Movie Portrayals A Downer For L.A.

Trash in the streets, graffiti on the walls, crime and homelessness everywhere.

This isn’t the South Bronx or Detroit. It’s Los Angeles at the millennium, the trendy film version of hell on earth. In pictures like “Seven,” “Falling Down,” “Grand Canyon,” “Menace II Society,” “Rising Sun” and “Strange Days,” L.A. has supplanted just about every other metropolis as the city you’d least like to live in. It’s a far cry from the days of “Beach Blanket Bingo.”

“Since the 1992 riots (following the Rodney King verdict), you’ve seen a conjunction of events in Los Angeles unique in 20th-century American history,” said Mike Davis, a columnist for L.A. Weekly.

“No city,” said Davis, “has suffered such a combination of natural and manmade disasters: flooding, fires, earthquakes, the O.J. Simpson trial. We’ve seen a recession which put an end to 50 years of unbroken growth and expansion, followed by some of the most devastating cutbacks in social services any city has experienced.”

Certainly the recent downturn in L.A.’s fortunes has affected its onscreen image. But that representation has actually varied widely over the years, from sun-drenched paradise to corrupt, crime-ridden site of many noir films made in the 1940s and ‘50s.

“There always have been dark portrayals of L.A., going back to ‘The Day of the Locust’ (a 1939 novel about Hollywood’s underbelly made into a film in 1975), which has an apocalyptic ending,” said Kenneth Turan, film critic for the Los Angeles Times.

Turan said the 1982 movie “Blade Runner” has been a major influence, particularly visually, on the downbeat vision of L.A.