Mark Shiel: Hollywood Cinema and the Real Los Angeles.

Ascarate, Richard John

Mark Shiel Hollywood Cinema and the Real Los Angeles London: Reaktion Books, 2012. 336 pages. Hardcover $35.10

"Where is the line between reality and representation to be drawn?" (7), asks Mark Shiel in the introduction to Hollywood Cinema and the Real Los Angeles. In the four chapters that follow, he shows how porous, indistinct, and evanescent that line has been throughout the history of Los Angeles--or the part of it known as Hollywood-- and of film, the city's most famous and one time most profitable industry. From the dawn of motion pictures in the late nineteenth century to the decline of the studio system in the mid-twentieth, Shiel argues, Hollywood has constructed and portrayed itself in a variety of styles, serving and reflecting shifting social, cultural, and political ideologies.

In the first chapter, "The Trace," Shiels maintains that films from the advent of cinema--for example, actualities by Thomas Edison and shorts by D.W. Griffith--depict Los Angeles as an Edenic, sun-drenched alternative to the bustle and grit of New York. The author analyzes frames from Edison's earliest films depicting urban scenes in Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York. He notes the crowded composition of the latter two, wherein pedestrians, streetcars, and tall buildings fill the frame and occlude almost all natural spaces. The openness of the Los Angeles shots, on the other hand, with their shorter buildings and more sparsely populated streets, provide visual traces of pre-modern California, when only Native Americans and Mexicans populated the landscape. Shiel asserts that the attractiveness of the Los Angeles settings advertised the city to East Coast filmmakers who migrated west for the unending sun and promise of artistic freedom unavailable in New York. The growing film industry, in turn, encouraged an influx of supporting trades and industries: carpenters, painters, electricians, contractors, and developers. As the author states, "Los Angeles and cinema came to shape each other not only in myth and representation but also in their economics and physical growth" (53).

In the second chapter, "Navigation," Shiel focuses on films made between the mid-1910s and the early 1930s, the era of slapstick comedy, the first mass-produced automobiles, and the first car-chase scenes. Citing statistics illustrating the manifold population and geographical expansion of Los Angeles during this time, the author argues that films by Charlie Chaplin and Laurel and Hardy, among others, signify the "comical efforts of citizens trying to orient themselves in the city's increasingly large, complex and fast-moving landscape despite its hazards" (69). Indeed, Shiel notes, these early films charted the growth of the city even by means of conveyance portrayed. Thus did Charlie Chaplin primarily walk about Los Angeles while only a decade later Laurel and Hardy rode about town in automobiles and streetcars, occasionally with disastrous results. And as the city developed a skyline, actors such as Harold Lloyd charted its verticality through improbable scenes outside high-rise buildings. The decentralization of place and fragmentation of time in slapstick comedies, Shiel posits, mirrored the rapid dispersion of the film industry beyond Hollywood and into Culver City, Universal City, Studio City, and Burbank. Wide streets and long highways became the meshwork interlacing suburban and film industry sprawl. Sound, however, would change not only film but the structure and layout of the studios themselves.

Shiel derives the title of the third chapter, "The Simulacrum," from a term French theorist Jean Baudrillard coined to refer to a simulation of the real with no basis in reality. Specifically, the author claims that as sound, rapid advances in technology, and Taylorist efficiencies and Fordist production methods turned film production in on itself, film studios "often explicitly claimed the status of cities, replicating their physical and social characteristics in their design and construction, and asserting a semi-autonomy of the real city in which they were located and upon which they relied" (128). That is, sound movies demanded a highly controlled and specialized environment, which discouraged the silent era practice of location filming. Sound stages and outdoor sets arose (along with the workshops and storerooms necessary to outfit them) and were almost as quickly demolished in the face of technological advances or economic necessity. Steel-framed glass buildings, which had allowed filmmakers to exploit the California sun, gave way to massive, concrete-walled, windowless sound studios. Meanwhile, elaborate facades in Spanish revival, Gothic, French rococo, English cottage, neoclassical, Egyptian, and Chinese style adorned studio front buildings and movie theaters, hinting at the marvels being generated inside. The homes of stars, featured prominently in architecture magazines, postcards, and Hollywood tours, followed the aesthetic trend, displaying myriad and sometimes discordant tastes. As if to associate themselves with the film industry, many hotels, offices, nightclubs, and other buildings took their interior and exterior designs from those proliferating on the silver screen. Los Angeles, Shiel cleverly argues, came to resemble the images of reality that the major studios had manufactured, a reality of at best tenuous provenance.

In the fourth chapter, "Geopolitical Pressure Points," Shiel contends that following the Second World War, the film industry was shaken from top to bottom, creatively and financially. First, 1948 anti-trust laws compelled the studios to sell off their movie theater chains, breaking up the vertical integration and attendant profits they had enjoyed for years. Then, television ownership increased nationally, providing an alternative, more convenient, and ultimately less expensive form of entertainment than the movies. Finally, the Hollywood strikes of 1945-1947 stoked postwar fears of a communist takeover of American society and prompted studio heads to contract the mafia to infiltrate their labor force to quell union unrest. Film noirs were born amidst the atmosphere of distrust, presenting a once sunny Los Angeles as a "disjointed network of nondescript commercial streetscapes, pretty but morally corrupt suburbs, and an increasingly dilapidated downtown as urban jungle" (214). Shiel notes that although the growing automobile, aircraft, and defense industries--Eisenhower's "military-industrial complex"--were driving California's economy, workers from none of these appeared as protagonists in films from the 1940s and 1950s. The studio gates at which the public once gathered to catch glimpses of their favorite stars became contested space as organized labor gathered to stake its claims and civil authorities descended to disperse the crowds. By the mid-1950s, the author concludes, Hollywood's zenith had passed.

Shiel is to be commended for his impressive scholarship. He ranges widely in his choice of supporting materials, relying not merely upon close analysis of film stills but invoking as well contemporary photographs, maps, advertisements, brochures, and internal film industry memos. His theoretical underpinnings--Baudrillard, as noted, and Walter Benjamin, primarily--hold his arguments soundly aloft without obtruding. The author's prose is clear, direct, almost nostalgic for a Los Angeles that will never return and perhaps never was. In an epilogue, Shiel offers a quick overview of the last six decades of Hollywood cinema, observing how various forces of globalization, demographics, and politics continue to drastically alter Los Angeles in reality and image. The volume's one shortcoming, if such it can be called, is minor: Shiel does not carry his analysis to the present. The author stays only long enough to mention iconic Los Angeles films such as The Graduate (Mike Nichols, 1967), Shampoo (Robert Altman, 1975), Colors (Dennis Hopper, 1988), and Falling Down (Joel Shumacher, 1993). And while film noirs were certainly an outgrowth of Cold War social and political insecurities, so too were many science fiction films of the 1950s set in Los Angeles or Southern California, such as The War of the Worlds (Byron Haskin, 1953), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Don Siegel, 1956), and Plan 9 From Outer Space (Ed Wood, 1959). And how might Shiel modify his analytic approach to film noirs to accommodate Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982)? As often happens with a truly enjoyable film, one hopes for a sequel.

Richard John Ascarate