Culture's edge

Torn Bethell

Los Angeles For the last hour of the flight, I stared out of the window, looking for those 'abundant natural resources' which account for the wealth of the country in the anti-American revisionism. I hunted also for signs of the dreaded 'population explosion' but could detect no sign of human habitation, not so much as a house or a road. Only the jet shadow ploughing a resolute furrow across crumpled crevasses, dry branching gullies, purple hills, rills and rockies, sunlit sandstone, salmon pink desert. No natural resources here, Gentlemen. Only the elements.

Finally we flew over scattered outskirts, brown turning to green, irrigated land, garden suburbs, the San Fernando Valley, the Los Angeles aqueduct bringing water from the Owens Valley across 200 miles of Mojave desert, then the Pacific Ocean, a banked turn, wheel jolt, and a voice over the intercom: 'We'd like to welcome you to Los Angeles, Ladies and Gentlemen It had all been arranged by telephone. For the next two months I would be 'writer in residence' at the Herald Examiner, the Hearst newspaper in Los Angeles. For 50 years at least, the city has intrigued writers because it has been, in a hard-to-define way, at the cutting edge of popular (i.e. American) culture. The newest craze here would soon spread east, thence to Europe. Aldous Huxley, arriving in the 1930s, was immediately attracted by the signs: 'EATS COCKTAILS JUMBO MALT FACIALS'. I looked alertly about me, but felt that somehow I had been there before, although this was my first Visit: 'AVIS HOWARD JOHNSON TRAVELODGE'. I began to worry that popular culture has now become so successfully franchised that it no longer cuts anywhere. Later, when I drove off in my budget rented car — alas no negro chauffeur awaited me, as one did for Jeremy Pordage in After Many a Summer, 'welcome to Los Angeles, sah . . — I wondered whether the distinctive signs of contemporary culture are any longer even in English. Sizeable areas of the city seem to have been reconquered and taken over by Mexicans and sundry Latinos. I read somewhere that the various 'minorities' in Los Angeles, mostly Hispanic, now constitute more than the majority. Nevertheless, the official American attitude towards Hispanics remains one of abject apology for the past sins of cultural imperialism, and bilingualism sprouts , everywhere: a conscious attempt to unmelt the melting pot.

Los Angeles was first settled as a kind of encampment in the desert by Spaniards and mulattoes from Mexico. 'Only poor people who despaired of their lives in Mexico were about to undertake so arduous a journey into a very great nowhere ' a local guide book explains. 'The names of the city's settlers, a ragtag band recruited in Northern Mexico, are not immortalised by the contemporary Los Angeles, nor does any plaque mark the spot of the founding of the city.' The date was September 1781, so there will soon be bicentennial celebrations. The city did not become a part of the United States until 1848.

All economies are kept in a dynamic state by two powerful forces: the upward push of those escaping poverty, and the magnetic pull of wealth at the top. There's no doubt that in Los Angeles at present a good deal of the upward push is provided by the labour of illegal immigrants, mostly from Mexico. Much to the annoyance of liberal opinion, these immigrants have shown themselves perfectly willing to exchange their labour (in garment manufactories and the like) for wages below the minimum level ordained in Washington.

Such workplaces are dubbed 'sweatshops', and a good deal of journalistic energy has gone into entrapping and exposing their owners, presumably on the theory that it would be better for all concerned if they were closed down. I tried to explain to one such press sleuth that both the immigrants who worked there voluntarily, and the entire city, would be the poorer in that eventuality, but I'm afraid she regarded me as quaintly unprogressive.

As for the magnetic attraction exerted by the top, it is well symbolised by the huge HOLLYWOOD sign set high up in the Hollywood hills and visible for all to see on a clear day (and the days were clear, smog-alarmists notwithstanding). But here again there may be trouble brewing. Fewer films are being made these days, and a much higher percentage of them today lose money — eight out of ten, according to one estimate I heard. The re-cut version of Michael Cimino's fiasco Heaven's Gate was showing to sparse audiences and was actually hissed at the end of the performance I attended.

I have not found any really persuasive explanation of why film-making is now so much more risky than it used to be. Audiences are dwindling and more than ever made up of children and teenagers out on dates. One thing that is clear is that there is no very powerful reason, other than habit, Why films have to be made in Hollywood. The text-book explanation for the industry's original settlement in Los Angeles — ample sunshine — always was dubious, and in any event modern film stock doesn't need sunshine. No doubt the unrestricted entrepreneurial climate in Los Angeles at the beginning of the 20th century had a good deal more to do with it. As far as location-filming is concerned, this climate is now beclouded with so many regulations in California that film-makers are increasinglY taking their crews to other states. More than once, for example, I heard of filmmakers who had to have the fire department in attendance (at the producers' expense) even though they were filming on the beach. This kind of bureaucratic nonsense does not prevail in Texas, and it is significant that a large film studio is under construction by Trammell Crow between Dallas and Fort Worth. The film industry is (and always has been) unionised up to its eyeballs. But strikes are becoming more frequent. Most recently the Writers Guild has been out on the sidewalks carrying placards and picketing the major studios. Although in rhetoric unions are organised against 'management', they are in reality directed against non-members who might conceivably do the same work for less money.

Thus the screen writers are worried about the fragmentation of the lucrative television market as a result of the advent of Cable TV (i.e. more channels, mostly local in origin). Such a market will prove harder to monopolise, because it will be harder to keep track of non-Guild members writing scripts for the much larger number of TV programmes. Hence the pre-emptive strike: an attempt to lock up contracts with the emerging cable companies. Some people believe, at the same time, that the coming fragmentation of the TV market may turn out to be the salvation of the movie industry.

George Lucas of Star Wars fame has broken with both the screen writers' and the directors' guild and is in the process of moving his entire operation to northern California. His reasons are thought to be more personal than anything else. They say he just doesn't like Hollywood. One day I went on the set of Zoetrope Studios, where Francis Coppola was directing One From the Heart, his latest film. Coppola attributes the decline of Hollywood to the demise of the studio system (in which actors, directors etc are not free agents but are employed by a film company), and he has attempted to revive it. He has been unsuccessful to date. Apocalypse Now is thought by industry observers to be still in the red, contrary to published statements, while no other film begun by Coppola's Zoetrope company has yet been completed.

On the day I was there Gene Kelly and Jean-Luc Godard were also on the set. The entire day was taken up filming an incredibly complex tracking (or panning, or something) shot that will delight cineastes but may leave regular film-goers cold. For reasons best known to himself, Coppola has spent millions of dollars reconstructing lifelike backdrops of Las Vegas, the real version of which is not too many miles distant from Los Angeles. Coppola, I noticed, was followed about wherever he went by a couple of fellows carrying a videotape camera and recording his every move. I asked them what they were doing, and they said making a movie of the movie. This might turn out to be the film to watch — indeed the only one. I spoke to Coppola's assistant director several weeks later, by which time he was working for another director. He told me that Coppola has once again run out of money without finishing the film. Clearly the great director has become too interested in the art of film, in himself, and in the opinion of French intellectuals. Thinking about Coppola, one concludes that the main problem with Hollywood is the shortage of people like Louis B. Mayer, the former furrier who made it to the top of MGM by dint of hard work. Such people may have their limitations but they never make the mistake of forgetting that the bottom line of the ledger is more important to worry about than choreographing the antics of the latest trendy Italian-import cameraman.

It has become almost a cliché to say it, but the main topic of conversation in Los Angeles these days is not the film industry but housing prices. They are about onethird higher than in the rest of the nation. This is usually attributed to rich Arabs, 'speculators', or simple greed. No-one ever mentions that in the early-to-mid 1970s the city enacted no-growth laws in the name of protecting the environment. These laws in effect constituted a form of organising, by those who had already arrived in the city, against newcomers. They will have serious consequences for the city a decade or two hence if they are not repealed. Zoning laws were changed so that the minimum area of land required to permit the construction of a new house was doubled in most instances. Similarly, the percentage of the builder's lot which apartment buildings could occupy was reduced (leaving more room for trees and greenery): underground parking was mandated, and so on.

The results .of all this phoney environmentalism could easily have been predicted: new houses cost far more, apartment construction fell off to be replaced by condominiums (which are bought with borrowed money, the value of which erodes with inflation). Rents for the existing apartment supply rose rapidly, and at that point rent controls were imposed by the city council. Thereupon apartment construction halted completely. No new apartments are being built in the city today.

Builders and developers have now begun to take their capital elsewhere — once again Texas is often mentioned. They didn't bother with no-growth laws in Houston, and it's easy to find an inexpensive apart ment there. In the Los Angeles area there are waiting lists and very high prices. To those who are already comfortably situated in a city, no-growth laws seem like a wonderful idea at first, but in the long run they don't work. By the slow but steady -process of abandonment and reconstruction elsewhere, the city 'moves', building by building, to a more favourable regulatory environment.

No-growth laws can't work because, in any organism, the growth feeds the whole body, not just the new tissue. This has been borne out in the case of the Los Angeles freeway system. A few years ago there seems to have been a kind of unconscious, collective decision in the city not to build any more freeways. The existing 715 miles of freeway (almost all built between 1940 and 1970) in Los Angeles, Orange and Ventura counties are about half what was planned. Now that they have stopped adding new freeways, expensive though that is, it turns out that there is barely enough money in the kitty to maintain the existing system. Within a few years, I surmise, L.A.'s freeways will be as bumpy and potholed as New York's. When things stop growing, they start dying.

This is no doubt an unduly sombre assessment of what is still the most exhilar ating city in America. And on a fine day, with its San Gabriel mountains, its beaches, and tropical vegetation mysteriously trans forming commercial neon into something more romantic, it is also far more beautiful than is usually recognised. Persisting in my search for the leading cultural edge, I heard intriguing stories of Nazi surfers in Huntington Beach, but could not find them.

However, a friend took me to a punk-rock place on Santa Monica Boulevard, where we stood in line outside with about a hundred greenand orange-haired punks who looked like beserk marine corps recruits. Some wore swastikas.

'It isn't like the old peace and brotherhood rock scene,' my friend, an out-ofwork film producer, told me. 'They don't believe in the perfectibility of man.'

We entered the inky-indigo club. 'Hey', the band leader shouted into a microphone. 'How many queers have we got here tonight?' Then he announced the first number as 'Let's Have a War.'

`Ya', the dishevelled punks in the audience yelled back. 'We want to go to Salvador'. The leader replied: `Ya'. Crudely lettered signs above the bandstand read: FAG GAY HOMO LEZBO.

'They read Hobbes, not Rousseau,' the producer yelled into my ear. I could barely hear him above the din, but for the first time since coming to Los Angeles I felt reassured that western culture had not entirely lost its edge.