Los
Angeles does not only have a very specific industry that gives a
lot of jobs to every social classes, it also manages,
through this very special industry, the film industry, to keep alive
the orignal spirit that gave birth to the city itself, this
outrageous ambition and endless fantasy that once was the californian
dream.
(Apart,
to Mike Davis : did you just forget to mention that ?)
1.
Some spice in your economic life
Every
city has what they call a "residential economy"
which is basicaly the economy
that exists just by having people standing there : people need
education, medical care, public services, and shops where to buy all
kind of products (food, clothes, computers, phones). Those
sectors are usually huge, and proportionnal to the population, but
they don't tell anything about the economic dynamism of a city.
Then,
huge metropolitan areas have advanced business services and
hi-tech departements in different kind of fields (energy, TIC,
biomed, etc).
Some
cities, lucky ones, have one industry bigger than all the
other that makes them very special and gives them an identity. But
this tends to disappear, like shipyard industry for exemple (in
Belfast in England or in St-Nazaire in France).
Los
Angeles has all those metropolitan attributes : it has
lots of firms, research departments from UCLA, Berkeley, the
influence of the Silicon Valley near by, plus a
military industry, and Long Beach, a massive harbor
connected to the whole world.
And
it has this extra-thing more important than all the others, an
industry that no other city has, not in nature and not in dimension :
the film industry.
Its
not an hobby, or a cultural side dish. Its an industry*,
which means its structural impact on the city and the
employment situation is massive. Check
out the numbers** : Motion pictures is the 4th leading employment
sector, before the "Wholesale trade (durable and non-durable
goods)", "Engineering and management service" and way
ahead of "Legal services"' for exemple.
Coming
home from LA with the strong feeling that everybody there was working
with movies, I was ready to get defeated by reality after confronting
my personnal experience with an objective analysis of the city
economy, as I thought my perception could be distorded by the
fact that I myself could act as a filter, only meeting people working
in this field.
But
check this out and feel the breeze :
The
ten largest employers in the district are (in order):
Paramount
Pictures Corporation (approximately 5,000 employees)
Kaiser
Permanente Hospital (5,000)
Children’s
Hospital of Los Angeles (3,600)
Sunset
Gower Studios (2,500)
Los
Angeles City College (2,271)
St.
Vincent’s Medical Center (1,800)
Hollywood
Presbyterian Medical Center (1,550)
City
of Angels Medical Center (900)
Nielsen
Entertainment (700)
Deluxe
Laboratories, Inc. (600)
Nowhere
else in the world you find those kind of statistics in a big city,
there's never one single specific industry that comes on top of all
the others like that. Except mining industry a century ago. And
that's precisely my point.
Of
course one could say this is a well known fact : LA is
the city of Hollywood, the city of movie making and famous
studios since 1912 and the innumerable chase scenes from Mack
Sennet's Keystones comedies, Charlie Chaplin's Little Tramp and the
ambitious productions of D.W Griffith, "the iconic Hollywood
director, dressed in quasi-military style (jodhpurs and riding boots,
epaulets on his shirt), directing large-scale films in the
studio or outdoors like a general in campaign"**.
In 1916 D.W
Griffith movie's Intolerance hired 60 000
actors, extras, technicians and workers.
Its
not like that anymore because extras are made digitaly but still, who
knows an industry that was so influencial in 1916 and that is still
today ? I don't.
Making
movies is a extremely rewarding industry when it comes to create
jobs : it needs people in a lot of different fields. Directors,
scriptwriters, producers, all kind of fine arts people, lightguys,
cameramen, soundguys, make up artists, stylists, architects but
also truck drivers, craftmen, carpenters, dog trainers, animal
keepers, warehouse owners (to keep all the furnitures you might
need), engineers,
insurances people, bricklayers, spot-locaters, explosive
experts and
as various as it can be : actors, and extras. A whole world of
people***.
When
they go to the mountains just to record a small 5 seconds scene, its
serious, they go there with five trucks full of equipment :
Even
the police works with movies, policemen days are booked to
protect the set :
Movies,
TV series of course, and also commercials. It doesn't matter
they don't do master pieces or profound meaningful creations
all the time. What matters is that they play around, building
fake, fantasized versions of the world as a day job. This is their
serious business.
Such
an embodied relationship between the history, the identity and the
economy of a town is a great model and a priceless chance for a city
that every mayor should dream of at night, waking up in sweat
thinking "I have an idea".
2.
And here comes the beautiful part
Imagination.
Endless ambition and gigantic projects. That's the spirit that
created Los Angeles (and California) in the first place, even before
the film industry started to settle down, lifted by an energy
grounded in "biblical resonnances of making the desert
bloom"*****.
Enjoy
those short choosen extracts from chapter 7 of CALIFORNIA,
A HISTORY by Kevin Starr called
"Great expectations : Creating the Infrastructures of a
Mega-State" :
"For
California to become inhabitable and productive in its entirety would
require a statewide water system of heroic magnitude. (...) Why not
build a gravity canal, tap the Colorado River, let its waters flow
westward, and turn the Salton Sink into a reservoir for the use of
southeastern California ? It took ten years and three trips to Europe
for Rockwood and Chaffey to organize and capitalize the California
Development Company, but a mere five months to dig the canal once
construction had started. Late in the morning of May 14, 1901, George
Chaffey ordered the last headgate to be lifted, and water from the
Colorado flowed into the Salton Sink, now renamed the Imperial Valley
: imperial as in empire, for millions of acres of arable land would
soon be reclaimed from the desert. (...)
To
serve as advertising manager of the company, Chaffey appointed
publicist L.M Holt. (...) Holt
promoted
the Imperial Valley as the Egyptian delta of the United States, with
the Colorado River serving as its Nile. Skillfully, Holt advanced a
biblical scenario. Going down to the Imperial Valley, Americans were
reenacting the going down in to Egypt of Joseph and his brethren,
called by the Lord to a life of missionary improvment, in this case
the irrigation and cultivation of millions acres of desert. (...) In
time, Southern California would develop into a landscape of irrigated
fields, vineyards, orchards, and orange groves ; townships planted in
trees; comfortable homes awash in vines and flowers. (...)
In
each city, a talented city engineer - William Mulholland of Los
Angeles and Michael O'Shaughnessy of San Francisco - pushed a major
water project to a successful conlusion by tapping, in each case, a
river - the Owens for Los Angeles, the Tuolumne for San Francisco -
and bringing its water to the city through a system of dams,
reservoirs, and aqueducts that took years to construct.(...)
It
took more than six years to construct the Los Angeles Aqueduct -235
miles of canals, conduits, tunnels, flumes, pendocks, tailraces and
siphons - from its intake point twelve miles above the town of
Independance on the Owens River in Inyo County on the eastern side of
the Sierra Nevada, to its last spillaway in the San Fernando Valley,
where the water at long last arrived ont he morning of Wednesday,
November 5, 1913, welcomed by a crowd of thirty to forty thousand,
many of whom had brought along tin cups to take their first
drink.(...)
"The
San Fernando Valley". I just love this. "San Fernando"
? What ? Spanish ? Yes. Los Angeles. that's spanish too. The story
never ends.
Of
course, this tremendous energy and ambition was abusive in many ways
:
"In
each instance, the water system involded almost equally momumental
damage to the environment : (...) in the case of Los Angeles, the
desiccation and devastation of the once-fertile Owens Valley when the
Owens River was siphoned off to Los Angeles. Each project, morever,
was plagued by claims of deception, double-dealing, and conflict of
interest that became the subject of many histories, novels, and films
- to include the Oscar-winning Chinatown (1974) - in the decades to
come".
Still.
There's something good in this. Something exciting. Like when you say
:
"Tomorow,
we're shooting". Let's do it, huge, insane, and why not ?
Which
means that architecture, urban planning, movie directing and politics
have something in common :
Having
a vision.
AP
** Those
numbers are from 1993 and if you're interested you can check the ones
from 2011 at the end of this post, but since they're not as well put
in order, it was less convenient to use them at the
begining of the article, as Im concerned to not bore everyone
too fast. Crisis has been there, but proportions are still the same.
**
I think those 1993 statistics are even a bit underestimated cos they
put "advertizing" in "Business services" because
the money cycle they come from is not the same,
but a lot of advertisements are about making videos. So I think they
should be counted as what I would call the movie industry together
with the "motion pictures"together anyway, as
an urban activity that has a similar impact on the city.
Forr now we'll just have to cope with an incertitude of 11 000 jobs,
which doesn't really matter as it doesn't change the main point :
motion picture is the 4th biggest employer in LA, before foodstores
and legal services. You can check out the
statistics from 2011 (one by one, no list)
*** California
: a history, Kevin
Starr, A Modern Library Chronicles Books, 2005, New-York, p276
****
Which means that in the 2011
LA county employment data that mentions "Motion
pictures and sound recording" you should add some % from "Truck
transportation" and "Transport and warehousing" as
well as some of the "Independent artist, writers and
performers", and so on, to get a real picture of the whole
impact this activity has on the city.
***** California
: a history, Kevin
Starr, A Modern Library Chronicles Books, 2005, New-York, p167
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