d lost the ability to tell a real bank robbery from a fake one.

Back to Naked Gun, we must’ve looked as clueless as the little girl walking past the police line. None of us turned out to be as cool as Liam Neeson underneath, though.

Escape from L.A.

One thing you might notice—besides Sam Raimi at his peak—is that two of the three (actual) movies I saw filmed were set in New York. At the time, it was often more logistically convenient and cost effective to film big action sequences in downtown Los Angeles than Manhattan.

Los Angeles is much more spread out than most older cities, and thus our downtown proper is much smaller. As I said in the intro to my short film EXT. LOS ANGELES - DAY, there are “just enough skyscrapers to the fill the background of an establishing shot.”

Another thing you might notice is that all of the movies I mentioned are at least two decades old.

Runaway production existed when first moved here. Vancouver was a popular location, because it had favorable Canadian tax credits and currency exchange, but still in the same time zone as the studios and producers. A decent amount of movies were shot in New York, as well as the relatively new film hubs of New Orleans and Atlanta.

That was twenty years ago. Even a decade ago, Film LA was reporting an average of more than 100 shooting days per calendar day in the metro area. Keep in mind that’s film, television, streaming, and commercials.

In the last couple of years, post-COVID, we’ve been at about two-thirds that level.

And this year is even worse, thanks to the fires.²

Anecdotally, I just don’t “run into” movie productions much anymore. Some of that is because I’m an adult now with grown-up responsibilities, but as the charts above show, it’s not all in my head. The ones I do see tend to be independent films and made-for-TV movies. Large scale production is mostly an Atlanta thing now (where Marvel films most of their movies), or shot in former Soviet Bloc countries with names I can’t pronounce.

Many people fear Los Angeles is rapidly becoming the next Detroit—a hollowed-out company town that can no longer compete economically in the industry it created.

As I said, I’m from Michigan; I’ve already seen urban collapse once in my life. Then again, movies like Demolition Man have been predicting the end of LA since the 90s.

The End… Or Is It?

In Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds, the alien tripods come out of the ground, having been buried for thousands of years.

Los Angeles would be completely safe in that scenario. The ancient aliens would be guessing where future human civilizations would likely build cities. Los Angeles is not one of those locations. There’s no geographic reason for us to be here—no large rivers, no safe harbors, very little arable land.

The city only exists by a serious of historical accidents and sheer force of will. Human ingenuity is the only thing supporting the twelve million people in what would naturally be a desert.

We’re here because we want to be.

I don’t know the solution to the city’s problems, but I do know that hard work and creativity will be a part of it. Like a lot of Angelenos, I’m a transplant. I wasn’t born here, but my daughter was. We have a home and a cat; we belong to a nice church and attend a nice school. I don’t want to leave, I want the city, and the movie business, to thrive.

Besides, the weather is always nice.

1. At a cost of $250,000 per boob, reportedly.

2. I wrote about some of this at the beginning of the year.