Why is LA so awesome ? Part I : the Industry

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 ?)

Note : The reading of this post should follow the reading of the prior post "Why is LA so awesome ? An introduction"

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 :

Economy - District 13 (Echo Park's district) updated 2011

The ten largest employers in the district are (in order):

1. Paramount Pictures Corporation (approximately 5,000 employees)
2. Kaiser Permanente Hospital (5,000)
3. Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles (3,600)
4. Sunset Gower Studios (2,500)
5. Los Angeles City College (2,271)
6. St. Vincent’s Medical Center (1,800)
7. Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center (1,550)
8. City of Angels Medical Center (900)
9. Nielsen Entertainment (700)
10. 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